"Painting lets me slow down and alter how I see, process, and interact with everything around me. Through painting I get to examine my everyday environment with a quizzical, curious eye. The mundane things I look at all day shift from something I observe to something I’m creating, they become abstract and full of possibility and play. So for example I might notice that the light hits my laptop screen at work in a certain way when I’m wondering when lunch time will roll around."

"Visiting Clare Kambhu’s Jackson Heights studio turned out to be one of the most rewarding conversations I have had to date with a painter in New York. It sounds minimizing to describe this artist merely as a painter, especially considering her almost ten year career in the City’s public school system educating students on how to create, speak and write critically about their own art. The artist’s familiarity with institutional buildings spans the majority of her young life as both student and teacher, and undeniably influences her paintings’ formal, and ideological inquiries. Kambhu’s observational oil renderings of roughed up chairs, used whiteboards, messy textbooks, grade cards, fingerprint smudges, and yummy oranges waiting for recess, all attempt to visually respond to her much larger train of thought; how are institutional spaces impacted by those they have been specifically built for?"

"Yes! The question—challenge—of evaluation in art is ever present in my life. In education and in marketplaces, we have this urge to codify and compare art through external criteria. But when art gets reduced to just the codifiable measurement of its merit, we lose something. The balance between making the analysis of art accessible and flattening it entirely is a very hard one to strike. As I think about how we evaluate art, I’ve been working on and off for a few years now on a painting of a rubric used to award college credit to high school art classes. In exacting brush strokes, I paint each letter of the rubric one at a time, like a bureaucrat clocking in and completing a futile task. The wet into wet impasto takes this flat document and makes it less legible and more tactile. The tactile, the wet, the painterly—they evade measurement on these sorts of rubric."

"Visitors to the United Federation of Teachers' Queens borough office in April were greeted by a curious sight: an artist with a tray full of oil paints standing before an easel in the fifth floor waiting room... Kambhu frequently paints in school buildings, focusing on elements —such as the handles of a door or the legs of a chair — that are universally recognizable and familiar to anyone who’s spent time in a school."