A R T I S T ’ S
P R O F I L E
-
P E T E R
C L A R K E
The life of Peter Clarke
The loneliness that he felt at this time is movingly encapsulated in his oil painting ‘The Lonely Wanderer’, which depicts a man walking all alone in a barren street, where no smoke drifts from the solitary chimney and the barren windows all stare out like the vacant eyes of the dead. Even the clouds are dark and grey, giving warning of a storm. Is this the storm he felt in his heart?
“In time we moved. We had to organise our own transport and a friend of mine, who happened to be Jewish and who had a business, said ‘alright I will arrange transport for you. I’ve got a big truck’. And he arranged for his truck and his workers to come and give us a hand and this in the heart of winter. Soup had been organised by my mother so that she could give all the helpers soup and bread and we moved off to Ocean View.”
In 1975, he was invited to take part in an International Writer’s programme at the University of Iowa, USA, where he spent nine months. While he did a good deal of poetry during his stay, it was in his art that the sense of prevailing loss he felt was so clearly evident. From the triptych “Haunted Landscape”, the anguish and desolation felt not only by himself, but by all the people affected by the Forced Removals, is so clearly evident. The depiction of the once peaceful doves fighting, proved all too prophetic a year later when thousands of school children took up the fight against Apartheid, many losing their lives in the process. “When I came back it could have been about May. I was actually struck by how peaceful and prosperous Cape Town looked because there was a lot of building going on and I still commented on all this activity going on, buildings going up and everybody employed and then suddenly it all exploded and the change of course …..” When asked whether he was happy living in Ocean View, he responded by saying: “Actually I think that this is a ghetto, but the nice thing about this ghetto is that it has mountains and there is a sea not too far away and the air is