Peter Clarke: The wood gatherer - SOLD
Peter Clarke (1929 - 2014)
The wood gatherer - 1978
Acrylic on canvas board
32 x 42 cm
Signed bottom right, dated on back label
Sold - 2011
Peter Clarke is not only a highly accomplished and versatile visual artist, working across a broad spectrum of media, but also an internationally acclaimed writer and poet. Patricia Hardy, the curator of a 1992 retrospective exhibition of his work, commented: one form continually balancing, drawing from and sustaining the other ’.
Born in Simon’s Town, Clarke attended Livingstone High School in Claremont where his art teacher had a lasting influence on his future career by introducing him to lino- and woodcut printmaking. At the age of fifteen he left school to work at the naval dockyard, where his father was a plumber’s mate. From 1947 onwards he attended art classes – a much-needed reprieve from his soul-destroying job at the dock yard.
Clarke eventually gave up his job of eleven years at the harbor, and after spending time with Katrine Harries at the University of Cape Town’s Michaelis School of Art in 1961, he commenced his studies at the Royal Academy of Graphic Art in Amsterdam in 1962. Here he concentrated on etching and lithography, as well as lino- and woodcut printmaking.
Clarke states: My earliest influences were the Mexican artists of the 1930s, 40s and 50s and the German Expressionists. The influence of the modernist Mexican artists’ expressionistic style is evident in the use of strong contrasting colours and angular abstraction found in Clarke’s work. Clarke’s style is descriptive and he explores a range of motifs in his paintings, quite often depicting life in poor, urban Cape Town, its rural hinterland or the foreign places he has visited. His work is characterised by strong lines often displaying an emotional distance between viewer and object .
In the ‘The wood gatherer’, a lone figure is collecting firewood, carrying a branch from a dead tree. The bare landscape with patches of fresh green does not offer many visual clues other than the twisted dead tree, and a structure resembling a church on the horizon. Pathways and roads, and people’s journeys on them are central themes in Clarke’s paintings; they seem to represent not only the physical, but also the spiritual journeys of his subjects. In this painting, the lone man carrying his burden becomes a universal metaphor for the daily struggle for survival by the disempowered.
The green and blue abstracted planes, set off against the thin orange skyline, suggest not only a physical, but also a mental space. Clarke once remarked: Physical space, mental space; these seem to have been a preoccupation throughout my life. The contrast between the new green vegetation on the dune landscape and the dead, gnarled tree can be interpreted as a metaphor for the reconciliation of past and future, as with the change of the seasons in nature. The subtle religious undertone suggested by the church in the background and the figure’s similarity to Christ bearing the cross cannot be overlooked. It appears that the artist has, through his subject, personalised the pervasive suffering, and is shouldering the burden himself.
It should be noted that Clarke lived through the turbulent times resulting from the rise and fall of Apartheid, and that this unavoidable influence on his psyche is reflected in his art, and possibly also the context of this painting.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hein Willemse, More than Brothers: Peter Clarke & James Matthews at 70 , Cape Town, 2000, pp 7-15, 72 and 73
http://www.sahistory.org.za/pages/people/bios/clarke-p.htm