Born in 1944, Mr. Lawrence is a product of South Side Chicago—a city that was on the forefront of the Civil Rights Movement with a burgeoning arts, music and cultural scene, and jazz clubs of international repute. He picked up the tenor saxophone as a high school student and, after playing the Chicago jazz club circuit, in 1964 he set his sights on New York. For the self-taught abstract painter Claude Lawrence, art and music have always been intimately connected. Growing up in the 1940s on the South Side of Chicago, surrounded by a vibrant jazz and visual arts scene, he was barely five years old the first time he felt drawn to painting, and just fourteen when he picked up a saxophone. “I adored the image of it—the mystique surrounding it,” Lawrence tells W. “Charlie Parker was my hero.” Out of high school, he became a professional saxophone player, joined a jazz trio, and performed all over the United States until the 1980s, when a psychic friend told him he would soon pursue a different vocation. “Maybe a day or so later, I got into painting,” Lawrence recalls. His profound love for music would reverberate within his artistic practice indefinitely. Lawrence, who is now 80 years old, has created works held in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., and the Studio Museum in Harlem over the course of his six-decade career. But it wasn’t until a few years ago, after moving back to the Black cultural enclave of Sag Harbor, New York (where he lived in the 1990s), that he had the opportunity to show his paintings regularly, with solo exhibitions at galleries like Anthony Meier in San Francisco, David Lewis in East Hampton, and The LAB in Seattle. It was the first of his many moves to New York, where he maintained a career as a musician and, by the 1980s, as a serious painter, too. The art world then was over-hyped, over-saturated and unsupportive of African-Americans, according to artist and critic George Negroponte. In 2013, three of Mr. Lawrence’s paintings were accepted into the permanent collection of the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill. A year later, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Department of Modern and Contemporary Art followed suit. Then came the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the National African American Museum and Cultural Center, the National Gallery of Art, and dozens more, as well as private collectors. In 2016, he made a public appearance and gave an alto saxophone performance for the opening of “Modern Heroics: 75 Years of African-American Expressionism” at the Newark Museum, where his work was also on view.