Artists

David Ivan Clark

Originally from the plains of Western Canada, David Ivan Clark graduated from Princeton University in 1983 and studied architecture at the Oregon School of Design from 1987 to 1989. With the exception of a brief apprenticeship with Jonathan Barbierl, Oaxaca, Mexico, he is self-taught as a painter and draftsman. His work has been chosen by curators from the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Los Angeles County Museum, and the Denver Art Museum for inclusion in shows at various venues in the western states. It is held in over hundred private, public and corporate collections throughout the United States and Canada.

Hovering in the space between romantic landscape and weathered industrial artifact, my paintings dwell in limbo. Each marks the spot where nostalgia collides with fact, where celebration and elegy converge. I work in fine layers of oil on stainless steel or wood. From a distance each panel presents land, sky and nothing more. Held up to the turbulent flux of the man-made world, each offers refuge.

As one draws near, this bucolic illusion becomes fugitive; deep space and distant horizon revert to paint, pitted and scoured as if the terrain depicted has issued from dire industrial processes... one may seem to glimpse a long vanished haven as if captured on old film, grainy and scratched... the steel upon which the image develops may be screwed to wood backing, an effect more evocative of rusted aircraft fuselage or derelict tanker hull than the landscape for which I yearn.

I was born and raised on the plains of western Canada. They served as introduction to the natural world and I return to them for the source of my work. My painting is based in the landscape tradition but it blurs the boundary between representation and abstraction; I am not concerned with re-creating the specifics of place. Rather, my aim is to commemorate and convey the profound experience of immersion in vast, unbounded and silent space.

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