MAURALOVESTODRAW.COM
Maura Cluthe · 2020 · Web design, Squarespace · Visit the site →
An illustrator, teacher and exhibiting artist with a decade of work, an exhibition history worth reading, and no single place holding either.
Maura Cluthe is an illustrator and fine artist working in acrylic, collage, posca and whatever else the piece asks for. Pattern, shape and colour, layered up slowly — some of it at 30x30 inches on canvas, some of it on trading cards two and a half inches wide that she swaps with her students.
She teaches, and the teaching runs right through the work. One of the pieces on the site was built layer by layer over a full academic year while she taught remotely from her studio, showing her students the progress every class day. It later appeared in American Illustration 41.
She is also the design half of Two Bit Consulting, which makes this the one entry in our portfolio that is not a client project. Maura built it herself, for herself. We are including it anyway, and saying so plainly, because it is the clearest example of her design thinking that exists — the version where the designer, the client and the subject are the same person and nobody had to be talked into anything.
The work was mostly on Instagram, which is a fine place to show a finished piece and a terrible place to keep an archive. Posts sink. Series get separated. An exhibition history becomes impossible to reconstruct, and the writing that goes with each piece gets flattened into a caption nobody reads to the end.
That writing was the thing most obviously being lost. Maura is genuinely good at explaining what she was thinking about while making something, and on a social platform that context lasts about a day and a half.
Maura built it start to finish, so the decisions here are hers rather than ours. The central one was to treat her commentary as the point rather than as a caption: each piece gets its image at a decent size and her own account of it underneath, with room to actually be a paragraph. Series stay together as series. Exhibitions get their own page, because juries and galleries ask for that history and it should not have to be reassembled from memory every time.
She deliberately left out a shop. She was not trying to sell from the site, and adding commerce to a portfolio changes how people read it — every piece starts looking like stock.
Worth saying what this demonstrates, since it was not a commission: it is the same judgement clients are buying. What to leave out, what deserves room, and what a page has to do before it is allowed to be beautiful.
Maura designed it, which makes this the easiest entry in our portfolio to explain. White space, restraint, and a structure that stays out of the way of work that is already doing a lot with colour and pattern.
The typography is quiet on purpose. Anything decorative would have been competing with the art, and losing.
It runs on Squarespace, which she chose and manages herself — we do not host it and do not maintain it. She wanted to add work the week she finished it, from wherever she happened to be, without asking anyone, and a platform that handles hosting, updates and security in the background buys exactly that.
We are aware this sits in a portfolio otherwise full of hand-built sites, and we would rather explain that than quietly leave it out. We are not precious about platforms. Squarespace costs a monthly fee and gives up some control over the long term, and for a working artist who also teaches, being able to post a new piece in ten minutes is worth more than either. Different trade-off, same question: what does this person actually need?
There is one link now for jurors, galleries, editors and anyone who saw a piece and wanted to know more. The exhibition history is in one place and current. The writing about each piece survives longer than a day.
And the work lives somewhere she controls the contents of, under a domain that is hers, rather than being scattered across a feed she does not own.
If any of this sounds like your situation, have a look at how we work, or get in touch.
