Maureen believes in simple ideas, strong relationships, and lasting impact.
Meet Maureen
Maureen is a fine artist and muralist based in New York City, where she has lived and worked since 1983. She studied painting at the School of Visual Arts, graduating in 1987, and has spent the decades since building a practice that moves fluidly between intimate mural work and studio painting. Her mural practice, Clavel Fine Murals, brings hand-painted oil murals into private homes and commercial spaces — intimate, room-scale environments rather than large public works. Commissions have included a Florida wetlands scene for a client’s dining room, immersive settings painted for children’s libraries, and an ongoing woodland entryway mural in her own home. Each piece is built up in layers of Winsor & Newton artists’ oils, worked with linseed oil and damar varnish for depth and longevity, an approach drawn directly from her training as a painter. Alongside her commissioned work, Maureen maintains a personal fine art practice: a body of mixed-media works on paper — pencil, charcoal, photo transfer, oil, and pigment — made primarily between 1993 and 1999. Rooted in her origins in Central Florida, this work explores memory, mortality, land, and the friction between the natural world and the systems we use to try to know it. Together, the mural and studio practices reflect a single, consistent interest: the way a painted surface can hold a place, a memory, or a feeling long after the moment itself has passed.
Artist’s Statement
“I think of every mural as a room remembering something it hasn’t experienced yet. My work — whether it’s a wetlands scene painted into a dining room or a small work on paper — starts from the same place: an interest in how landscape and memory shape each other, and how paint, applied in patient layers, can hold both at once. I’m drawn to the intimate scale of a room, not a public wall — a mural that lives with the people who see it every day. I trained as a painter, and that training shows in how I work now.
I build my murals the way I was taught to build a canvas — in oils, layer by layer, with linseed oil and damar varnish carrying the light through each pass. It’s slow work by nature, and I’ve come to think the slowness is part of what makes a mural feel inhabited rather than applied. My personal studio practice, a body of works on paper made through the 1990s, grew out of my own history in Central Florida — the specific quality of that land, and the tension between what we observe in nature and what we think we know about it. That same tension quietly runs through the murals I paint for other people’s homes: an attempt to give a room a landscape that feels remembered, not decorated. Whether the canvas is a client’s dining room wall or a sheet of paper in my studio, I’m working toward the same thing — a surface that holds still long enough to let you look, and keeps giving something back the longer you do.”