Tesselaarsdal ,1958
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Note : In 1956 Peter Clarke decided to quit his work at Simon’s Town docks to concentrate on the art he had been making in his spare time ever since he left school. He travelled to the village of Tesselaarsdal near Caledon, where he had previously spent holidays, in a move reminiscent of the French artists he admired, escaping the city to find more picturesque scenes.Clarke filled many sketch books on long summer trips there, with a particularly productive stay in 1958 yielding three. The sketches range widely, depicting landscapes and cottages, plants and people, fowls and domestic animals, including studies of pigs like those pictured in this 1958 painting simply called Tesselaarsdal. He particularly used his drawings to practise with perspective, developed in the varied views of pigs in this work, a number foreshortened, and some piglets amusingly seen from the rear with their little tails facing the viewer.Tesselaarsdal depicts the mundane chore of a woman feeding the pigs, and it seems an idyllic and gentle way of life, away from the hubbub of urban living. Despite storm clouds, the sun is shining, and the grass is green. Clarke’s fine colour sense is seen in the way the cool tones of the pigs and the sturdy woman’s apron, ranging from white through pale blue-grey to deeper charcoal, are echoed in the clouded sky, and the contrasting warm hues of the sienna of one piglet and the woman’s face and skirt, the ochre of her top and the farmhouse walls, and the vivid red of its roof and the flowering coral tree against the cerulean blue of the distant sky.Although he was well aware of the hardship of the little community of Tesselaarsdal, in the firm outlines and bold shapes that characterise his style, Clarke captured the enduring values of rural life.
Elizabeth Rankin
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