Artist of 'joyous, optimistic' work dies at 90

Claudia Williams, pictured in 1998, proved "it was possible to forge a career as a woman artist in Wales and to exhibit and be succcessful," said her biographer

Artist Claudia Williams, who was best known for her large works, often depicting intimate scenes of family life, has died at the age of 90.

Her work, described by her biographer, as "joyous, colourful, optimistic", regularly showed outings to the seaside.

She lived in both north Wales and France, and an exhibition of her new work was held in 2016, when she was 83.

She said at the time: "I do find people fascinating and I never get tired of painting people in different attitudes and working with different colour schemes."

Mothers on the Beach is an oil on canvas from 1986

Born in England, she had family ties in north Wales and moved to Welsh-speaking Gwynedd at the age of 12, where she said she felt like an outsider.

This, she later said, led to her fascination with observing people.

After attending the Chelsea School of Art in London she moved back to Gwynedd in 1954 and met her future husband, Gwilym Prichard, also an artist.

In the early 1980s they travelled through Europe together. They settled in France in 1985 and lived there for 15 years.

In 1995, she was awarded the silver medal by the Academy of Arts, Sciences and Letters in Paris, in recognition of her contribution to the arts in France.

She returned to live in Wales in 2000.

Claudia Williams's work, like Dreamer on the Beach, from 1986, often portrayed families at the seaside

A retrospective was held at the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth in 2000, and an exhibition of her paintings of Tryweryn - the Gwynedd valley that was flooded to provide drinking water to Liverpool - was shown there in 2010.

The 1965 flooding of the valley and the village of Capel Celyn is commemorated in graffiti often seen in Wales, Cofiwch Dryweryn (Remember Tryweryn in Welsh).

Her biographer and friend of 40 years, Prof Robert Meyrick said: "Her joyous, colourful, optimistic paintings have been an inspiration to generations of younger Welsh painters especially because Claudia proved that it was possible to forge a career as a woman artist in Wales and to exhibit and be successful."

Writing on the Art UK website, Harry Heuser, co-author of the book Claudia Williams: An Intimate Acquaintance, said: "Many of Williams's compositions, however abstracted or generalised their figures may be, are rooted in observations of real people in actual situations."

In 2016 she told BBC Wales: "I don't really see myself as prolific and I consider myself a retired person, but I can't see a day in the future when I don't paint."