Lynsey Cleaver

With a BA in Fine Art from Coventry University and an MA in Art History from the University of Warwick, Lynsey Cleaver’s career has spanned more than two decades as a muralist, scenic artist, and commission-based painter for private clients, leading interior designers, and the theatre and television industries.

From 2006 until his passing in 2013, she worked as an on‑site artist for the late publishing giant Felix Dennis, contributing to a wide range of creative projects across his estates in Warwickshire and Mustique in the Caribbean. Other notable works include creating artwork for the opening ceremony of the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics in Russia, exhibiting in London, Lithuania, and South Africa as part of the Surviving History project for Living Imprints, and designing and painting sets for a children’s television series by writer and actor Iain Lauchlan. Alongside these projects, she has completed numerous scenic mural commissions for interior designers, theatre, television, and events companies.

Lynsey’s current studio practice is deeply rooted in the wildlife and landscapes around the Cotswold border where she lives in a Victorian school mistress’s cottage with her husband and two daughters. From her garden studio she creates mixed media works on paper and canvas combining mono-printing techniques on a gelatine plate, paint, collage and expressive graphite drawing. Her landscape paintings explore the shifting effects of weather and light, sometimes zooming into intimate sections of the natural environment. Recently, her focus has turned to the hidden worlds of birds within these environments, creating paintings that explore the colours, textures and patterns she finds in local hedgerows and habitats when out walking in the Cotswold countryside. Using a gelatine plate in her mono-printing, she will often print directly from nature—pressing twigs and leaves gathered from the hedgerows, overlapping and layering them, and overpainting onto the plate to build depth and texture.

Lynsey’s passion for depicting birds and native wild animals is rooted in her upbringing. Growing up on the edge of ancient woodlands in Warwickshire, she was surrounded by her parents’ love of birdwatching, their shelves of bird books, and their collections of natural specimens. This early immersion in the natural world has left her feeling almost compelled to paint from nature; it forms a visual language that speaks of home, belonging, and continuity—one that she hopes to pass on to her own children.