Lazy Day ,1975
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Notes : Peter Clarke typically used high white walls with cornices reminiscent of Cape Dutch architecture to carry a political message about the exclusions of apartheid South Africa, separating white from black, privileged from oppressed. But here the wall takes on a benign role – it provides solitude and privacy for a lone nude woman enjoying the sun, its warmth and brightness suggested not only by the vivid blue of the cloudless sky but the dark shadows the figure casts. The pleasurable scene is enhanced by flowering plants with thick green leaves and brilliant red blooms, and a limpid pool that mirrors one of them, as well as complementing reflections of the cerulean sky. It is a luxuriant, peaceful garden, sheltered from the outside world: only a black cockerel on the wall overlooks the scene. The woman’s relaxed body is languorously sprawled on the grass, arms raised to reduce the glare of the sun on her face, but also to expose her generous breasts. Nudity is unusual in Clarke’s oeuvre, although he produced a series of life drawings in 2008 when he attended life classes in Kalk Bay. But the only naked females in Clarke’s paintings that spring to mind are ‘exotic’ – a blonde woman carried off by a black centaur in a 1958 work after Picasso’s Rape, and a Japanese Geisha and her lover in Lady with a chiffon scarf in her mouth, made in 2007 as part of his Fan Series. The current beauty is black, with the sun’s sheen on her dark skin. Given Clarke’s impish sense of humour and the double entendres of works like Cock Stand of 1978, portraying the bird perched on the buttocks of a young man doing press-ups, it seems unlikely that the rooster on the wall of Lazy Day is about to interrupt the woman’s leisure only with his crowing.
Elizabeth Rankin
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