Claire Iono

About

Claire Iono’s artistic journey is an expression of the unfolding of her transformative spiritual journey. Born in 1969 in Paris, as a child Claire wanted to live several lives in one. True to this idea, she explored different paths before placing her art practice at the centre of her life. Since 2010, Claire has been living in the experimental township of Auroville in Tamil Nadu, India. Claire was initially trained in Fine Arts in France by a Bauhaus painter. Her artistic journey was furthered by her training in the Japanese painting technique Sumi-e (ink wash technique), which had a profound effect on her development as an artist. Pushing her to evolve her practice and research, it taught her to look at the world through another set of eyes. In the forms of Japanese and Chinese art that she studied, there was a strong focus on using just black ink on white paper, which helped Claire redefine her ideas of space, substance, and form. Now, in her artistic practice, she focuses on the finesse of strokes and lines, and the harmony of different elements with one another, achieving a certain simplicity in her work which indicates a purity of thought. Claire’s art reflects the blend of cultural influences she has had in her journey as an artist - she uses tempera with wash technique as used in traditional ancient Indian arts, as well as watercolours and ink used in East-Asian art. She finds inspiration in legendary artists such as Paul Klee, V.S. Gaitonde and Zao Wou-Ki. Claire intuitively fluctuates between the abstract and figurative, creating subtle worlds that evoke imaginary and symbolic landscapes where nature is animated. In her visual storytelling, there are no boundaries between realms; instead, they simply unfold into each other in a kind of continuum. The symbolic and allegorical cityscapes that she depicts, timeless and unknown, may sometimes evoke metropolises or some undiscovered or mythical cities. She states, “The lines that I paint with my brush are also t