Daphne McClure was born in Helston, a market town in South West Cornwall, into a family of long Cornish ancestry.   After studying fine art at Redruth Art School, she went on to Hornsey College of Art under John Platt.   Here she was particularly influenced by Alan Braund and his emphatic stress on Design and Balance as the two most important aspects of a work, the two fundamentals to get right before all else.

The 1950’s were a fertile period of British Art, the 1951 Festival of Britain Exhibition being of particular significance, with Heron, Wynter and Lanyon represented.   The younger artists were challenging the established pre-eminence of more traditional styles, all of them, as Hilton Kramer, the New York Times art critic, observed after visiting West Penwith in 1957, “in pursuit of a painterly abstraction.”   There was an emphasis on shallow space, on structure, and in particular in Lanyon’s work, on local references.   These characteristics are found increasingly in McClure’s work to some extent in her first solo show at the Borlase Gallery and then at the Oxford Playhouse, but much more significantly after her return to live in Cornwall with her family in 1976.

It was in Porthleven, a small fishing village near Helston, that Daphne McClure was able to start absorbing into her own work long felt influences.   That of Ben Nicholson, with his extremely sensitive use of line and Christopher Wood and his painterly passion for Cornwall and of Milton Avery with his marvellous paring down of basic shapes to achieve so much sense of space.  Here in the 1970’s and 1980’s inspired as much by her innovative reaction of ariel photography, as by the familiar shapes and associations of Porthleven found so powerfully in the early Lanyon work,     McClure’s own personal language found an expression and vigour all of its own.   This vigour and emphasis on design carried forward in her work as it crossed over the narrow bridge of land to the north coast and its sharper outlines.   At Godrevy, where the Red River used to enter the sea, and further to the west at Hayle, McClure’s blend of fantasy and reality really began to fuse.   Travelling round the coast via St Ives, her work displays an expressive handling of the subject and it’s emotional intensity combine with calligraphic scratchy references.   Coming round Land’s End to Newlyn, where McClure has long been a member of the Newlyn Society of Artists, the journey of her work continues and finally rests in Penzance, her present home and the inspiration behind her latest and in many ways her most quintessential work.