Claire McPeak is a Chicago-based artist and designer whose painting practice informs her approach to architecture and interiors. Working primarily in abstraction, she creates atmospheric compositions that explore memory, light, and the beauty that emerges through revision rather than perfection.
Currently pursuing a Master of Architecture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with a focus on interiors, McPeak approaches both painting and design as acts of composition. Before returning to art school, she worked on Wall Street after graduating from the University of Virginia with a degree in Mathematical Statistics and a minor in English. Her background bridges analytical thinking with creative intuition, allowing structure and spontaneity to coexist within her work.
McPeak’s practice is rooted in the belief that beauty is rarely found in flawless surfaces, but instead emerges through layers, imperfections, and continual transformation. Rather than concealing evidence of change, her paintings embrace it, treating each mark as part of a larger process of becoming.
Alongside her visual work, writing serves as an integral part of her creative practice. Through essays and reflections, she explores the same themes that appear in her paintings: identity, place, memory, and the quiet process of becoming.
Artist Statement
I grew up oil painting in my grandmother’s art studio beginning around age three. Looking back, I think it’s funny, letting a three-year-old use your oil paints, but art is love in its purest form. She’d tell me, “You have to finish your carrots, or you won’t be able to paint someday. They’re good for your eyes,” she’d encourage. I suddenly started liking vegetables. The messiness of paint has always felt right on my hands, and it is when making art where turmoil of my brain becomes silence.
Life’s taken me on a wild goose chase. For years I drifted away from that instinct while pursuing careers and expectations that looked successful from the outside but felt increasingly distant from who I was. Eventually I found my way back to the studio, where I discovered that painting was never about arriving at certainty. It was about becoming.
My work exists between abstraction and atmosphere. I am interested in spaces that feel remembered rather than described, where light, color, and gesture suggest emotion more than representation. Layers are built slowly, concealed, revealed, softened, and reworked, allowing the surface to hold traces of its own history. I rarely think of a painting as solving a problem; instead, it becomes a record of decisions, revisions, and discoveries.
The idea of becoming shapes both my practice and my understanding of identity. We often imagine an artist as something we eventually become, as though there is a point where we finally deserve the title. Painting has taught me the opposite. Every canvas is unfinished until it isn’t, and even then it still carries the possibility of another mark. In the same way, I don’t believe artists arrive at a final version of themselves. We simply continue becoming—more observant, more curious, more vulnerable, and perhaps a little stranger with every painting. When we embrace the reality of brokenness instead of trying to chase perfection, we open ourselves to a whole new way of seeing things.
My work embraces that openness. Rather than choosing between atmosphere and abstraction, I allow the two to coexist. The paintings are less interested in depicting a place than in creating one: spaces where memory, emotion, and light remain in motion, inviting viewers into the same process of becoming that brought the work into existence.