Strauss & co - 13 November 2017, Johannesburg

307 360 Peter Clarke SOUTH AFRICAN 1929–2014 Landscape with Sisal Trees signed and dated Feb 1966 gouache on paper 53,5 by 45 cm R350 000 – 500 000 During the 1960s Peter Clarke visited Tesselaarsdal which he described as ‘very quiet, peacefully, soothingly quiet after the racket left behind at the Peninsula’. 1 Describing his rural scenes Philippa Hobbs and Elizabeth Rankin suggest that Clarke was ‘revisiting this pleasurable subject matter at a time when his own urban world was filled with unease’. 2 Noting the characters that people his landscape from this period, Hobbs and Rankin suggest that ‘most of the figures in his rural scenes lack a strong sense of individuality, as though they are willingly part of a life of agrarian labour. This is not out of tune with other subjects in his work: while Clarke rarely creates individualised portraits, his figures are not devoid of the dignity of self-will, whatever their setting’. 3 Commenting on his formal compositions of clouds Clarke noted that he was ‘exploring patterns as if they were woven in a tapestry. I have spent a long time looking at clouds. You can find one type of cloud here that is unique simply because of the topography. This was a formal gesture of shaping the clouds. The sky is never really cloudless here …’ 4 1 Clarke, Peter. 1964. Winter Shepherding. Contrast X: South African Quarterly 3(2). October, p 40. 2 Hobbes, Philipa & Rankin, Elizabeth. (2011) Listening to Distant Thunder: the Art of Peter Clarke , Johannesburg: The Standard Bank of South Africa. Page 108. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid. ©The Estate of Peter Clarke | DALRO