Claire Luxton, cover of Country & Town House Magazine, July/ August Issue, 2023, featuring ‘Cloud 9’ artwork.

The July/August issue of Country and Town House Magazine is their regeneration special, focusing on how we can make the planet – and us, its people – healthier, happier and (hopefully) cooler, in every sense of the word. Claire Luxton was commissioned to create the unforgettable cover image, which represents our dreams of a better, brighter future. Claire’s work is very much rooted in nature – often with an exploration of the female form, culminating in colour-saturated visions of exquisite vulnerability. The cover image was inspired by Head in the Clouds, her 2020 self-portrait that symbolises everything Country and Town are trying to capture within the issue about how, although the world is in pain, the axis keeps on spinning and we need realign ourselves with our planet. Luxton’s new iteration Cloud 9, is not only ethereally beautiful as a visual image, it is a meditation on dreaming decoded by the viewer in their own idiosyncratic way. ‘I like the idea that when you daydream,’ says Claire, ‘you are able to manifest and bring it into this world in a positive way. There are so many special and amazing things all around us and we just need to open our eyes to receive it.’ The sprinkling of diamonds in the cloud made from carbon taken from the sky by Skydiamond shows us that there are ways out of traditional extractive industries into realms where you lack for nothing but you’ve not exploited nature to get what you want.