Description
Exhibited: Johannesburg. Graham’s Fine Art Gallery. 16 July – 16 September 2009. “Imaging and Imagining: South African Art c.1896 – 2008”.
Illustrated & Referenced: Graham’s Fine Art Gallery. 2009. Imaging and Imagining: South African Art c.1896 – 2008.Graham’s Fine Art Gallery, Johannesburg. p. 166 & 167.
Best known for his graphic art and illustrations, Peter Clarke is also an accomplished painter, as this oil painting of a man in mourning demonstrates. The monumental figure of the mourner towers above the landscape. Strong primary greens and blues predominate, and contribute towards the overall sense of pictorial flatness. This flatness and pureness of colour characterises most of Clarke’s oil paintings and situates him firmly within a modernist figurative tradition. The background does not recede in accordance with the laws of atmospheric perspective, but is pushed forward, vying with the figure for the viewer’s attention. In particular, the sky, which covers most of the surface behind the mourner, is rendered in a dramatic interplay of blacks, grays, whites and blues. Mountains and clouds clash and mingle and eventually become indistinguishable in a dynamic interpenetration of air and solid matter that is reminiscent of the Cubists. Despite the experimental formalism of this painting, it is nonetheless imbued with a strong sense of emotion. The dark, boldly modelled face of the man is indisputably the focal point of the painting and compels the viewer’s engagement with the loss that is etched there. As in Pemba’s paintings, a strong sense of compassion and humanity underlies Clarke’s art and writings.
by Lize van Robbroeck