St Clare's Art Teacher exhibits at Oxford Castle

Francesca Shakespeare, who teaches art on the Pre-IB and Liberal Arts programmes, has work on display at the O3 Gallery in Oxford Castle as part of the Art Teachers Exhibition. Francesca has also shown her work in galleries in the UK, Ireland and Morocco. Solo shows have been at The New Grafton (2004,2006), London, The Ashmolean Oxford (2011), and Oxfordshire Artweeks (2001-2011). State funded art projects have included The Spoonrace at Modern Art Oxford (2008) and The Cherwell River Project at Art Jericho (2011). Other Galleries include Josie Eastwood, Brian Sinfield, Jerram Gallery, Oxford Arts Society (various venues), Lawrence-Arnott Gallery Marrakech and Modern Art Oxford.

In her teaching (which currently takes up about 50% of the time) she communicates her sensual enjoyment of objects, materials and process. She also runs creative workshops for all ages in local museums and at St. Clare's including our annual visit from Kanagawa school in Japan and our IB taster and review courses in the summer.

Francesca describes her own art process as a bit like cooking: her studio is her kitchen where new combinations of good basic ingredients are constantly being experimented with. She explains "my ‘on the spot' paintings, sketching and gathering of materials is the sourcing: local markets, different flavours, textures and colours. Back in the studio I create my main dishes, working with natural pigments, plasters, paints and wax to create fresco-like panels, layering the textures and sometimes pushing my impasto effect into a form of cast bas-relief which I incorporate into the paintings".

The work on display at Oxford Castle, "Women behind a Screen", shows her typical love of images brought back from travel, using techniques to give the effect and patina of time has on things and to recreate a sense of the ancient whilst adding a touch of the modern. In the gloomy winter days in England, she finds inspiration and warmth in the aesthetic surroundings of museums, where she entices crusty old objects to reveal their secrets.

Woman behind screen	On a pier with a beach ball

January