Old poems and half remembered quotations, images of city streets and suburban parks, old relics, follies and monuments, seaside postcards and photographs, create a subject for Pete Clarke’s paintings. His work can be seen as personal and poetic images navigating metaphoric sites and places. He is sure that being brought up around the Pennine Towns and living for many years in Liverpool has significantly influenced the way he represents and sees the urban landscape. There is a sense of reconciling the simultaneous viewpoints as you encounter, look down, up and across the industrial valleys. In many ways this is a cubist world, history painting and aesthetic process mediating the constructed image.

The challenge to this project is how he can picture modernity with an international perspective with a particular regional sensibility related to specific geography and social and cultural history. Recent paintings include the series ‘letters to language’, images exploring the city as a sign: ‘city of ships and stores’, an installation of twenty paintings influenced by a poem by Walt Whitman: and ‘city going to sea’, a series of island paintings incorporating poetic text suggesting history, memory and loss.

Pete Clarke has exhibited extensively in the UK and Europe with recent exhibitions in Cologne, Rome and Wiesbaden. He is also co organiser of ‘eight days a week’, an artists initiative arranging reciprocal exhibitions and projects in Liverpool and Cologne.

Since 1998 he has also made collaborative paintings with Cologne artist Georg Gartz:

‘Through this dialogic process a body of painting has emerged which offers us, not a series of composite impressions of the urban landscape, but a kind of visual meditation on the city, an amalgam of different perspectives. The paintings raise questions about how we picture the world, challenging the notion of a single fixed authorial point of view. They also interrogate the practice of painting itself through the methodology of the collaborative approach – the process of applying paint to canvas becoming a discursive act.’

Bryan Biggs, Director Bluecoat Arts Centre, Liverpool, from ‘Collaboration’ catalogue 2000.

Links for ‘Collaboration’, paintings by Pete Clarke and Georg Gartz:
www. eight-days-a-week.de
www. chatting-with-colours.de
www.britishcouncil.de/d/arts/liverpool.htm