Claire Basler

Claire Basler is a French artist who specialises in painting flowers. After studying at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-arts in the Seventies, Claire has spent forty years since developing her captivating style. Delicately painted plants unfurl across dreamlike backdrops, the brushwork energetic and distinctive. 

For Summer 24, Ffern has been lucky to work with Claire on two works, one on gold leaf for our seasonal poster and one on large-scale panels for Kent Wildflower Seeds’ stand at the Chelsea Flower Show.

Watching Claire Basler paint is a rare privilege. Her brush - which she often loads with several colours at once - seems to dance across the surface, moving with choreographed purpose. But it’s pretty much all spontaneous. She explains, as she prepares to paint a three-metre backdrop Ffern has commissioned for a stand at the Chelsea Flower Show, that she needs total focus when working on the background. But I can ask her questions once she’s moved onto the details. 

So for several hours, myself, my colleague and translator Marine, and filmmaker Nick Whitworth simply watch as she moves across her canvas, building up layers of colour in cloud-like formations. The closest comparison, at this stage, must be Turner. She moves with grace, filling the large space rapidly and purposefully, working across from right to left.

Claire identifies a linguistic synergy between fond, which means background in her native French, and fondation, foundation - she says ‘il va vraiment porter tout’, the background will carry everything, the rest of the painting utterly reliant on whether this part goes well. It does, and the four of us get the chance to talk, our conversation running between French and English.

How does she begin a painting? She’s eager to make it clear that the nature of this work with Ffern, a pair of commissions, pinpoints her focus: ‘It’s almost easier, because there's a single goal, whereas if it’s not a commission, my thinking goes in all directions, all the things I like - and the older I get, the more I like!’ That delight in her work and in the world carries through the whole day, animating her and her painting, which she often identifies as vivant, lively.

How did you approach the painting?

It’s true - at the start of the day we have an incomplete background, charming in its own way but clearly ready for more. By the end, the work almost done, Claire has brought it to enchanting life. We exchange the names of the flowers as she paints them freehand. Marguerites or pâquerettes - daisies - trèfles - clovers - fenouil - fennel. Claire knows them all intimately. She says she sometimes touches them with her mouth, kissing them, and imagines them talking to one another, chatting amongst themselves.

We finish by asking what makes Claire paint. Nick asks, ‘You could be reading a book, you could do anything, why do this?’ And she says, ‘Je ne sais pas!’ But as she’s shown through the day, she does in fact know lots about why. Having left school at fifteen, Claire’s parents asked her what she was going to do now - and she said she wanted to paint: ‘it's incredible that I had the audacity… and that I managed to do it.’ She has rarely put down her brush since, finding ‘a lot of joy in choosing a profession where I could protect my childlike self, letting it grow along with my adult self.’

Painting, for Claire, is to be among the flowers, living in joy.

Interview by Catriona Bolt & photography by Nick Whitworth for Ffern