The first time the unfamiliar British Columbia number called artist Claire Drummond last fall, she didn’t answer. She assumed it was spam. The second time, she picked up – still expecting to be defrauded.
Instead, the caller told her she had won the Plaskett Award for painting. Drummond’s first reaction was disbelief. She asked, “Are you joking?”
They weren’t. The thirty-three-year old artist, who grew up in Elgin, was the latest recipient of one of Canada’s most prestigious awards for emerging painters.
Established in 2004 by the late Canadian painter Joe Plaskett, the Plaskett Award supports emerging artists seeking the creatively stimulating experience of living abroad. The $65,000 prize is granted every two years to a Canadian painter completing or recently graduated from a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) program, enabling them to live, create, and travel for one year.
For Drummond the award came at the right time. Having finished her MFA at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) in 2023, she had applied for many opportunities and faced what she describes as an onslaught of rejection. The experience left her demoralized and questioning her path.
Winning a major national award – and the art-world attention that comes with it – changed that.
Drummond is a figurative painter; her work refers to the real world. She mostly paints people, frequently exploring motherhood and caregiving – particularly artist-mothers – as subjects. She credits her own mother, Elgin artist Gail McGowan, as her first painting teacher and profound influence. McGowan’s own art career was interrupted by motherhood, an experience that deeply shaped Drummond’s thinking. “The ideas of motherhood and art for me were always connected,” she says, and the depth of her mother’s sacrifice became clear when she began painting seriously herself.
For Drummond, “mothering” includes all those engaged in sustaining life. She sees it as vital labour that contemporary individualistic society both relies on and devalues. Caregivers are marginalized and unsupported, yet are expected, in her words, to “bear the brunt of all the most difficult aspects of what it means to be human.”
Her paintings confront both the difficulty and the dignity of that work. They also challenge a lingering artworld perception that such subjects are frivolous, inferior, and unworthy of serious consideration.
Dividing her time between Chicago and Elgin, Drummond mainly paints large-scale oil canvases in light, bright colours, keeping the paint thin. Her brushwork is loose and sketch-like – she often draws with a brush. While she plans some basic shapes in advance, much of the exploratory work happens directly on the canvas to preserve spontaneity. Areas of colour-toned canvas are left visible, giving the work an unfinished quality that emphasizes process over polish: a style that mirrors the experience of caregiving itself.
She frequently repeats figures within a single painting, a device discovered accidentally when using a smartphone to capture rapid sequences of reference images of her models. The repeated figures create a sense of unfolding time and express what she calls the “multiple selves” of motherhood – how caregiving undoes the singular self by requiring caregivers to inhabit many versions of themselves at once.
Drummond draws inspiration from other artists including early expressionist Paula Modersohn-Becker, mid-twentieth century American painter Alice Neel, and contemporary figurative painters like Jordan Casteel and Anthony Cudahy. Like Neel, she seeks deep emotional connection with her subjects, one of the qualities in her work singled out by the Plaskett jury.
“It feels like a very emotional, empathetic, and caring process when I paint somebody,” she says.
This spring, Drummond will travel to Europe for the first time, beginning in Italy in early May. There she will immerse herself in its rich visual history – not only to study technique, but to expand her research of motherhood to include the myths and icons of maternity so prevalent in Western art, such as the Virgin Mary, which she sees as static and idealized and divorced from life’s messy realities.
Rather than remain abroad for a full uninterrupted year, which would be impractical, she plans to travel in stages, returning home between periods away. She has also applied for several art residencies, which provide studio space and living accommodations to artists at relatively low to no cost so that she can paint while she travels. Her first residency will be in Sardinia, where she will begin figuring out how to incorporate her new research and experiences into her artwork. Later, she plans to spend time in Scotland exploring how her family history fits into her theme and will then visit London and Paris.
Her longer-term plans are still unfolding. She hopes to build a financially stable art practice and sees university teaching as one way to do that. Gallery representation is another goal. Although there has been interest, no commitments have yet materialized. Ironically, she notes, galleries sometimes hesitate because her work is seen as too personal and not commercially viable. “They can’t sell a painting of someone else’s mom,” she says.
In that hesitation, old ideas about motherhood persist. Drummond is working to shift them, offering what she calls “an alternative vision for how we can look after each other better,” one painting at a time. (SR)