Claire Lily Coxon was born in 1985 and grew up in the unusual setting of Whiteway Colony, later moving to Swansea to study at the University of Wales and graduating with first class honours in Illustration. She has worked as a full-time freelance artist since 2008, focussing now on painting en plein air on the beaches a short walk from where she lives with her husband and stepson in a little wooden chalet on Gower.

Claire prefers to be out where she paints, feeling the movement in the space and interpreting this with oil paint and cold wax, with various tools, traditional and improvised. When the weather is too hostile she paints from what’s inside her in her attic studio, these paintings use imagination and memory with sketches and photos as prompts, and often tend more towards abstract. Claire does not work in any one way, as the work changes with the moods and weather of the day, as a response to the unique setting each time, but she feels there is a thread that defines her work, of a sense of place and emotion in the wide space in which she lives and paints.