Claire Jorgensen's painting practice focuses on portraiture exploring the line between reality and representation, challenging conventional notions of self-identity. Her work, often rendered on monumental canvases, employs high-chromatic, contrasting colours to depict her subjects. Adding other-worldly dimension to skin, she uses tones such as phthalo, lime green, cerulean blue, and neon pink. This colour-rich approach to painting skin and the frequent appearance of red-headed subjects, in both her and her family’s likenesses, are defining features of her work. Jorgensen’s practice grew significantly during a ten-month self-directed study period in the UK at Newcastle University. Her research evolved from an exploration of personal grief, stemming from a family death that occurred while living away from home. Feeling numb and disconnected, and finding it impossible to share in the grief authentically given the distance, she turned to generating portraits. Jorgensen's paintings begin as images whose indexical link to reality has been severed. In her latest series, she creates haunting compositions by training a small data AI model on photographs of herself and her family, prompting the technology to depict an array of emotional states. What emerges is a collection of distorted portraits, each sharing her distinct familial likeness and the technology’s interpretation of her prompted emotions. These manufactured images, whose tie to reality is inherently distorted, became the references for her paintings. By turning these digital images into analog paintings on large canvases, she reclaims them, bridging digital image-making with the methodology of painting. Working in this scale immerses her within a surreal painted world, forcing her to confront her own relationship with the faces she is actively constructing. Her practice, which started as an exploration of personal grief, now poses an alternative conception of the visual language of emotion, paradoxically offering a concrete depiction of abstract self-identity. Jorgensen holds a BFA (Honours) from the University of Victoria and resides on Vancouver Island, British Columbia.