About
Hallie-Claire Weems is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice delves into identity, memory, and representation through portraiture, narrative, and material experimentation.
Hi! I’m Hallie-Claire Weems, a painter, storyteller, and lover of messy sketchbooks. My work is rooted in portraiture, but it’s really about exploring personhood and identity. I work with multiple mediums including acrylic and oil paint, graphite, ink pen, watercolor, and traditional digital painting.
I was raised in the American South and informed by a background in Studio Art and Art History (UNCW, BA). My practice is equally concerned with internal landscapes: the politics of self-perception and the ways of becoming. My work ranges from classical reinterpretations to more playful, observational work. I often draw from lived experience and pop-cultural iconography.
background
I’ve been drawing portraits for as long as I can remember; tracing faces with a pencil before I could spell my name properly. From early childhood, I felt pulled toward the human form, fascinated by how emotion can live in someone’s eyes, the tilt of a chin, the tension in a person’s brows. That curiosity quickly turned into an obsession with characters and storytelling. I spent countless hours immersed in the worlds of H2O: Just Add Water, Tinker Bell, The Little Mermaid, Super Mario, and other fantastical universes that transcended my own. I wasn’t content just watching. I had to participate. I would invent characters and film elaborate skits on my iPad or my family’s old camcorder like a one-person production crew to bring those ideas to life, starring my favorite dolls.
When I wasn’t directing my dolls, I was filling sketchbooks with original characters, teaching myself how to use whatever materials I had access to, from Crayola colored pencils to watercolor palettes. My early drawings were cartoonish, but over time, that style evolved into something more grounded and observational. I became more interested in realism, in capturing the truth and texture of real people, not just imagined ones. That shift deepened as I pursued a formal art education at the collegiate level.
College gave me the tools and language to refine my practice, introducing me to techniques that helped me translate and capture the human condition and helping me understand the power of historical context. But even with that training, I never lost the desire for playfulness or imagination that first drew me to art.
That is the goal I maintain with my art; maintaining that spark. Whether I’m painting a large-scale portrait or developing a study, I try to approach each piece with a sense of curiosity. I want the work to feel alive and have an identity of its own.
In many ways, I see my practice as a conversation between past and present. The skills I developed myself and through formal training have allowed me to speak to my lived experience, my identity, and yes, even my childhood obsessions, that shape the tone of that conversation. I’m still chasing the same feeling I had as a kid with a sketchbook and a handful of markers: that moment when imagination and reality start to blur, and something new begins to take shape on the page.