Alan Clark and the Creative Process

Springing from a deeply spiritual and intuitive place, Alan Clark’s vibrant paintings glow with pure, transparent color and pulsate with a jazz-like rhythm. While each work can be enjoyed on only a visual level, they are further enlivened by a referential aspect that adds to the full experience of his work. His wide-ranging vocabulary of signs and symbols presents a fascinating intellectual challenge that speaks of a life spent sifting and processing an abundance of experiences and influences. Rendered in his own unique blend of abstraction and realism, these paintings literally teem with life.

The relatively small size of Clark’s paintings (12” x 12” or smaller) belies their communicative power - the myriad associations and alliterations dazzle the mind and the eye. In these gem-like works with their cosmic perspective, Clark alludes repeatedly to the changeable nature of things. He celebrates the human being as creature and creator, finding in each a miracle, a little God.

Mexico has been enormously influential. The country has become both a physical and spiritual home for Clark. Since 1991, he has spent a part of almost every year there, usually in the Caribbean state of Quintana Roo. His absorption of the ancient culture of the Maya, with its mysticism, its cult of the spirit world, its awe inspiring stone monuments, masks and heroic architecture, is evident in paintings like Blood and Stone and Mago (The Wizard). While not the exclusive domain and determinant of the paintings, Mexico certainly looms large.

Helen Ashton Fisher, Curator
Farnsworth Art Museum
Rockland, Maine 2004

To speak about Alan Clark is to speak about a multidisciplinary artist. To define him is not an easy thing. Painter, sculptor, printmaker, poet, writer of plays and film scripts. They are all facets of one profound need of expression.

The same spirit is to be found in all his work. He creates and recreates worlds that are full of color, where human passions are depicted through plastic means. Lines definite and at the same time sinuous… wrested from the hand of the artist, yet always present in spite of the explosions of color that would have them disappear… lines invading the space, dissolving, but not quite, in color.

He often uses everyday elements that can become sometimes vaguely threatening, mysterious: a figure becoming a shaman, an insect a totem. A flower in its origin at the beginning of all things. His goal is to make what is interior and hidden, visible – out of flesh: a glimpse of the soul. Vibrating nerves with their maddened synapses.

It is poetry become tangible. He paints his graphic forms as signs of a personal grammar. It is demanding work that forces one to pay attention, even more so because of the intimate format.

To contemplate these works of art gives one the sensation of being intimately invited to look through the keyhole of a door into a private and almost forbidden universe.

(Translated from the Spanish)

Ma. Cristina Gonzalez Tejada
Mexico City 1999

Clark’s Paintings – Vibrant, Intense

They are bristling shards and shoots of saturated color, fractured space and a barely contained energy. This simultaneous intimacy and intensity gives each work a very active inner life. The similarity of format links the works to each other, but each is fiercely itself, a patch of burning color tangled and spun with associations.

Clark goes beyond the literal by approaching the world in the animist tradition of artists like Paul Klée, Albert Pinkham Ryder, Arthur Dove, John Marin or Charles Burchfield. In this good company, traditional subjects are perceived as full of life force and spiritual necessity, and this force is revealed or crystallized through the very act of painting.

In his own manner, Clark transforms the familiar into connotative systems of marks and signs which, like all effective visual art, tell stories that float on the edge of time to create a new reality which goes beyond the visual and comes into being as a solid phenomenon of the imagination, as real as any object in the world, as long as the painting exists.

In almost all the paintings, we look inside things, like primitives who understand an animal visually only by conceiving it viscerally, from the inside out. The space feels a little dangerous, consciously out of control, explosive. In The Un-laws of Sparks, an alchemist’s anthanor holds streams and fires, a waterfall, maybe the full moon. Separate sections impinge on each other. They are contained, but within each, a kind of madness burns.

Each painting is a potent world in process, tattooed with the past, inventing a present. Full of streams, teardrops, scarifications, hearts, ribs and eyes, these are paintings that set things loose at the window. Somehow, it seems a natural way to be.

Alan Crichton
The Camden Herald
Camden, Maine 1994