Modern Landscape Artist
Oil and mixed media painter based in Oxfordshire, UK
Welcome, I’m Duncan Clarke. I have been working as an artist for over 45 years, not only here in England but also abroad. I am based in the Cotswolds, where I have lived for over 20 years making paintings about the changing landscape – its uses, and the industrial pressures that impinge upon it.
When you sit down to make a painting, it’s important to be aware of the paradox that exists. Working on a landscape, it may feel as if you are capturing a timeless scene. In truth, the painting depicts just one moment in time – a fingerprint of something that will inevitably move on.
Everything is changing and evolving, growing. Also, this is the paradox, you are not just depicting the landscape – the landscape is helping you make a painting. The energy and vitality of the compositions depend on this competition between what one sees, what one knows and what one wants.
Selected Works
It’s strange how many people look at and admire a landscape, even make paintings of landscapes, and never acknowledge the existence of telegraph poles. Aesthetically, for a painter to have these perpendiculars striding across the landscape, delineating distance and proportions and drawing lines across the sky with their wires, is a dream.
It’s also important, in respect of one’s own desire as an artist, to present the scene as it is in someway. I have made many paintings of the countryside and been surprised and alarmed by just how quickly the scene has changed. The work suddenly becomes a social document of a time past. Even where I live, which is in an area owned and managed by the National Trust, I have made paintings of barns, sheds and trees which no longer exist.
