Claudia Chapline’s art both honors the natural environment and laments its destruction. The “Spill Series,” a collection of gestural style paintings in blue and black hues, was created after the Cosco Busan oil tanker hit the Golden Gate Bridge in 2008, an event which resulted in damage to the bridge and surrounding ocean life, such as the fragile marine and shoreline birds. Chapline’s creative objects also reflect a consciousness in regards to product consumption and it’s subsequent waste. Constructed from natural and manufactured fragments that were once “discards” from the street, Stinson beach, and her own artist studio, these unique pieces are poignant reminders of the things we leave behind.

Claudia Chapline has been a political and artistic staple in the Bay Area since her “Diary of Discard” series in the 1960’s. A self described art journalist and poet, Chapline’s poetry and language often finds its way into her two-dimensional art.

Over her long career, her work has been shown at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Crocker Museum, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the War Memorial Museum in Seoul, the Florence Biennale, and many galleries throughout the USA and in Japan, Australia, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Mexico, and Guatemala. In 2006, the Northern California Chapter of the Women’s Caucus for Art recognized Chapline with a Lifetime Achievement Award.

Chapline has founded and directed galleries for new California art since 1974 in Santa Monica, Sacramento and in Stinson Beach (since 1987). She has curated numerous exhibitions for her own galleries and for non-profit organizations. Due to her efforts over the past three decades, hundreds of artists have shown their work throughout California and also in Europe.

Chapline is an international artist and poet, whose art has been exhibited in museums and galleries throughout the US, Latin America, Europe, and Asia over the past five decades. She also received the 2006 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Northern California Women’s Caucus for Art, and is an author of a memoir and six books of poetry and art.