Artist CJK
Contemporary Artist
Claire Jane Kendrick
CJK is a contemporary painter known for large-scale atmospheric abstractions that explore movement, calm, and layered emotional space. Her work draws on a background in Paris fashion trend and color forecasting, where exposure to couture textiles and luxury fabrication sharpened her sensitivity to texture and tonal harmony. Raised in Ireland within a family of designers and architects, she cultivates a structural awareness and sense of scale that informs her expansive canvases. Her surfaces echo woven patterning and shifting light, offering a meditative counterpoint to the pace of modern life. CJK’s work is held in private and corporate collections, and she is currently developing a New Seascapes Series, an ambitious large-scale series debuting in 2026.
Overview
Claire Jane Kendrick is a contemporary painter whose large-scale atmospheric abstractions explore movement, calm, and the layered emotional spaces we hold within ourselves. Her work is defined by gestural mark-making, nuanced color harmonies, and a refined vocabulary of texture inspired by working within Paris’s fashion and color forecasting industry.
Before moving fully into painting, CJK built a career inside the world of haute couture and trend analysis, collaborating with Paris design houses and large scale retail that shaped global aesthetics. Exposure to couture textiles, luxury fabrication, and the meticulous craft behind woven materials continues to inform her surfaces. This sensitivity to texture and color echoes the heritage textiles she grew up with in Ireland—wool, tweeds, and woven blankets—revealing a lineage of material intelligence that now translates into paint.
Raised in a family of designers and architects, she developed an early appreciation for scale, spatial awareness, and structural clarity. These influences naturally led her toward expansive canvases, many reaching over six feet, where gesture can unfold with a sense of physicality and the viewer can step into the work. Her paintings propose the ocean not as a subject, but as a metaphor: a place of internal quiet, resilience, and reflection amid an oversaturated world.
Artist
“I’m an American citizen who grew up in Ireland and hopscotched through Europe—Dublin, London, Paris, Brussels—while working in a highly competitive creative industry. Traveling through New York, Tokyo, and the great museums of the world shaped my eye, but it was the constant movement that taught me to seek calm. On the canvas, water becomes the place where all those shifts, crossings, and adaptations settle into stillness.” - Claire
All the senses seem to be wide open in Claire’s paintings….she is a talented and committed painter and clearly has her own voice, a painter’s painter. I would place my bets on Claire now and in the future
Mentor
"My early practice was shaped by the mentorship of Anne Packard, whose influence remains a quiet undercurrent in the way I approach light and atmosphere."
Gallery Locations
Claire J Kendrick Represented by
