Clarissa Upchurch was born in China, to a missionary family. In her childhood she moved between England and Malaysia. She was trained as an artist at Sheffield, Harrow and Norwich Schools of Art, working on large-scale landscapes and cityscapes, as well as in abstraction.

In 1970 she married the poet George Szirtes and they had two children, Tom and Helen. Her work in the 1980s was mostly in black and white, the subjects often derelict local places. From the mid-seventies into the mid-eighties she was co-proprietor of The Starwheel Press, that printed and published collaborations between poets and artists. As time went she undertook ever more of the press work. At the same time she was producing illustrations and book jackets for various publishers. After her first visit to Hungary in 1984 she began to concentrate on the city of Budapest, first on its courtyards and doorways, and later on the elevations. Her work was not so much topographic as dramatic: buildings haunted by history. She produced drawings, paintings, pastels and prints. More recently she has been examining the streets of the city, with its traffic of cars and pedestrians, as in still frames of a moving film, a kind of unwritten film noir employing a story-board of undefined incidents. Her art has been moving beyond Budapest to other cities and to figures in motion.

Clarissa Upchurch has won various prizes, and her work has been exhibited in England and abroad. She is represented in a number of private and public collections. Her major gallery in London is The Boundary Gallery, to whose site this is linked. It is also linked to the site of her husband, George Szirtes, for the covers of whose books she has been providing images since 1986.