Paraskeva Clark
Paraskeva Clark | |
---|---|
St. Petersburg, Russia | |
Died | August 10, 1986 | (aged 87)
Nationality | Canadian |
Known for | Painter |
Notable work | Petroushka |
Paraskeva Clark RCA (October 28, 1898 – August 10, 1986) was a painter.[1] who believed that "an artist must act as a witness to class struggle and other societal issues."[1] She was a member of the Canadian Group of Painters, the Canadian Society of Painters in Water Colour, Canadian Society of Graphic Art, the Ontario Society of Artists, and the Royal Canadian Academy (1966).[2] Much of her art now is in the National Gallery of Canada and the Art Gallery of Ontario.[1]
Early life
Clark was born Paraskeva Avdeyevna Plistik in
Enjoying the theatre as a young woman, Clark was initially interested in acting but deterred by the financial expense of training.
In 1929, six-year-old Benedict was sent to a boarding school during week days and Clark took a job outside of her in-laws home, in an interior design shop. Here, she met her second husband, the Canadian accountant Philip Clark.[3] Clark was visiting Europe for three months at the time, and the two kept in touch until he visited her again in 1931, at which point they decided to marry[4] – and did so in London on June 9, 1931.[1] After the wedding, Clark and Benedict travelled with Philip to their new home in Toronto where the family welcomed a new son, Clive, in June 1933.[3]
Artistic influences
In 1916, Clark discovered that the landscape painter Savely Seidenberg's studio was on the same streetcar line as the shoe factory where she worked; she began to take art night classes there. Seidenberg taught figure drawing as well as still life and for months, Clark, as a beginning student, drew in charcoal from plaster heads, while the advanced students worked from a model.[6] She immersed herself in conversations with her peers about art styles, including impressionism, post impressionism, cubism and the artists who were central to those movements.
Vasily Shukhayev was a relatively unknown painter and set designer whose students practiced life drawing and painting. The fallout from the Revolution brought about a great upheaval in all the arts. Clark was familiar with the many prominent artists of the time, including Vladimir Tatlin, who believed that they were creating a revolutionary art – Cubism and Futurism – for the new regime.[6]
Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin was a humanist painter who integrated the European influences of Matisse and Cézanne, with his personal Russian experience. He was a thinker, an intellectual, and from him Clark gained some sense of depth of an intellectual, thoughtful life.[6] Clark was interested in colour and still life, to which Petrov-Vodkin brought his theories of space, and studied his way of depicting a visual perspective that was not an artificial architectural construction.[6] It was from Petrov-Vodkin that Clark learned the technique of spherical perspective in which figures and objects are distorted from their perpendicular axis to produce dynamic moment.[7]
In years to come, Clark drew on her teacher's concept of tilting the usual verticals and horizontals, she employs this technique in her 1947 painting Essentials of Life.[6] Petrov-Vodkin passed on to Clarke his knowledge of Cézanne's techniques in utilizing the shifting axes in a picture.
For her Self Portrait of 1933, Clark borrows from Petrov-Vodkin's compositional methods, but made the decision to build her self-portrait around the colour black, creating her own aesthetic and moving away from the style of her teacher, who discouraged his students from using black.[8] The painting is unified by the tilt of the figure and the slanted architectural elements, reflecting Petrov-Vodkin's influence.[6] Also in Self Portrait, Clark employs the techniques she learned from her teacher—and utilized framing elements like doors, to structure her paintings; she is shown smiling confidently while leaning against a door, and her strong facial features are accentuated by the employment of minimal colour and by the understated elegance of her dress.
In Clark's work, critics have noted two influences: Cézanne and to a lesser extent
Clark's 1933 paintings Self Portrait and Portrait of Philip are her first major works that deal with the composition of the artwork, in which the subject is integrated in time, space and architecture.[8] In terms of configuration she takes inspiration from Cézanne – the balancing of form, his structured and measured employment of the paint on the canvas. In Portrait of Philip for example, the artist creates a complex but very balanced pattern of parallel and perpendicular lines within the stable square of the canvas, containing and supporting the cool, appraising, sartorial figure of her husband.[8] Space is constructed in such a way that the spectator looks down into the picture, and down at the figure of Philip in the deep, perspectively distorted chair, yet meets the glance of the man eyes to eye.[8]
Petroushka
In Petroushka, Clark creates a seemingly innocent scene of street entertainers; it was painted as an outranged response to newspaper reports of the killing of five striking steelworkers by Chicago police in the summer of 1937.[9] She chose to adapt the story of Petrushka (the Peter puppet and symbol of suffering humanity within Russian tradition) to a North American context.
Clark spoke out about the role and responsibility of the artist; she declared:
"Those who give their lives, their knowledge and their time to social struggle have the right to expect great help from the artist. And I cannot imagine a more inspiring role than that which the artist is asked to play for the defence and advancement of civilization".[10]
She urged Canadian artists to "Come Out From Behind the Pre-Cambrian Shield" as she titled an article she wrote in 1937 in "New Frontier".[11]
Political influences
Clark's early financial challenges in her pursuit of the arts, because of her working class Russian parents and the
Later life
Paraskeva Clark's eldest son Benedict was hospitalized and diagnosed with schizophrenia after a nervous episode in 1943,[4] and she put her artistic career on hold temporarily; though even when she resumed painting a year later she struggled to balance the responsibilities of her family life with her artistic ambitions.[3] From 1951 to 1956, Clark gave several large solo shows which were favourably received.[3] Her son Clive was married in 1959 and gave her three grandchildren, which were "a source of great delight" for the artist.[4] In a poor turn of events Benedict was again hospitalised because of his mental health 1957, and this impacted Clarks's production of art in a predictable manner.[4] In 1965, after multiple rejections of her work, Clark resigned from the Ontario Society of Artists.[4] Then in 1974, mother and son shared a show together during which the National Gallery of Canada purchased her piece Myself (1933).[3] Many exhibitions of her work and new projects featuring her art came about in these later years of her life, including a 1982 film by the National Film Board of Canada, Portrait of the Artist as an Old Lady.[1] Speaking of her art in 1974, Clark said
"I cannot complain, I have had a very good career, considering a great deal of my time has been spent on being a wife and a mother."[3]
Philip Clark died in 1980, and after living for a time in a nursing home Paraskeva Clark suffered a stroke and passed away on August 10, 1986, at the age of 87.[3]
See also
Notes
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n McDougall, Anne. "Paraskeva Clark". The Canadian Encyclopedia.
- ^ "Clark, Paraskeva". Canadian Women Artists History Initiative.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p "Celebrating Women's Achievements". Library and Archives Canada.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o Boyanoski, Christine. "Paraskeva Clark: Life & Work". Art Canada Institute.
- ^ Daubs, Katie. "Our City, Our Art". Toronto Star, January 5, 2019, pages GT1 and GT4.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i Lind, Jane (2009). Perfect red: the life of Paraskeva Clark. Toronto, ON: Cormorant Books.
- ^ a b Boyanoski, Christine; Fischer, Barbara (2014). A story of Canadian art: as told by the Hart House collection. Toronto, ON: Justina M. Barnicke Gallery University of Toronto.
- ^ a b c d MacLachlan, Mary E. (1982). Paraskeva Clark: Paintings and Drawings. Dalhousie University: Dalhousie Art Gallery.
- ^ ISBN 0-19-540663-X.
- ISBN 978-1-55209-450-1.
- ^ New Frontier 1, no. 14 (April 1937):16-17, reproduced in Lora Senechal Carney's Canadian Painters in a Modern World 1925-1955 McGill-Queen's Press, 2017, p. 122.
- ISBN 978-1-4871-0271-5.
References
- Boyanoski, Christine. Paraskeva Clark: Life & Work. Toronto: Art Canada Institute, 2019. ISBN 978-1-4871-0114-5
- Brandon, Laura. War Art in Canada: A Critical History. Toronto: Art Canada Institute, 2021. ISBN 978-1-4871-0271-5
- Reid, Dennis (1988). A Concise History of Canadian Painting. Toronto: Oxford University press. pp. 184–186. ISBN 0-19-540663-X.
- Newlands, Anne (2000). Canadian Art: From Its Beginnings to 2000. Firefly Books Ltd. pp. 74. ISBN 978-1-55209-450-1.
- Harper, J. Russell (1977). Painting in Canada: A History. ISBN 0-8020-6307-1.
- "Canadian Women Artists: Artist Database CLARK, Paraskeva". Retrieved 2009-05-03.