After a decade of commercial illustration, UK-based visual artist Claudine O’Sullivan found her way back to paint through running, building an abstract, process-led studio practice that captures energy rather than form.
Claudine O’Sullivan started running just under two years ago. It had nothing to do with her work. Then, gradually, it had everything to do with it.
After a decade as a commercial illustrator working across international commissions, O’Sullivan had been experiencing years of creative block. Running broke it, not through intention but through the daily reset of physical movement. She began sketching after her runs, ten minutes at first, pure play with no objective. That small practice built into something larger and, eventually, into a complete reorientation of her work.
“The daily movement pulled me out of years of creative block,” she says. “I started sketching after my runs and gradually this built into a whole new body of work.”
The practice she has developed is called Movement as Method, and it is exactly that: running as process, not inspiration. Where her commercial work was precise and observational, trained on physical forms and the visible world, the new work is abstract and reduced, focused on what it feels like to move through a landscape rather than what that landscape looks like. “I don’t capture landscapes,” she says. “My focus is what it feels like to move through them.” The shift has brought her back to paint after years of pencil, and the layered approach she uses carries echoes of screen printing in its structure, building depth through accumulation rather than detail.
What looks simple, O’Sullivan is clear, has been decades in the making. The reduction in the work is not the absence of something but the distillation of a long practice arriving at its own essential form. “This new collection feels like my best work yet,” she says, “not in a sense of being good, but in a sense of how I feel making it.” That distinction matters. It is the difference between work made to a standard and work made from somewhere real.
O’Sullivan is now pushing the practice outward from the studio, with residencies, participatory formats and exhibition opportunities developing around the project. It feels, as she describes it, like an important moment in the long game of art as career.
Claudine O’Sullivan is a UK-based visual artist exploring movement as methodology. Her practice translates endurance, terrain and repetition into restrained, process-led abstraction, bridging running culture and contemporary painting through site-responsive work, workshops and exhibition.
ARTIST LINKS
claudineosullivan.com
@claudine_os
claudineosullivan.com/shop
Movement as Method, ongoing. Paint on paper. All images: @claudine_os.
