Strauss & co - 2017 Boerneef

22 PETER CLARKE 1929-2014 Space signed and dated 3 Dec 1975 acrylic on canvas 120 x 73,5 cm Kilbourn Collection This work was sold accompanied with a hand-written note by the artist entitled: ‘Space’, dated 12th July 2012 ”In 1975 I was delighted to receive an invitation to participate in the International Writing Programme. This was a residency programme affiliated to the University of Iowa City & occurred annually in Iowa City, Iowa, USA. People involved in various literary disciplines were invited to attend for a period of 3 months. In answer to my query when I arrived there I was informed by Paul Engle, director of the programme, that, “nothing is expected of you”. Being a residency programme, he said we were there to do what ever we wanted to do at our own pace. I had gone there with the intention of writing and that is what I did. But I found that two of the writer-poets, Dilip Chitre from India and Ahmed Mohammed Imamovic from Yugoslavia, were like myself also painters. During the course of a conversation, they suggested the idea of what they called ‘The triple triptych‘. Basically, each of the three painters contribute a panel to a single triptych based on a mutually agreed upon theme and then also each paint a triptych of his own. Each artist painted in his apartment in the Wall Flower on Dubuque Street. Subsequently, towards the end of the l.W.P residency certain triptychs were exhibited briefly in the Art Gallery of the University of Iowa City. That was in 1975. The panel ‘Space’ comes from a triptych of that particular name to which Chitre, Imamovic and I had contributed. The reason for portraying space in this manner was because I travelled from South Africa to the USA by plane. This being my first flight, I was fascinated by the way we passed through space, a space, apart from air, occasional cloud banks and formations, time, colour, light and shadow, in which there was the absence of a perspective reference point. Travelling high about the earth in this particularly effortless way, I was able to reflect on space. The painting, ‘Space’, an acrylic on canvas, is an impression of that, at the time, unique experience.“