Claude Lawrence (born 1944) is an American jazz tenor saxophonist and self-taught abstract artist.
He attended a vocational high school for commercial art and instrumental music, where he was classmates with fellow musicians Frederick J.
Some of the New-York-based artists he was associated with over the years include Fred Brown, Lorenzo Pace, Jack Whitten, Joe Overstreet and Robert Blackburn.
[6] During this time, he also worked a number of odd jobs including painting houses, cleaning chandeliers, teaching Tai Chi and groundskeeping for the University of Connecticut.
Williams Jr. bought a large collection of Claude Lawrence’s paintings and began donating them to museums.
[10] In 2016 Lawrence’s work was featured in “Modern Heroics: 75 Years of African-American Expressionism” at the Newark Museum.
The show featured 22 abstract paintings inspired by George Gershwin’s revered opera Porgy and Bess.
Lawrence painted the works intuitively with music playing, often improvising and letting forms and colors lead the way to the final image.