Born in 1944, Mr. Lawrence is a product of South Side Chicago—a city that was on the forefront of the Civil Rights Movement with a burgeoning arts, music and cultural scene, and jazz clubs of international repute. He picked up the tenor saxophone as a high school student and, after playing the Chicago jazz club circuit, in 1964 he set his sights on New York.

For the self-taught abstract painter Claude Lawrence, art and music have always been intimately connected. Growing up in the 1940s on the South Side of Chicago, surrounded by a vibrant jazz and visual arts scene, he was barely five years old the first time he felt drawn to painting, and just fourteen when he picked up a saxophone. “I adored the image of it—the mystique surrounding it,” Lawrence tells W. “Charlie Parker was my hero.”

Out of high school, he became a professional saxophone player, joined a jazz trio, and performed all over the United States until the 1980s, when a psychic friend told him he would soon pursue a different vocation. “Maybe a day or so later, I got into painting,” Lawrence recalls.

His profound love for music would reverberate within his artistic practice indefinitely. Lawrence, who is now 80 years old, has created works held in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., and the Studio Museum in Harlem over the course of his six-decade career. But it wasn’t until a few years ago, after moving back to the Black cultural enclave of Sag Harbor, New York (where he lived in the 1990s), that he had the opportunity to show his paintings regularly, with solo exhibitions at galleries like Anthony Meier in San Francisco, David Lewis in East Hampton, and The LAB in Seattle.

It was the first of his many moves to New York, where he maintained a career as a musician and, by the 1980s, as a serious painter, too. The art world then was over-hyped, over-saturated and unsupportive of African-Americans, according to artist and critic George Negroponte.

In 2013, three of Mr. Lawrence’s paintings were accepted into the permanent collection of the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill. A year later, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Department of Modern and Contemporary Art followed suit. Then came the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the National African American Museum and Cultural Center, the National Gallery of Art, and dozens more, as well as private collectors.

In 2016, he made a public appearance and gave an alto saxophone performance for the opening of “Modern Heroics: 75 Years of African-American Expressionism” at the Newark Museum, where his work was also on view.

Edit from W magazine

For the self-taught abstract painter Claude Lawrence, art and music have always been intimately connected. Growing up in the 1940s on the South Side of Chicago, surrounded by a vibrant jazz and visual arts scene, he was barely five years old the first time he felt drawn to painting, and just fourteen when he picked up a saxophone. “I adored the image of it—the mystique surrounding it,” Lawrence tells W. “Charlie Parker was my hero.”

Out of high school, he became a professional saxophone player, joined a jazz trio, and performed all over the United States until the 1980s, when a psychic friend told him he would soon pursue a different vocation. “Maybe a day or so later, I got into painting,” Lawrence recalls.

Music’s deep influence on Lawrence’s oeuvre is palpable in the paintings’ visual compositions. Highly gestural, with vibrant geometric forms depicted in rich hues oftentimes emphasized by dynamic black strokes, it’s not hard to imagine the artist creating the paintings in his Sag Harbor studio, guided by the vibrations of music. “You can do a dance with the colors when there’s music on in the background,” Lawrence says of his process. “I build a dialogue with each painting. It speaks to me, it tells me where it wants to go, and when it gets there, it’s born. It’s done.”

Lawrence, has created works held in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., and the Studio Museum in Harlem over the course of his six-decade career. But it wasn’t until a few years ago, after moving back to the Black cultural enclave of Sag Harbor, New York (where he lived in the 1990s), that he had the opportunity to show his paintings regularly, with solo exhibitions at galleries like Anthony Meier in San Francisco, Keyes Art in Sag Harbor, David Lewis in East Hampton, and The LAB in Seattle.

Lawrence, who remembers coming of age and listening to the songs of Porgy and Bess, says feeling an intimate connection to the characters of the story was what prompted him to create the series of paintings currently on view. “This is a very character-driven piece—I know these people,” the artist says, likening Gershwin’s fictional community to the one he grew up around in Chicago. “The characters and their interactions create something like a Greek tragedy, and the place where they live, Catfish Row, is like a ghetto where so much is happening. These are my people.”

The artist’s energetic series, comprised of 22 abstract paintings, follows Gershwin’s opera sequentially; many of the painted works, such as Sportin’ Life (2022), Poor Robbins (2022) or Crowns End (2022), have titles based on characters from the original production. One of the largest and most vibrant paintings in the collection, Summertime (2022)—rendered in yellow, blue, and peach tones—is titled after the most celebrated song of the opera, which has been performed by legends like Nina Simone and Charlie Parker himself.

Music’s deep influence on Lawrence’s oeuvre is palpable in the paintings’ visual compositions. Highly gestural, with vibrant geometric forms depicted in rich hues oftentimes emphasized by dynamic black strokes, it’s not hard to imagine the artist creating the paintings in his Sag Harbor studio, guided by the vibrations of music. “You can do a dance with the colors when there’s music on in the background,” Lawrence says of his process. “I build a dialogue with each painting. It speaks to me, it tells me where it wants to go, and when it gets there, it’s born. It’s done.”

Lawrence, who continues to play the saxophone, sees how his love for jazz and its intrinsic dynamism has informed his life in more ways than one. “When I graduated high school, I could’ve gone to college or academia. I could’ve led a career-driven life, but I chose the jazz life—a life of movement, of no [consistent] jobs, of no money,” he says.

Over the years, he’s lived in Europe, Mexico, and more. To support his nomadic lifestyle, he took on varied jobs—at one point working as a house painter and then as a chandelier cleaner. But times have changed, as he’s now put down roots in Sag Harbor (but still travels to a chateau near Paris once a year). “I’m confident my purpose is through music and art, and I know that I’m inhabited by a purpose that I have nothing to do with,” Lawrence says, laughing. “In other words, I’m just a purpose package, and I can’t take credit for any of it. If I can paint, play, and exercise, then it’s a good day.”

By Salomé Gómez-Upegui