Image source, Robert Meyrick
- Author, Owain Evans
- Role, BBC News
Artist Claudia Williams, who was best known for her large portraits often depicting intimate scenes of family life, has died at the age of 90.
Her work, described by her biographer, as “joyous, colourful, optimistic”, regularly showed outings to the seaside.
She lived in both north Wales and France, and an exhibition of her new work was held in 2016, when she was 83.
She said at the time: “I do find people fascinating and I never get tired of painting people in different attitudes and working with different colour schemes.”
Born in England, she had family ties in north Wales and moved to Welsh-speaking Gwynedd at the age of 12, where she said she felt like an outsider. This, she later said, led to her fascination with observing people.
In the early 1980s they travelled through Europe together. They settled in France in 1985 and lived there for 15 years.
In 1995, she was awarded the silver medal by the Academy of Arts, Sciences and Letters in Paris, in recognition of her contribution to the arts in France. She returned to live in Wales in 2000.
Her biographer and friend of 40 years, Professor Robert Meyrick said: “Her joyous, colourful, optimistic paintings have been an inspiration to generations of younger Welsh painters especially because Claudia proved that it was possible to forge a career as a woman artist in Wales and to exhibit and be succcessful.”
Writing on the Art UK website, Harry Hauser, co-author of the book Claudia Williams: An Intimate Acquaintance, said “Many of Williams’s compositions, however abstracted or generalised their figures may be, are rooted in observations of real people in actual situations.”
In 2016 she told BBC Wales: “I don’t really see myself as prolific and I consider myself a retired person, but I can’t see a day in the future when I don’t paint.”
