Literature

During the 1960s Peter Clarke visited Tesselaarsdal which he described as ‘very quiet, peacefully, soothingly quiet after the racket left behind at the Peninsula’.¹ Describing his rural scenes Philippa Hobbs and Elizabeth Rankin suggest that Clarke was ‘revisiting this pleasurable subject matter at a time when his own urban world was filled with unease’.² Noting the characters that people his landscape from this period, Hobbs and Rankin suggest that ‘most of the figures in his rural scenes lack a strong sense of individuality, as though they are willingly part of a life of agrarian labour. This is not out of tune with other subjects in his work: while Clarke rarely creates individualised portraits, his figures are not devoid of the dignity of self-will, whatever their setting’.³

 Commenting  on his formal compositions of clouds Clarke noted that he was ‘exploring patterns as if they were woven in a tapestry. I have spent a long time looking at clouds. You can find one type of cloud here that is unique simply because of the topography. This was a formal gesture of shaping the clouds. The sky is never really cloudless here...’⁴ 

¹ Clarke, Peter. 1964. “Winter Shepherding. Contrast X: South African Quarterly 3(2). October, p 40 .

² Hobbes, Philipa & Rankin, Elizabeth. (2011) Listening to Distant Thunder: the Art of Peter Clarke, Johannesburg:  The Standard Bank of South Africa. Page 108.

³ Ibid.   

⁴ Ibid.