Ciara McAvoy
Artist Biography
Freelance Illustrator & Film artist
Early Years, Influences & Education
Ciara McAvoy is a celebrated artist and "seventh art" devotee who has worked in the motion picture and publishing industries for over 20 years.
Ciara is of Scottish and French descent and inherited her talent for portraiture from her grandfather, a pre-WWII portrait artist from Montmartre. At the age of 14, she became fascinated with Star Wars and turned her artistic hand to science fiction, adventure, and action movie genres.
Influenced by notable movie poster artists John Alvin, Tom Jung, the brothers Hildebrandt, she built her industry reputation for hand-painted, realistic concept art and pre-production art.
She works almost exclusively in oils for her movie posters. However, she built a broad repertoire of skills in other media (acrylic, gouache, watercolor, graphite, charcoal, and pastels) as well as storyboarding, animation, character design, and matte painting while studying at L'Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris (ENSBA), where she obtained her Diplôme Supérieur d'Art Plastique (D.S.A.P.) in 1985. Later, she expanded her artistic skill set to include costume design and historical fashion, which now play an integral supporting role in her posters and illustrations.
Work, Commissions & Exhibitions
Ciara has been invited to solo and group exhibitions across the U.S., France, and Scotland; her work can be found in many private collections. Her career also spans critical acclaim and first-place awards for her oil paintings, beginning with her work, Cop, which won first place in La Rochelle under the patronage of the CALC; the same work was bestowed The David Cargill Award and The Armour Award by the Royal Glasgow Institute.
In addition to sci-fi book covers, she is regularly commissioned for film illustrations as well as science fiction, adventure, and action movie posters due to her early career accomplishments as a freelance illustrator for the Company Courleciel, a high-quality Lucasfilm magazine. She began working there in 1996 and soon received industry commendation and recognition for her highly detailed Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back and Raiders of the Lost Ark anniversary posters.
Upon discovering Ciara's work at the Company Courleciel during a Paris visit, Mr. Leonard Maltin, American film critic, recommended her work to Skywalker Ranch and she was soon invited for contract work by Allan Kausch, the continuity editor of several Star Wars guides and sourcebooks at Lucasfilm, including Star Wars Galaxy Magazine. She has also been engaged by the Chaplin Association on several projects.
Her legacy project to date involved a commission by the French Lucasfilm magazine, for which she created an epic poster for Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. Ciara has recently completed movie posters for X-Men: First Class and Sherlock Holmes: Games of Shadows.
For information about commissions and art available for purchase, please contact her exclusive gallery representative, CMCV Studios in Glasgow at cmcvstudios@icloud.com or +44 0141 255 1911. The art by Ciara McAvoy available for purchase at any time will be displayed at
ciaramcavoy.com/
Facebook official page :
www.facebook.com/McAvoyCiara2
Wikipedia : en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciara_Mc...
IMDB : www.imdb.com/name/nm5051865/
