Peter Clarke: A far journey, Oslo, 1978
  • Peter Clarke, A far journey, Oslo, 1978
  • Peter Clarke's rise from dock worker to one of South Africa's most revered modernists is a story worth celebrating. This...
    Peter Clarke, A far journey, Oslo, 1978

    Peter Clarke's rise from dock worker to one of South Africa's most revered modernists is a story worth celebrating. This year marks 80-years since Clarke decided to leave school to undertake insalubrious employment as a stevedore on the quays of Duncan Docks in Cape Town for the subsequent 12-years. Clarke's dream was always to be an artist, but for a man of colour, a career as a professional artist in apartheid South Africa was never going to be an easy path. It was only in 1956, at the age of 27, while on holiday in Tesselaarsdal, a small farming village in the South West Cape, that he began his artistic career in earnest. Thanks to his dogged commitment, bravery and obstinance, the South African, and indeed international, art worlds are profoundly enriched.

     
    This exhibition considers one particular work, a painting almost entirely unique in Clarke's oeuvre, produced at Atelier Nord in Oslo in October 1978, appropriately titled, A far journey.

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  • Peter Clarke was born in the naval port of Simonstown in 1929, the year of the infamous ‘Swart Gevaar’ or...

    Peter Clarke was born in the naval port of Simonstown in 1929, the year of the infamous ‘Swart Gevaar’ or ‘Black Peril’ election. Due to the rise of a more formal racial system in South Africa, Clarke was denied any form of institutional art education until the 1960s. In a now-famous newspaper photograph, Clarke appears attending this art group, seated at an easel, in 1947.

     

    As a result of his growing reputation, he was allowed to attend the Michaelis School of Fine Art on a part-time basis in 1961, but as a so-called 'coloured' student, he was not allowed to enrol fulltime under apartheid racial laws. He later managed to continue his studies at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam and the Atelier Nord in Oslo.

     

    Peter Clarke’s persistence and dedication to his art led him to be invited to work and exhibit around the world. By the late 1970s he had presented a solo exhibition in Chicago, and had been included in exhibitions ranging from (then) Yugoslavia, to Brazil, Germany, Australia, Nigeria, Austria, Italy, Argentina and the USA.

  • As Clarke reached his late forties, his unwavering dedication to his art career finally began yielding results, garnering him long-awaited...
    Peter Clarke holds up A far journey while visiting George Hallett (1942-2020), at Mas Domingo, near the village of Boule d'Amont, France, 1979. (Photograph: George Hallett)

    As Clarke reached his late forties, his unwavering dedication to his art career finally began yielding results, garnering him long-awaited recognition and increasing opportunities. However, a cruel irony unfolded as the limitations he had previously faced under apartheid now resurfaced in the form of the international boycott placed on South Africa by the international community.

     

    This global stance restricted artists' ability to leverage international connections, opportunities and circumstances, and consequently adversely affected Clarke’s ability to seize opportunities presented to him. Undeterred, his commitment to broaden his horizons remained steadfast and he applied to work on printmaking at the Graphic Workshop at Atelier Nord in Oslo, Norway.

     

    Unfortunately however, in light of the international boycott, his initial application was declined. Despite the setback, he persisted in his efforts and, eventually, his persistence paid off. Two years after his initial application, he received an invitation to work at Atelier Nord from October 1978 to the end of January 1979. It was during this period that he produced the remarkable painting, A far journey.

  • "A far journey, 1978, was a response to his feelings of unfamiliarity in Norway."

     

    – Philippa Hobbs and Elizabeth Rankin

    The painting, as Clarke himself explained, was produced in direct response to the Norwegian environment. Once in Norway, Clarke found that distance seemed to bring events at home closer. As he said he: 'looked back to South Africa, as though being away made [him] more aware'. In many senses, the physical distance allowed Clarke to discover political freedom in Norway, while he simultaneously began to long for another sort of freedom - that of the large open spaces of South Africa where the natural world and all its wonder readily opens up and engulfs the viewer.

     

    A far journey is almost entirely unique in Clarke's oeuvre. In most of his paintings and prints, the main figure or human subject limits the landscape by their presence. Conversely, in A far journey, the vast landscape is the subject. This was, at least in part, the result of being able, while in Norway, to paint on a larger format than usual and explore a sense of scale. Limited space for a black person in South Africa was mandatory and had consequently become an unavoidable hallmark of his work. It was also not just the space in which to make these works that was a challenge, but equally difficult was the problem of where to store them afterwards. Clarke lived in a Group Areas apartment in Ocean View which, by the mid-1980s he still shared with his mother and sister who occupied the two upstairs rooms, while he slept downstairs in the living room.[1] However, in this painting the dove and the family remain markers of a socio-political context - the far journey, or the long walk to freedom, that South Africa still needed to travel in the 1970s.

     

    The dove motif occurs regularly in Clarke's work. As he himself noted, he was intrigued by birds and the many people in his Ocean View community who kept them. As art historian Kenneth Clark stated, birds gained their meaning in art as much for their evocative colours as for the fact that they were symbols of hope; they were 'cheerful, hopeful, impudent, and mobile.'
  • "...it brought back special memories of travelling through the Karoo in the summer."
     
    – Philippa Hobbs and Elizabeth Rankin

    The dove symbolises new beginnings, peace, fidelity, love, luck, prosperity and hope. For those who knew Peter Clarke, no sentence could be more descriptive of his character.

    In the seminal publication on the artist Listening to Distant Thunder, authors Philippa Hobbs and Elizabeth Rankin discuss this painting and the context of its creation in some detail:

     

    “…A far journey (1978), was a response to his feelings of unfamiliarity in Norway: ‘…it was getting very cold and the Arctic was pressing on me’. The stippled ochre surface of the landscape conjured up the hot dry spaces of Africa that stretch endlessly to distant horizons. For the artist it brought back special memories of travelling through the Karoo in the summer. But, like other gouaches made at the time, this work was more than just an expression of dislocation from home. Taking advantage of his roomier living space and access to large sheets of rag paper, Clarke scaled up his landscape to panoramic proportions handled with fluid painterly surfaces. And not only was the scale bigger and the paintwork freer, but he took the experimental leap of using strips of paper collage instead of brushstrokes for the streaks of cloud in the sky and other elements.“A far journey accompanied him on a springtime visit on his way home from Norway to his old friend George Hallett, in exile since 1970 and now living at Boule d’Amont, near Perpignan in the south of France. Hallett’s recollection of this encounter remains vivid, perhaps because of the volume of photographs he took of the artist, who was to become, Hallett considers, his most extensively documented male subject. The two men worked through an ‘inspirational period’ of experiment, Hallett enjoying that quality about an artist that ‘inspired one to take pictures’ (Hallett interview 2007). One of these photographs has a particularly poignant relationship to the works Clarke had been making in Oslo. Hallett’s camera captured him holding up A far journey, thus juxtaposing the expansive Cape Flats image and the mountainous Pyrenean backdrop behind him, visually linking familiar home territory with present location. Distance afforded Clarke a more detached perception.”[2]

  • References:

    [1] Hobbs, P. and Rankin, E. (2011). Listening to Distant Thunder: The Art of Peter Clarke. Cape Town: Fernwood Press. p.168

    [2] Hobbs, P. and Rankin, E. (2011). Listening to Distant Thunder: The Art of Peter Clarke. Cape Town: Fernwood Press. p.144

     

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