About

Clara Beyer Bower is a painter and mixed media artist in Washington DC. Her work is informed by her youth in the elite pressure cooker of Northern Virginia suburban culture at the turn of the millennium. She has shown her paintings in group shows and renegade festivals in the Washington DC area, such as SHE DC, DC Arts Center’s Wallmountables, and Artomatic. 

Beyer Bower studies painting at the Washington Studio School. She holds a degree in Linguistics from Brown University. 

Statement

I have always been obsessively self-documentary. A diarist, a mix CD burner, a cell phone photographer. In my adolescence, a part of me wanted to crystallize every emotion, fearing that adulthood would make me forget their intensity. I now understand this impulse as the work of an artist. Each act of self-documentation was a foothold as I scrambled for authorship over my own identity. 

And it still is. As a painter, my work wrestles with the overlap of objectification, femininity, and violence. So much of being a woman is about being perceived by others. In my work, I claim the position of the observer, not the observed. My self portraits are a declaration: This is how I choose to be seen. Using fluorescent, unnatural color and decisive marks, I demand the viewer’s attention.

At times, my paintings purely engage with the physical experience of having a body – plastic, meat, and skin bound up in positions of discomfort, reflecting the harsh light of a camera’s flash or shouldering the weight of heavy expectations. In other cases, I draw on spiritual imagery to elevate my subjects to figures of legend. The fates themselves bounce ping pong balls into red solo cups of destiny. 

Like a teenage girl’s diary, my work is at once earnest and ironic, humorous and scathing. Using paint, collage, and occasionally nontraditional materials like old CD cases, I am still trying to capture every feeling.