Twelve Canadian Artists 1980
From the catalogue article by
Joan Murray, Director, The Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa.
For Ann Clarke, art is a by-product of her journey through life. Its essence has to do with identity and a human’s perception of their identity. “The more personal the treatment of self, the more universal you are”, she says. She identifies her paintings with “exhilarating” dreams of flight. Art is communicating something “transcendent and moving”. Art forms have their origin in religious practice. As for being a woman artist, to be a woman painter is the struggle, rather than “talking and politicising about it”.
Clarke attended the Slade School in London (1962-66), the school “her father wanted to go to but couldn’t” because she wanted to be able to draw like Augustus John. (As a child, she could draw likenesses). After a ten-year period of “learning how to paint” and various experiments with canvas, sewn or shaped, and different media like gel and latex paint, as well as about five years ago, some important loosely painted large colour field abstractions, Clarke returned to calligraphic style similar to drawings she had been doing as an art student. In 1967 she began making “families of shapes and marks, things having relationships, like automatic writing only a little more organized” – a sort of “advanced doodling”.
Today Clarke’s paintings are totally abstract. The shapes are associative but non-representative, “allusive, not illusive”. “I have imagery bursting out of me all the time and want to get it down without drawing a cartoon,” she says. The images “appear and are recognized” – the decision-making process is the recognition. She also delights in her feel for paint and its manipulation. Her colours are direct and intense but delicate and iridescent. She mixes “real colours” although she feels it’s somewhat old-fashioned, “mixing a colour, putting it on with the brush and seeing if it is the right colour against other colours”.
Clarke’s imagery verges on symbolism. The ideas she uses for her ambiguously painted signs are often talismans. She is studying North American Indian pictographs and petroglyphs, as well as Celtic stone carvings, to see what the linking factor is – why there are images at all. She describes her study of petroglyphs as “getting the feel of a language but using it to say your own ideas”. Clarke also likes angels, “having them hover around most of the time” She sometimes uses large flying vessel-like shapes – for her a transcendental metaphor of the state of human consciousness. She may titles some of her paintings “Ament” after the Egyptian goddess of the West who welcomed the dead at the gate of the Other World. But her titles are related to the images only through an analogous set of associations.
Clarke is fascinated with, and responds to, the work of Canadian artist Emily Carr – and Georgia O’Keefe. She admires the work of Helen Frankenthaler and the “drive and daily slogging” of Barbara Hepworth. Naturally she has studied painters like Jules Olitski, Adolf Gottlieb and Larry Poons. Jack Bush once gave Clarke advice, telling her to persevere. She felt he was “passing on a baton”
Clarke teaches painting and drawing at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, and has taught at the Banff Centre (1973,1976,1979) and Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (1975-76). In November 1979 she had a solo exhibition at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery in Lethbridge and she has participated in a number of group exhibitions like Certain Traditions: Recent British and Canadian Art which toured England in 1978. Her work is in many public collections in Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia.
From the catalogue article by
Joan Murray, Director, The Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa.
For Ann Clarke, art is a by-product of her journey through life. Its essence has to do with identity and a human’s perception of their identity. “The more personal the treatment of self, the more universal you are”, she says. She identifies her paintings with “exhilarating” dreams of flight. Art is communicating something “transcendent and moving”. Art forms have their origin in religious practice. As for being a woman artist, to be a woman painter is the struggle, rather than “talking and politicising about it”.
Clarke attended the Slade School in London (1962-66), the school “her father wanted to go to but couldn’t” because she wanted to be able to draw like Augustus John. (As a child, she could draw likenesses). After a ten-year period of “learning how to paint” and various experiments with canvas, sewn or shaped, and different media like gel and latex paint, as well as about five years ago, some important loosely painted large colour field abstractions, Clarke returned to calligraphic style similar to drawings she had been doing as an art student. In 1967 she began making “families of shapes and marks, things having relationships, like automatic writing only a little more organized” – a sort of “advanced doodling”.
Today Clarke’s paintings are totally abstract. The shapes are associative but non-representative, “allusive, not illusive”. “I have imagery bursting out of me all the time and want to get it down without drawing a cartoon,” she says. The images “appear and are recognized” – the decision-making process is the recognition. She also delights in her feel for paint and its manipulation. Her colours are direct and intense but delicate and iridescent. She mixes “real colours” although she feels it’s somewhat old-fashioned, “mixing a colour, putting it on with the brush and seeing if it is the right colour against other colours”.
Clarke’s imagery verges on symbolism. The ideas she uses for her ambiguously painted signs are often talismans. She is studying North American Indian pictographs and petroglyphs, as well as Celtic stone carvings, to see what the linking factor is – why there are images at all. She describes her study of petroglyphs as “getting the feel of a language but using it to say your own ideas”. Clarke also likes angels, “having them hover around most of the time” She sometimes uses large flying vessel-like shapes – for her a transcendental metaphor of the state of human consciousness. She may titles some of her paintings “Ament” after the Egyptian goddess of the West who welcomed the dead at the gate of the Other World. But her titles are related to the images only through an analogous set of associations.
Clarke is fascinated with, and responds to, the work of Canadian artist Emily Carr – and Georgia O’Keefe. She admires the work of Helen Frankenthaler and the “drive and daily slogging” of Barbara Hepworth. Naturally she has studied painters like Jules Olitski, Adolf Gottlieb and Larry Poons. Jack Bush once gave Clarke advice, telling her to persevere. She felt he was “passing on a baton”
Clarke teaches painting and drawing at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, and has taught at the Banff Centre (1973,1976,1979) and Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (1975-76). In November 1979 she had a solo exhibition at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery in Lethbridge and she has participated in a number of group exhibitions like Certain Traditions: Recent British and Canadian Art which toured England in 1978. Her work is in many public collections in Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia.