Can I use a wxPaintDC instance as a class member?

Question

I have made a class wxRectangleDrawing, which has 3 methods, 1 for catching the paint event and creating the dc object, one for drawing my desired rectangle with that dc object, and one for clearing that dc.

The only problem is I cannot clear that dc with my Clear() method, because dc is a local variable and not a class field/member. I looked up online, and as far as I understood you need to catch an EVT_PAINT in your function to create a dc in it (?) Don't know if that's correct.

Here's my .h and .cpp files

wxRectangleDrawing.h

#pragma once
#include <wx/wx.h>

class wxRectangleDrawing : public wxWindow
{
    wxPoint position;
    wxSize size;
    wxBrush brushColor;

public:
    wxRectangleDrawing(wxPanel* parent, wxPoint rectPosition, wxSize rectSize, wxColour rectColor);

    void PaintEvent(wxPaintEvent& evt);
    void DrawRectangle(wxDC& dc);
    void Clear(wxDC& dc);

    DECLARE_EVENT_TABLE()
};

and here's the .cpp one

wxRectangleDrawing.cpp

#include "wxRectangleDrawing.h"

BEGIN_EVENT_TABLE(wxRectangleDrawing, wxPanel)

// catch paint events
EVT_PAINT(wxRectangleDrawing::PaintEvent)

END_EVENT_TABLE()


wxRectangleDrawing::wxRectangleDrawing(wxPanel* parent, wxPoint rectPosition, wxSize rectSize, wxColour rectColor) : wxWindow(parent, wxID_ANY)
{
    position = rectPosition;
    size = rectSize;
    brushColor = wxBrush(rectColor);
    SetMinSize(size);

}

void wxRectangleDrawing::PaintEvent(wxPaintEvent& evt)
{
    // depending on your system you may need to look at double-buffered 
    wxPaintDC dc(this);
    DrawRectangle(dc);
}


void wxRectangleDrawing::DrawRectangle(wxDC& dc)
{
    dc.SetBrush(brushColor);
    dc.DrawRectangle(position.x, position.y, size.x, size.y);
}

void wxRectangleDrawing::Clear(wxDC& dc)
{
    dc.Clear();
}