A01=Claire Steele
art and family
artist parent
artistic legacy
Author_Claire Steele
Category=AFC
Category=DNC
Category=FXL
creative inheritance
creative nonfiction
death of a parent
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_new_release
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
home and belonging
identity and belonging
landscape and memory
literary memoir
managing grief and loss
power of art
sense of place
Yorkshire
Product details
- ISBN 9781917000161
- Dimensions: 154 x 216mm
- Publication Date: 26 Mar 2026
- Publisher: Constellations Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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The Art of the Matter is a montage of memory, meditation and creative migration, centred around the idea that art is where we go to discover the things we don’t yet know. As well as its attention to painting, it also engages with the art of managing grief. It offers the reader a way of looking at endurance, both in terms of resilience and everlastingness. Art prompts a kind of expansion in the chest: we become more human, more curious, more alive when we are in the presence of a really great painting. Focusing on the relationship with her painter father, Claire Steele considers his works as posthumous conversations – dynamic, ongoing and full of mysterious surprises. Almost tactile in its language, The Art of the Matter is rich with surprise and vitality.
Claire Steele grew up in a mill-town in the West Riding of Yorkshire, flanked by the Pennines and the moors of Ilkley and Saddleworth. After winning a post-graduate scholarship to study literature at St Cross College, Oxford, she has worked in academia, publishing and as a creative writing tutor, running workshops in prisons, dementia cafés, on the tops of double-decker buses, on airport runways, in gypsy caravans and on narrowboats, as well as in more predictable locations. She currently lives in Buckinghamshire.
