Op Pad ,1966
Procedencia :
Exhibited : Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town, Listening to Distant Thunder: The art of Peter Clarke, 20 October 2011 to 19 February 2012, catalogue number 43.
Literature :
Notas : During the 1960s many of Peter Clarke’s works depicted travellers. Stocky figures with bags and bundles make their way across dunes or along roads, like the two figures who, back view and cut off by the frame, seem to move from our space into the landscape of Op Pad. It was an important theme in Clarke’s oeuvre, prompted perhaps by his own travels when he went to Europe in 1962. But the reference is clearly to South Africa, to commuters stoically trudging long distances to work from the Cape Flats, or displaced people seeking a new home, as he himself would have to do when Simon’s Town was declared a ‘whites only’ area in the mid-1960s. Yet Clarke’s works are not strident or overtly political; rather they are a quiet commentary on the realities of life for people of colour in South Africa under apartheid.The watercolour Op Pad may well have been inspired by earlier travels, when he visited Natal by train in 1955 and was fascinated by the wide spaces of the interior, so different from the coastal Cape where he had grown up. His sketchbook at the time was filled with drawings and watercolours of the scenes and people that he saw. Op Pad may depict the Karoo, the featureless flat landscape stretching into the distance, a darker edge defining the horizon against a slip of blue sky above. The veld is painted in warm oranges and ochres, as though washed by the heat of the sun. But Clarke’s landscapes are rarely specific places: indistinct rectangular shapes and parallel lines created in the fluid brushwork here perhaps represent the raw earth of ploughed fields, like those of the Caledon area that he painted so often. Then the stippled dark green of the horizon suggests welcome shade in the distance for the two travellers.
Elizabeth Rankin
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