A self-taught artist and lifelong jazz musician, Claude Lawrence has sustained a parallel practice in sound and image for decades. He grew up on the South Side of Chicago, immersed in the city’s vibrant jazz and arts culture of the 1950s and 60s. He began playing tenor saxophone in high school, and by the early 1960s, he had become a regular presence on Chicago’s jazz club circuit. In 1964 he began performing in New York and after relocating there in 1968, Lawrence moved easily between music and visual art communities, engaging with artists such as Jack Whitten, Frederick J. Brown, and Robert Blackburn, many of whom were deeply connected to jazz culture.

Propelled by this environment, Lawrence began painting in 1987, developing a visual language that mirrors the structures, rhythms, and improvisational freedom of jazz. His boldly colored, gestural canvases—balancing figuration and abstraction—translate musical phrasing into paint, where tempo becomes mark and improvisation becomes form. Still actively working as both a musician and a painter, Lawrence continues to explore the crossover between jazz and painting, treating each medium as an extension of the other and as a site for sustained experimentation and expression.