Lovers At Retreat Station ,1975
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Anmerkung : Peter Clarke was a life-long commentator, surveying his world with a sardonic but tolerant eye. His closely observed figure studies capture every aspect of community life, from township gossips to bathers on the beach and children playing, or sometimes sombre reflections on the effects of poverty, although darker themes are found more in his writing than his artworks. His everyday scenes are usually slightly stylised, even caricatural, in approach, and often in pencil or ink, direct media suited to setting down ideas swiftly. But he also developed them in other media, such as linocut, or worked up the drawings with colour or tonal washes of ink, as in Lovers at Retreat Station.There is an erotic thread in Clarke’s work, but these lovers are a modest enough pair, she rather unreceptive to his advances. They are clearly young, and Clarke invites us to smile at their ‘with it’ appearance – she in a perky hat, tight-fitting mini dress and platform sandals, he with Afro hairstyle, sideburns and moustache. They have found a quiet railway bench to meet unobserved by the others on the platform. The graffiti on the walls includes a protesting clenched fist and anti-nuclear peace sign with a more apt ‘make love not war’ slogan. And there is an appropriate pierced heart above the couple, although it carries a cautionary comment on the foibles of love, typical of Clarke’s humour: ‘Karin Scott smaak Raymond but he like Berenice’.Retreat Station, one of the stops on the line from Simon’s Town to Cape Town, was familiar to Clarke, as the train was his transport to the city from the time he was a boy, whether to attend school, visit galleries, or see friends. But a railway station seems an odd place for a romantic tryst, perhaps suggesting a lack of anywhere else to meet, or that the couple will soon be parted.
Elizabeth Rankin
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