User:Tidworth56/Clarissa Upchurch

Clarissa Upchurch (born 1949) is a British artist.

Life
Clarissa Upchurch was born in China, to a missionary family. In her childhood she moved between England and Malaysia. She was trained as an artist at Sheffield, Harrow and Norwich Schools of Art, working on large-scale landscapes and cityscapes, as well as in abstraction.

In 1970 she married the poet George Szirtes and they had two children, Tom and Helen. Her work in the 1980s was mostly in black and white, the subjects often derelict local places. From the mid-seventies into the mid-eighties she was co-proprietor of The Starwheel Press, that printed and published collaborations between poets and artists. As time went she undertook ever more of the press work. At the same time she was producing illustrations and book jackets for various publishers. After her first visit to Hungary in 1984 she began to concentrate on the city of Budapest, first on its courtyards and doorways, and later on the elevations. Her work was not so much topographic as dramatic: buildings haunted by history. She produced drawings, paintings, pastels and prints. More recently she has been examining the streets of the city, with its traffic of cars and pedestrians, as in still frames of a moving film, a kind of unwritten film noir employing a story-board of undefined incidents. Her art has been moving beyond Budapest to other cities and to figures in motion.

Selected Exhibitions

 * 1986	Broken Light: one woman show at Hitchin Museum
 * 1987	Cleveland International Drawing Biennale
 * 1991	Tenements and Towers: one woman show of Budapest material at the Cheltenham Festival of Literature
 * 1993	Shadow Palaces: one woman show at the National History Museum, Budapest
 * 1998	International Print Fair in New York, US
 * 2000	City Narratives, at RIAS Gallery, Edinburgh
 * 2000	Good Drawing, at Boundary Gallery, London (mixed show)
 * 2000	Taylor’s Gallery, Dublin (mixed show)
 * 2001	London Art Fair, Royal College of Art
 * 2001	Chelsea Art Fair, London
 * 2002	Inside/Outside two woman show Boundary Gallery North London
 * 2003	Art London Design Centre Islington
 * 2003	Battersea Art Fair, London
 * 2004	Art London, Design Centre, Islington
 * 2005	Landscape 200 Castle Museum Norwich
 * 2005	Cityscapes, Retrospectives Gallery, Stratford-upon-Avon
 * 2006	Budapest - Poem, Image, Film, Hungarian Culture Centre London
 * 2007	Eastern Open Group show Kings Lynn - Drawing Prize
 * 2007	Taylor Gallery Dublin - Group Show
 * 2008	Cities - Boundary Gallery
 * 2008	Celebrating Palladio - Plusone Gallery, London - Group Show
 * 2009	Cities, Landscapes, Wrestlers - Becket's Chapel Arts Center, Norfolk
 * 2010	Open Studios Show, Becket's Chapel Arts Centre, Norfolk

Literature and Publications

 * 1993	City Lights: The Art of Clarissa Upchurch, Mozgó Világ (Hungary)
 * 1993	Shadow Palaces: The Budapest Drawings of Clarissa Upchurch, Victor Határ, Budapest Historical Museum
 * 1993	British Contemporary Art 1993 (Galliardi)
 * 2000	City Visions: The Lost Movies of Clarissa Upchurch, Modern Painters
 * 2002	Inside/Outside - catalogue essay
 * 2006	Budapest: Image, Poem, Film (with Poem and Essay by George Szirtes), Publisher: Corvina, Budapest

=Awards=


 * 1990	First Prize in Gainsborough’s House, Drawing for All competition
 * 2000	Joint first prize: Drawing for All, Gainsborough’s House. Touring exhibition.