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Clara Vogedes born Clara Homscheidt (* 1892 in Krefeld; † 1983 in Heilbronn) was a German painter.

Life and Work
Clara Homscheidt was born in a bourgeois family, sensitive to the arts, in which her talent for painting was encouraged. After visiting an exhibition by Paula Modersohn-Becker, her desire to become a painter matured.

First she learned the profession of interpreter. She studied languages in Rolle on Lake Geneva, graduating with a French diploma in interpreting.

She then took lessons in watercolour painting with Professor Roger Duvoisin in Geneva and later in oil painting with Professor Henry van de Velde in Krefeld. She painted at that time some oil paintings, but later only rarely took oil.

In 1917 she married the journalist, writer and local poet Alois Vogedes. They had four daughters. The republican leanings of her husband forced them to constant changes in employment and location. Alois worked as an editor for various newspapers, often as a journalist, in Hanover, Trier, Neunkirchen and Paderborn, among others. Clara was at all times part of literary and artistic circles, as in Hanover in the scene around Kurt Schwitters, the central figure of "Hanover-Dadaism", and in Paderborn in a group of poets around Alois Vogedes as heirs of Peter Hille.

In 1926 her husband was made an offer in Trier (from 1918 to 1930 under French occupation). Clara Vogedes joined the Trier circle of painters. French influence became noticeable in her works, and from then on she worked with French colours from Sennelier, Paris.

In 1935 she had her first solo exhibition in Trier.

In Neunkirchen she created rare watercolours of the working world: scenes with hard-working men at blast furnaces, in rolling mills and wire drawing shops.

Her portrait of her husband (1929) and her self-portrait "The Painter" (1933) illustrate her remarkable mastery of the watercolour technique.

Shortly before the end of the war the family moved to Paderborn. Many impressionistic watercolours were painted, especially from the cathedral.

"The watercolors of that time [...] show the remarkable mastery of the technique: Delicate colour gradations, opalescent transitions from tone to tone, drastically contrasting shades of colour, dark accents, brittle, dry brush marks that make the grain of the paper visible, then again the transparent overlapping of colours in a sparse palette, the wiping of colours, almost reminiscent of chalk drawings. The works are created briskly and with spontaneity, and always directly in front of the motif, they are 'works from the backpack', as Clara Vogedes herself called them.”

In winter she devoted herself to batik, which was familiar to her because she came from the textile city of Krefeld. Thus she transferred her watercolour technique to batik and gave it new impulses. She often chose religious themes and created many nativity scenes for Christmas exhibitions in the surrounding cities.

In the early 1950s Clara Vogedes painted watercolours of flower still lifes in dull, weak colours. She seemed to anticipate her husband's death in 1956. Deeply struck by this, she did not paint for a while. She moved to Lünen to her youngest daughter who set up for her an own studio, and she started painting again. A new creative period began at the age of 65. She resumed work and took part in summer courses. In the late 1960s and early 1970s she enrolled in the International Summer Academy of Fine Arts (ISOAK),[2] today the Summer Academy, founded by Oskar Kokoschka in 1953, in the classes of Professor Emilio Vedova in abstract painting, Professor Zao Wou-Ki and Professor Ciuha in nude and portrait painting. After some abstract compositions she returned to her own style.

In 1969 and 1970 Clara Vogedes spent the summer months in the "Atelier artistique international in Séguret", where the painter Arthur Langlet gathered artists from many countries and all genres such as painters, draughtsmen, graphic artists, photographers and sculptors. She painted “Watercolour series in front of the landscape, sunsets, thunderstorm studies, light and mood of the Camargue. Clara's watercolors seem to vibrate: Light, air, atmosphere play into it, and therefore set a strong lyrical accent. She is not concerned with exact rendering, but with the dimension of experience while lingering, e.g. in the landscape, painting as a 'message of existence.'"

She travelled relentlessly: to Greece (Rhodes, Crete: once a longer stay in an artists' colony thanks to a scholarship), to Andalusia, France (especially to Paris, Brittany, Provence and Camargue), to Prague, to the Czech Republic, England, Norway, Denmark and even at the age of 85 to Egypt. She brought along many drawings and landscape watercolours from all her travels, "which sometimes seem quite abstract but like colour and light studies”.

In 1977 she suffered her first stroke, after a second in 1979 she went to Heilbronn near her eldest daughter, a doctor. That is where she died in 1983.

In 1992, on her 100th anniversary, the city of Lünen dedicated a large retrospective to her work. About the exhibition day: "Rainy day in Lünen. A city wraps itself in grey-brown colors. Silhouettes blur before the eye of the beholder, appear washed out and dull. The November mood so aptly depicted by Clara Vogedes, immortalised as a watercolour many years ago, hardly differs from the cloudy grey tones of yesterday's day".

In 1999 the city of Lünen named a street after her.

Young artists are also interested in Clara Vogedes' work. In 2005 there was an exhibition "Pictures from the Backpack - Pictures without Sketches", an exhibition of the Studio group Lünen in the studio of Heinz Cymontkowski, which contrasts Clara Vogedes’ pictures with his own creations from 2000 onwards.

Two of her granddaughters have followed in her footsteps: Kristine Oßwald (1961-2017) was also a draughtswoman and video artist. Dr. Cornelia Oßwald-Hoffmann is an art historian and freelance curator for contemporary art.