How the Longing for Home and Nature Informed Cathleen Clarke’s Newest Works

Cathleen Clarke’s paintings, with their lush, dreamlike scenes, balance figuration and an imaginative and emotive transposition of reality. Rooted in nostalgic reflection, her work revives personal and familial memories, transforming remembered moments into emotive and colorful visions on canvas. Her creative process bridges the inward and outward, blending factual events with the emotions they evoke while filling in gaps through imagination to complete those images with all the emotive and psychological sensations that accompany memory.

Observer caught up with Clarke ahead of her debut with Night Gallery in Los Angeles as she prepared her newest body of work for the upcoming solo show, “Morning Star.” When we meet in her Brooklyn studio, Clarke shares how the works were deeply inspired by her childhood on a rural farm in northern Illinois. Her family moved there from Chicago when she was almost 10, and she experienced isolation but also a deeper familial connection and a more intimate relationship with nature. “My parents don’t live there anymore; they sold the farm after I and my siblings moved out,” she tells Observer. “It’s a place that I think back to all the time. It’s a place I really long for because I can only revisit it in my memory now.”

Painting is Clarke’s way of revisiting and reviving memories, delving into their sensations and emotions while considering their practicalities. “It’s always like a story, but I most often prioritize the feeling over the figure,” she says. When asked how she would describe her style, Clarke says she considers herself primarily a figurative artist. “I feel like that’s always where my experience lands because I’m always interested in people and their stories that we pass on to one another.”

Clarke has, in recent times, been looking at old photos to spark ideas, but that exploration of personal and family photo archives serves only as a starting point. This group of paintings is deeply personal, inspired as they are by living in a certain place, but she’s not trying to revive specific moments in full. Instead, she’s distilling these memories, capturing the light and colors that define each scene. The figurative elements provide an anchor, but the image evolves spontaneously, mirroring the way our minds reconstruct past moments—building narratives to fill gaps or reshaping details that no longer feel true. “As I paint, I blur the edges, which morph and become more distorted,” she says. “This allows me to explore the thresholds between reality and illusion, and memory and its mixing with my imagination.”

Clarke’s paintings often feature this hazy, diaphanous effect, evoking the fluidity of memories or dreams as they surface and fade when we try to retrieve them. Her use of surreal colors amplifies the emotional and atmospheric aspects of each scene, heightening their resonance as fragments of a relatable but often too-brief lived experience. Her new works, in particular, radiate a sense of wonder and mystery, capturing the enchantment of childhood when the world still feels ripe for discovery. “My parents really instilled this sense of wonder in me,” Clarke says. “Living in the country, there were many strange and mysterious occurrences, especially coming out of a big city.”

Reflecting this perspective, her new canvases give more space to the scenery and nature, with the human figures serving as a focal point to anchor the moment. Clarke has shifted her focus toward the emotional and subconscious projections of the self, embedding them within an evocative, natural environment.

Clarke’s paintings can be seen as attempts to translate a synesthetic experience of the world, blending sensorial inputs with the emotive and subconscious associations tied to specific moments. Through a process of memorial recording and imaginative elaboration, her work captures the essence of experiences. This might explain why the artist assigns human qualities to elements in nature, creating in the process a kind of spiritual impersonation—an immersion that mirrors the profound connection one feels when deeply enveloped by the natural world: “a sort of human element in all these forms of nature,” in Clarke’s words.

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The elements she selects often carry more emotional and symbolic weight, reflecting the deep ties between human life and the natural environment. “I’m thinking about sunrise and the sun as a recurring presence throughout the works,” she offers as illustration. “How it can symbolize beginnings and endings and the inevitability of change.”

At the same time, Clarke intentionally keeps her imagery open to interpretation. The fluidity and loose style of her work suggest that everything is still in flux, subject to metamorphosis and evolution. “I like that things remain a little more unexplained and open, leaving that sense of mystery. I love that a painting can be interpreted in different ways.”

Clarke describes her process as deeply intuitive, surrendering to subconscious responses and the natural flow of creation: “A lot of the time, I’m also not sure what’s happening in my paintings. My process is not planned.” For her, art-making is more an investigation than a predetermined act, one that compels her to blend experience with imagination. “Memories can be so ambiguous. I’m always interested in that moment when our memory becomes a mix with imagination to fill in the blanks.”

The poetic power and universality of Clarke’s work seem rooted in her profound longing for something irretrievably lost. “I think maybe the fact that I’m not there is what gives me that drive and longing to paint it,” she reflects. This yearning for a place she cannot return to echoes a broader, more universal desire for a deeper connection with nature—something humanity has increasingly lost with the rise of civilization and urbanization.

One particularly evocative painting features a group of people waiting on a porch, poised in the liminal space between the domestic and the vastness of the natural world. It captures the desire to return to the land and reconnect with roots, offering a quiet response to the alienation and isolation of modern urban life. “There are all of these figures on the front door, looking and confronting the viewer, but also welcoming the viewer home,” Clarke says. “I really wanted to have this type of scene, where it’s like a group of people from your past waiting for you to come back.”

Cathleen Clarke’s “Morning Star” opens at Night Gallery in Los Angeles on January 11, 2025, and runs through February 15, 2025.