Marinescape

 

Peter E. Clarke

  1929 - 2014 (biography)

1971  

color linocut 

16 7/8 x 12 1/4" image size 

pencil, lower right 

21 of 31  

pencil titled, dated, and editioned; annotated "linocut no. 21 April" in lower right margin 

 

cream kitakata 

published 

artist 

25451 

$750.00 

Four figures stroll along the white sands of a quiet beach, the sea beyond illumminated by a setting sun. In the foreground, two seashells rest in the shadow of a bare tree. Peter Clarke was one of South Africa's leading Modern artists, and was outspoken in the fight for "Coloured" and Black South African identity in the art world.

This two-color linocut was done the year before Peter Clarke was forced out of his hometown of Simon's Town, South Africa, due to the infamous "Group Areas Act." The three-part racial segregation act was developed by South Africa's apartheid government beginning in 1950 and lasted four decades. The intent was to force every South African of color to leave developed areas, despite their majority, in order to give the land to the white minority. In particular, attractive stretches of land near the sea, such as Simon's Town. Though the act was repealed in 1991, the damage was done and its negative effects are felt to this day. Said Nelson Mandela in Long Walk to Freedom (2004, Little Brown Book):

"...the Groups Areas Act was the foundation of residential apartheid. Under its regulations, each racial group could own land, occupy premises, and trade only in its own separate area. Indians could henceforth only live in Indian areas, Africans in African, Coloureds in Coloured. If whites wanted the land or houses of the other groups, they could simply declare that land a white area and take them."

Two years before he created this linocut, he painted one of his most well-known works: "Listening to Distant Thunder," a small oil painting of a family waiting in a baren "karoo" landscape with the angular limbs of a leafless tree stretched over them, a jagged sotrm approaching in the background. These objects - the dead tree, the arid desert, the quiet family awaiting their fate - appeared more and more in his artowrk as pressure mounted agains him and his friends and family to leave their home. "Marinescape" takes that narrative and allows for a bit of peace in an otherwise bleak moment in human history.