Claudia Toutain-Dorbec

Claudia Toutain-Dorbec is an American artist known primarily for her botanical art. Her work incorporates a variety of media, including drawing, photography, sculpture, monotypes, digital images, and painting. Born in Oregon in 1949, she grew up immersed in the activities of her family’s small berry farm outside Aurora. The vegetable and flower gardens, her grandmother's roses and other flowering shrubs, the farm's berry fields, fruit and nut trees, open fields, small streams and woods, chickens, horses, and the other animals – all these combined to create the interest in and love of nature that still sustain her. Her first science project was a discovery of the wild plants of Oregon's fertile Willamette Valley. Since the sixties, Claudia has explored various botanical subjects through her art, such as A Year in the Southwest, An Exploration of the Natural World (2008-9). She attended the Museum School, Portland, Oregon, and Marylhurst University, Lake Oswego, Oregon. She lives with her husband, Pierre, in Oregon and in Burgundy, France.