Annie Clavel

Annie Clavel is a French artist. She grew up in Paris where she studied mathematics and computer science. She gained a Master’s degree in both subjects and taught them at schools throughout France and Tunisia.
Annie moved from France to Long Beach, California, in 2006.
Once in the US, Annie created Les Jolis Trésors Art Gallery in Long Beach and managed it from 2009 to 2014. At the Palos Verdes Art Center, she has been a teacher (watercolor and mixed media painting). Her work has won awards in juried shows in Southern California and is in private collections in France, USA, Germany, Japan, Tunisia and United Kingdom.

In her paintings she explores the duality between her scientific perception and her creative life. She imagines mathematical theories in color, shapes, light and movement. Theories are worlds where she likes to wander, inventing moments, emotions and stories. Her textured and colorful surfaces depict universes driven by quantum mechanics or mathematical concepts.

Her scientific mind copes with theory and knowledge, complexity and simplicity, randomness and predictability while her emotional self translates her feelings, reactions and visions. She lets her instinct and intuition guide her work to capture parallel moments of time, advancing each work towards a personal resolution.

Her mixed media paintings combine a variety of nuanced colors, a multitude of diverse brush strokes and alternating textures. She builds up layers in acrylic paint and paper or fabric, then subtracts, adds, partially covers, scratches and scrapes the surface to create the effects she seeks.
Elements of modernism, abstract expressionism and contemporary abstraction influence her paintings. she looks to the work of Gerhard Richter, Sam Francis, František Kupka, Matisse, Franz Marc, Max Tegmark, Benoit Mandelbrot and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.