By Julia Jones
Claire Fried is a Suffolk artist who has lived and worked extensively abroad. This year she is opening her new studio to the public for the first time (June 6/7). In an interview with Julia Jones, she reflects on the year that has passed since the death of her husband Bertrand.
Bertrand Fried by Claire Fried
The day Claire Fried was given the keys of her new studio, was the day her husband, Bertrand, died. Next weekend, June 6th-7th 2026, she will open it to the public for the first time, as part of the Suffolk Open Studios initiative. Canning Studio is in Woodbridge, tucked away behind Woodbridge Books and Claire’s gallery, Artspace Woodbridge. The studio’s name comes from its propinquity to the former Woodbridge canning factory (later Turban Foods). Claire also thinks of the name as including the words ‘I can, You can, We can’, symbolising the feelings of activity and purposefulness that have kept her going since the loss of Bertrand.
The Studio was the East Anglian regional winner for Best Non-Residential New Build in 2025. It was a project which she and Bertrand had worked on together and is a fitting testimony to their creative and loving partnership. She feels a different sort of energy in that area of her garden. In practical terms, I was fascinated to learn that the studio has been built on a platform to protect the roots of the birch tree which dapples the gravelled courtyard with light and shade. When Claire talks about her mother, Suffolk painter Audrey Sant, who will be 100 this year, she spoke of her mother as still ‘painting with her eyes’, observing nature and immersing herself in nature. Pausing to gaze at the varying colour and delicate movement of the leaves on this single tree in Clare’s yard, I felt I could understand how a painter could feel so completely absorbed in nature that he or she might no longer need to pick up a brush.
Claire, however, has done much more than that in the months following her husband’s death. She had time to prepare herself (as far as anyone can prepare for such a loss). Bertrand was given a terminal diagnosis early in 2024. Claire describes him as ‘a believing man’ who accepted his diagnosis calmly but felt he was healing daily. They went away together on some wonderful trips and spent time at home adapting their living space and watching the growth of the Studio. Claire also realised that she would need an absorbing personal challenge to pick her up and carry her through in what became the initial months of widowhood. She enrolled on a one year online Drawing Development Course offered by the Royal Drawing School. Sixty students from across the world attended usually a10.am start (UK time) several days a week. In early 2026 they all met in Spitalfields, London, working together, then mounted a collective exhibition in February.
Bertrand died in November 2024 – though for Claire he is still living on, all around her. The course began in January 2025, the curriculum was extensive; the pace challenging. The students (from Japan, China, Finland, Italy, Holland, USA, Russia, Ukraine – and more) studied different forms of drawing, printmaking, sculpture and painting. They were expected to being posting work and ideas from day one, demonstrating different forms of drawing, from life, from the imagination, from the Masters, charcoal drawing, animations… Everyone needed to have gained a degree, but this could be in any subject, not only art. Every day began with a splendid lecture, setting them thinking, and talking, and creating.
Claire identified Love as a major theme for her work during this year. She was thinking about eternal love, a state of thankfulness at having known Bertrand and been there with him at his end. She needed to connect this to nature, to the natural condition of ageing. These are ideas that she is continuing to develop, using Japanese rice paper to represent skin, for instance. The first piece she produced during the course was inspired by the room in their house where Bertrand’s friend Nick would come, almost every day, to talk about things that matter deeply – like life, and its meaning. The Pope died during this period. Claire saw images of his lying in state in the Vatican while a continuous stream of people was flowing past him. She noticed that there were not many women but then saw a huddle of four nuns, protecting the body of the Pope, like a single rock. When asked to consider Human form in landscape, Claire also began to think about her art residency in China with The Masters of the Ink and Brush in 2019 and the Chinese attitude to mountains, which are named and revered. The sculpture element of her course came as a revelation to her. Instead of drawing, she expressed these ideas in clay. This formed her first major piece in her year of study.
For the second piece the students were asked to represent an inner forest in clay, possibly expressing parts of their own inner landscapes, An inspiring lecture suggested ways in which carving into a geometric shape, used in sculpture worldwide and through the centuries, can contain strong force and energy. Claire was struggling through the Probate system just then. She wasn’t sure this was really where she wanted to go. She was expressing Probate like being in a forest, saying I need to see light at the end of the tunnel.
Whilst in Majorca staying with one of her sons, she looked out at old, gnarled trees and wondered whether she could recreate these on the outside faces of a cube of clay, then find ways to burrow through to the centre. Her son found the clay and as she began to dig into the block of material with kitchen utensils, she felt as if the shapes of the branches were telling her where to go. A kestrel flew down in front of her. She and her son discovered that it had three fledglings. They too were incorporated into the design. Claire wrapped the completed unfired artwork in many layers of cloth and brought it back to England with her.
For the third piece she wanted to explore the idea of eternal love as growing, rather than dying. Again she drew inspiration from China. She made a mountain of clay with two heads at the top, hers and her husband, turned towards each other. Unexpectedly this released floods of tears as she remembered touching and being touched. She extended her sculpture from heads to bodies so that the whole mountain was constructed of intertwined limbs. As she worked the tears continued to pour as she recreated a complex embrace.
This was a spiritual year for Claire. There were other happenings, both in her own life and in the lives of friends which she found ways to interpret in art. Some of this will be shown in her studio as well as the work she has in progress now. The companionship of the other students on the Royal Drawing School course was mutually supportive as well as stimulating. When they were all working on their final exhibition, Claire created a wall of small works where they were all represented together. They called it ‘Drawing Closer’
As Claire and I chatted in her peaceful house. I asked her a little more about her early career, beginning with the days when her mother would sit her five children round the kitchen table every day of the holidays, drawing whatever had been placed on there. Claire had recalled those days and the long days sailing, swimming and playing in the Deben mud in a profile found in magazine (Deben #61). Now I asked her about her adult career, after she finished her degree in Fashion and Textiles at St Martin’s School of Art, London. Her work with transparent threads took her to Paris where she worked with some Couture houses, but didn’t meet Bertrand for many years.
Claire Drawing in the style of William Blake
Almost her first assignment had been to his family’s business, Fried Frères, bead specialists. The company had been set up by his grandfather in 1886 selling tiny glass beads from the Czech mountains moving from Vienna to Paris. Bertrand had not been there on the day that young Claire had been sent to visit. He was older than she, with a complex upbringing derived both from his childhood in Paris during he wartime occupation and also from his mixed Mexican / French heritage. Claire describes him as someone ‘with a huge heart’. She never heard him say anything unkind about anyone. He was also deeply spiritual. Catholic by upbringing, he longed for all religions to come together. Theirs had been a rich, full, life. One of Clare’s most recent drawings inspired by Blake’s work shows the two of them, lying next to one another, surrounded by images of their time together on the Deben with their two boys when they had moved to England after their working lives in France.
When Canning Studio opens to the public on June 6/7, it will be fascinating in its own right as a building and will contain a partial retrospect of the work Claire has produced in this long year since his death. She has many more projects gradually developing and will also continue to attend courses with inspiring artists. She recommends this to others. ‘They help give you the different languages of art’. Her year at the Royal Drawing School certainly bears this out.
The Suffolk Open Studios event is held over the four weekends of June every year. Its aim is ‘to promote the community of exciting and vibrant artists and galleries we have in the county of Suffolk, giving members of the public the opportunity to see what happens in a working studio, meet the artists and makers and discover lots of new artworks.’ Not every studio is open every weekend. Do visit their website to discover more.
Claire Fried is also the owner of Artspace, the exhibition centre in Woodbridge Thoroughfare. Exhibitions change frequently. Click here to discover what’s currently on show.
