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06/10/2015 08:30 AMClio Newton, a member of the Daniel Hand High School Class of 2007, has already found local and international renown as an artist.
There’s a lot of professional excitement in the 26-year-old’s life. Clio, a Madison native, was recently named one of Connecticut magazine’s 40 Under 40 for 2015. She leaves June 30 to begin a seven-month artist residency in Zurich, Switzerland. She recently returned from two years studying art in Florence, Italy.
Closer to home, she was hired this year by Yale-New Haven Hospital to paint a portrait of a retiring doctor and to perform more work for her alma mater, Cooper Union in New York City.
“Yale hired me to create a portrait of one of their retiring staff members, a really prominent endocrinologist. When I graduated from Cooper Union, they hired me around the time of graduation to do portraits of all of the presidents of the university, so that was my first big commission job. I had to do 14 drawings for Cooper Union, which are now permanently installed on the university campus.”
Clio grew up on Barberry Hill Farm in Madison, which her mother and step-father, Kelly and Kingsley Goddard, own. She says her love for art began with her father, Richard Newton.
“My father is a sculptor, and he was an illustrator when I was growing up, so I spent a lot of time in his studio making art with him,” she says. “It was always something that I knew I loved to do. Even when I was in kindergarten, when people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I always said that I wanted to be a painter. I’ve known forever that this is my calling, this is what I want to do with my life.”
Clio says she’s “fortunate to live in a day and age where the Internet really helps facilitate artists to get their work out into the world, to have experiences internationally, to exhibit internationally. I’m very fortunate, I think, to be alive in 2015.”
Clio has always been most interested in portrait painting, even in her teens and earlier. This passion has resulted in some jaw-droppingly realistic pieces of art.
“I always loved painting people’s portraits, partly for the challenge of creating an image that transcends representation. It’s not just a reproduction of a person’s face; it becomes sort of this supernatural entity in and of itself, which is why I think that portrait painting and portrait drawing is so interesting. It’s not an imitation of photography—sure, it can have elements that are photographic—but when it’s done well, I think it can really be something else, something that has that other element.”
While growing up in Madison, Clio was heavily involved in the local arts scene “because I always knew that it was something I was serious about.”
By her senior year at Hand, she had blown through all the art classes the curriculum offered. Another student in her grade had done the same with math classes.
“They allowed him to go to Yale to take a college course in mathematics,” Clio says, “so I petitioned for the school to let me do that, too, with art, and they did, which was amazing—so I got to take a class at Yale, and I also studied a lot at the Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts.”
She earned her BFA at Cooper Union in New York City, “which is a really interesting school,” Clio says. “Up until last year, the school offered full tuition scholarships to all of its admitted students. They only take about 50 students every year, but if you got into the school they paid for everything, which is amazing. They even helped me pay for my apartment in New York, and all of my education was free. It’s a really, really special school, and I feel really fortunate that I was able to go there.”
She was able to study at the Florence Academy of Fine Arts for two years thanks to the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation out of Canada. Clio enjoyed a very different artistic education in Italy than the one she’d received in New York City.
“New York was a very progressive, postmodern, very liberal kind of art atmosphere, and Florence Academy was extremely conservative, rigorously classical, academic—basically the opposite of Cooper Union,” she says. “But it was great because the contrast of those two educations was really special; I think it’s cool that I got to experience both extremes. Now I want to move forward and take what I’ve learned, particularly from Florence Academy, and meld it with the content I got from Cooper Union.”
On the last day of June, Clio will fly to Zurich, Switzerland, to begin her seven-month residency.
“In Switzerland, essentially it’s a gallery-slash-foundation that selects two artists internationally every year and they’re provided with a studio space to work in and an apartment to live in for six or seven months while in Switzerland,” Clio explains. “Then at the end of those months, you have to produce an exhibition for them. That’s the exchange: they give you this free studio, free apartment, and then you build a body of work for their gallery and have an exhibition at the end.”
The exhibition’s theme is ultimately up to Clio. When she applied, she was required to send in a proposal with her application describing how she envisioned her exhibition.
She says, “Who knows if it will end up being this, but my plan right now is to make some really large-scale figurative charcoal drawings and oil paintings. Portraits, but sort of a contemporary twist on portraits; the modern portrait, essentially.”
As for her hometown, Clio could not be more appreciative of the support she received growing up.
“Madison absolutely helped shape me,” she declares. “It’s such an amazing place to grow up, and I think when you grow up here you don’t really fully appreciate how amazing it is. It’s a beautiful place to grow up; it’s intellectual; it’s very stimulating. It’s close to New York; it’s close to New Haven. People are really open-minded here, and everyone was so supportive of me my whole life in telling me that, ‘Yes, you can make a career out of this,’ which is amazing that I grew up believing that I could and now I am. If I had grown up in a different community, I don’t know that people would have been so accepting, so I’m really grateful to the community of Madison for that, for being so supportive of me.”
It seems much of Clio’s time is spent painting, drawing, and applying for more sponsorships and residencies. She hopes to be in Rome for 2016.
As for anyone who wishes to make a life out of art as she has, Clio has these words of encouragement: “If you believe that you can make something work, you can make it work. Anything is possible. If you treat something like a job, it can become one for you. If you’re disciplined and you put in the effort, you can really do anything in your life that you want to do.”
See Clio’s work at www.clionewton.com.
To nominate someone for Person of the Week, email Melissa at m.babcock@shorepublishing.com.