“I have known for as long as I can remember that I was going to be an artist.”

By Sarah Emily Gilbert

Images courtesy of Clio Newton

While most 26 year olds are still trying to decide their longtime careers, Clio Newton has had it figured out since she was a little girl. She would be an artist.

Newton’s self-assuredness came as a result of her art-filled childhood in Madison, Connecticut. Her dad, a steel sculptor, and her mother, a farmer and photographer, would have Newton shadow them as they worked on their designated projects.

“Growing up, I spent a lot of time outside with my mother in the fields and with my father in his studio. My father often looked after me as a small child, and he would set me up with paints so that he could continue working while I made art along side him.”

"A portrait of three girls I met at the lake." (Charcoal on paper 100 x 60)

Hoping to follow in her parents’ footsteps, Newton studied art in school and supplemented her education with private lessons and courses at Lyme Art Academy and Yale University. Newton received her B.F.A. at Cooper Union in New York City, followed by a two-year study at Italy’s Florence Academy of Fine Art. She was also a recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshield's Fellowship Award, given to artists “in the early stages of their career working in a representational style of painting, drawing, sculpture, and printmaking and demonstrating a commitment to making their art a lifetime career” (elizabethgreenshieldsfoundation.org).

Newton has not only accomplished her childhood goal of becoming an artist, but an internationally recognized artist thanks to an exhibition she is preparing for the AKKU Kunstkiste Gallery in Zürich, Switzerland. Titled, “Bathers of Uster,” Newton’s exhibition is going to be a series of large scale drawings and paintings of the people she’s met swimming at the lake near her studio in Uster. Newton considers the opportunity in Zurich to be the highlight of her career thus far as it combines all of her passions.

(18 x 24 oil on panel)

“I love traveling. Traveling and meeting new people is essential to my studio practice…The purpose of the [Zurich] exhibition is partly to consider the generosity of these people who have welcomed me into an intimate moment of their life with no incentives, only the desire to connect.”

When Newton isn’t preparing for an exhibition of her personal art for a gallery, she works on private portrait commissions for families and institutions. Her creations generally feature Newton’s trademark mediums, charcoal and oil paint, which she is partial to because of their malleability. While onlookers might call Newton’s work lifelike, expressive, or poignant, the talented artist has difficulty describing her aesthetic as she is always trying to reinvent it.

No matter how Clio Newton’s art is categorized, it continues to capture the essence of the people it features and the attention of the people who view it.

"A portrait of two girls I met at the lake" (Charcoal on paper 60 x 100)

(Oil on Panel 18 x 24)

(18 x 24 oil on panel)