Claude Lawrence is a jazz tenor saxophonist and self-taught painter whose practice bridges improvisational music and abstraction. After a successful jazz career in the 1960s, Lawrence shifted his focus to painting in 1986, bringing with him a sense of rhythm, timing, and structure.

In Untitled, Claude Lawrence reduces the figure to a raw, expressive construction, where form emerges through distortion, erasure, and immediacy. The face—partially rendered, partially obscured—feels unstable, as if caught between presence and disappearance. Bold passages of color and loosely defined contours reject refinement, allowing gesture and instinct to carry the image. The result is a figure that resists fixed identity, instead operating as a psychological trace.

Lawrence’s paintings translate the improvisational logic of jazz into visual form. Bold colors, brushwork, and shifting structures produce works between abstraction and figuration. Rather than resolving into fixed imagery, his compositions unfold through gesture and response. As Lawrence says, “I build a dialogue with each painting... it tells me where it wants to go.”

Within the context of contemporary figuration, his work offers a vital link between musical improvisation, modernist abstraction, and evolving forms of visual storytelling.

Lawrence lives, creates his works, and plays jazz in Sag Harbor, in the Hamptons.