Clara J. Straight

Clara Straight was born on August 28, 1919. Her family moved to Yarrow, Missouri, outside of Kirksville, when she was six weeks old. At age three, she began painting with shoe polish, using cereal boxes as a canvas. She attended Northeast Missouri State Teachers College in the 1940s and graduated with honors. She taught art in Moberly, Missouri, at Moberly Junior High School from 1941 to 1945, and at Moberly Junior College.

She then attended the University of Colorado at Boulder, and earned her master’s degree and became an art instructor there in 1945. In 1948, she moved to Ithaca, New York, and taught in the Design Department at Cornell University for thirty-six years, retiring in 1984. During her sabbaticals she visited several institutions in the United States and traveled to Europe, Mexico and Australia.

In 1984, she returned to Yarrow, Missouri, to live with her brother in their childhood home. She is a prolific artist who paints in watercolor and acrylic, depicting landscapes in an impressionist style. In a Rural Missouri article about how she paints, it states that "Clara has an uncanny ability to see the big picture, even when she is applying the early brush strokes. 'I know exactly how much and where it’s going to set on the page, what it is to feel like and the mood is'" (Rural Missouri, July 2018)

Her impact on the art community in the Kirksville, Missouri, area has been great, and the Kirksville Arts Association has been a big supporter of her. Hundreds of her paintings have been sold mostly in the Kirksville area, but her works can be found in private collections worldwide.