Claudia Morales’ painting and ceramics explore abstraction as a way to engage with sensory experience, memory, and emotional states beyond language. She moves between oil on canvas and clay, allowing each medium to inform the other. Both are slow processes that ask for attention and invite intuition. Morales begins without a fixed image, responding to color, texture, and form as they emerge. The work builds through layering, revision, and erasure.

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In the studio, Morales trusts the rhythm of the process. Over time, she has allowed representational forms such as figures, flowers, leaves, and bodies of water to (re)enter her work. These images appear within or beneath abstraction, sometimes clearly, sometimes just on the edge of recognition. They reflect a deepening relationship with the natural world and with the body as a site of memory and knowledge.

Morales’ interest in abstraction is in holding space for what is felt rather than explained. She wants the work to carry the sense of something unfolding, something lived. Themes of growth, intimacy, love and transformation often surface, but they are not imposed. They are discovered through the act of making.

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Claudia Morales  (b.1976, El Salvador) is an abstract painter and educator based in Berkeley, CA.  She received an MFA in Drawing and Painting from California State University, Long Beach.  Morales  has exhibited her work throughout the United States and abroad including the Torrance Art Museum (CA), The Pacific Design Center (CA), University Art Museum (CA), Arizona State University (AZ), Kohler Arts Center (WI), Alexander Calder Arts Center (MI), United States Embassy, New Zealand,  and Centro Nacional De Arte (El Salvador).  Claudia teaches drawing and painting at Santa Rosa Junior College.