Exposition Art Blog: Edward Clark - abstract art

Edward Clark - abstract art

Edward Clark, also known as Ed Clark (born May 6, 1926), is an African American abstract expressionist painter.
"Ed Clark is an American Color Field painter whose style was shaped by the years he spent in Paris in the early 1950s. As an African-American who had been raised in the segregated South, he found Paris tolerant, and the atmosphere encouraging. While there, he developed a sophisticated abstract style that was markedly influenced by the tachist painter Nicolas de Stael. His early work is remembered for his "push-broom technique," which encouraged his full physical involvement in painting. He is also noted for the monumental scale of his work, and the fact that he is one of the first painters to have used shaped canvases






 Edward Clark was born in the Storyville section of New Orleans on May 6, 1926. When he was six, his parents Merion and Edward Sr., moved their family to Baton Rouge where they lived in a shotgun house with his father's great aunt. At this time, Clark began his elementary schooling, where he was first exposed to drawing. On one occasion, a nun at his Catholic school issued a challenge to Clark and his classmates: whoever could produce the best tree drawing would receive a gold star. Taking up the challenge, Clark won acknowledgement from his teachers for his artistic abilities as well as the gold star, and this experience awakened in Clark the desire to become an artist.
Two years later, Clark's family relocated north to Chicago. In 1943, at the age of 17, he left high school and enlisted in the air force during the height of World War II; he was stationed for two years in the South Pacific and returned to Chicago upon his release.







In the 1970s Clark began to travel extensively - to Greece, Nigeria, Mexico, Brazil and China - incorporating the colors and experiences of journeys into his painting.
In addition to shifts in his color palette during the course of his career, Clark has also experimented with line and form. Much of his work during his early period maintained a strong horizontality that was congruent with the push of his broom. But in the 1980s he abandoned his three-unit Color Fields for tubular forms that are curved and multi-directional - a contrast to the static Color Fields of the 1950s. In the 1990s and the 2000s he began relying on vertical strokes combined with floating masses of color that intermingled with one another across the picture plane, resulting in monumental abstract compositions that reflect his entire career of experimentation with color, form, and line." (theartstory.org/artist-clark-edward.htm)





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