Clare Woods is a British painter who resides and works in London. Her painting style is largely influenced by the works of Van Gogh, especially The Yellow House. In 2021 she was awarded the Turner Prize, an award that recognizes outstanding contributions to contemporary art by an individual in any medium. Among many of her oil paintings of buildings in London she has created such landmarks as the British Museum, the Science Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and Westminster Abbey.
Her professional career spanned much of the twentieth century; she began working in a printing press in her early twenties, and after that she worked for the now-defunct Saturday Review Magazine. She then went to teach art at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, for a number of years, and from there she pursued a teaching career at the University of Glasgow. In between those periods of work she spent considerable time as a commercial illustrator, and later she decided to pursue a career as a writer. After publishing only a handful of articles she felt dissatisfied with her career, so she began painting professionally, and has never stopped since. She has won numerous awards, most notably the medal once awarded to Paul Gauguin for his “Lodestone”; this enabled him to travel and explore Europe, and Clare has remained busy ever since.
Her own paintings span a wide range of subjects, including religious subjects, landscapes, commercial subjects, and portraits. One of her paintings, entitled Ambush, shows a group of people silhouetted against a bright blue background. According to some websites, she might be a Scot, since she has the surname of “Woods”, though this is unconfirmed. The Nationality Department of the British Library lists Clare Woods as a Scot, but says she was born in England and therefore British, though she had no other British nationality.