BROOKVILLE, NY.- Wishing you could go for a walk along the shore or a dip in the pool? Here’s a chance to do both! “Claudia Waters: The Figure in Motion,” a solo exhibition of oil paintings, is on display at Steinberg Museum of Art at Hillwood (formerly known as Hillwood Art Museum) in Brookville, N.Y., through July 19, 2013.

The exhibition organized by Barbara Applegate, Director of Steinberg Museum of Art at Hillwood, features Montclair, N.J., painter Claudia Waters’ figurative seashore and pool paintings. “Claudia Waters: The Figure in Motion” features 34 of the artist’s iconic medium- and large-scale oil paintings. The artist favors authenticity over pretense or mere prettiness in her approach. Her polytych configurations group sequential canvases that portray series of stop-action postures that reference Eadweard Muybridge’s motion studies. Waters paints in oil on fine linen that has four coats of oil ground stretched over handcrafted basswood supports.

The paintings distill the essence of specific moments often involving movement to express universal themes — unobserved moments preserved. Waters’paintings preserve these unobserved moments while recalling the fleeting nature of existence. Both the shore and pool environments provide a simple, abstract backdrop for the figure and represent a metaphor for life.

“The natural world of the seashore is an ideal place to contemplate life. I capture the essence of a moment so it’s not forgotten or unnoticed, acknowledging the persistence of movement, change, and the passage of time. The underwater pool environment acts as a lens or filter through which the figure may be observed. Color, pattern, light, reflections, shadows, and bubbles, created, transformed, and refracted by the water and the figure cause spontaneous abstractions that may imply introspection, mystery, and perhaps the unknowable. ” – Claudia Waters

Claudia Waters earned a BFA from Parsons School of Design and studied painting at the Art Students League and the Yard School of Art. Childhood summers spent on Long Island beaches have influenced her current work. Her paintings have been exhibited extensively in national and regional venues. Solo and group exhibitions include the Arnot Art Museum, The Butler Institute of American Art, the Court Gallery at William Patterson University, the Edward WIlliams Gallery at Fairleigh Dickinson University, City Without Walls, The George Segal Gallery at Montclair State University, Johnson&Johnson World Headquarters, and The Arts Guild of Rahway. Her work was part of the 2010 New Jersey Arts Annual: Fine Art, Reality + Artifice, at the New Jersey State Museum in Trenton. Claudia Waters lives and works in Montclair, N.J. Her paintings are in numerous private collections. For more information, please visit her Web site at www.claudiawaters.com