Clara is driven to paint and can’t remember a time when that was not the case. As a child, that’s all she wanted to do. Her first oil painting was done at the age of 6, and she earned a BFA degree at the Atlanta college of Art with a painting major and printmaking minor. This experience helped her develop and appreciation of and love for abstraction. Clara’s life has always been fairly structured and she has found the need to build a painting in much the same way, with a strong underpinning. Concurrently, Clara loves energetic brush strokes and marks and uses both. She also knows that color is important and how one color relates to another to move the eye around the canvas, helps tell the story and create depth. Clara does not begin a painting with an image in mind. This approach allows her to use her instincts without the distraction of subject and intuitively create a painting that is honest. Clara never wants to quite growing and finding different ways to create art; change creates excitement. Clara Blalock lives and works in Atlanta, Ga.