David Ivan Clark   Bio

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.

David Ivan Clark
17_10
Oil on stainless steel
36 x 48 inches

David Ivan Clark
48_08 (left), lower right corner detail (right)
Oil on stainless steel
29 x 29 inches

David Ivan Clark
11_09 (left), upper right corner detail (right)
Oil on stainless steel
44 x 44 inches