John Clark (Born 1964) was born in Yorkshire, England but became a Canadian citizen. He attended Hull College of Art from where he received an N.DD in Painting. He also obtained a post-diploma in Printmaking and later received M.F.A. in Painting from Indiana University. From 1968 to 1973, he was a part-time lecturer in Art History/Fine Art at Hull College of Art, England. In 1974 he became a full-time lecturer in the same college. His work plays with simple motifs, images that often refer to the mythologies that saturate the modern workplace: commitment, teamwork, inclusion, professionalism, and the quiet desperation these notions produce in a workforce for whom difficult questions of identity never seem far away. More often than not these concerns combine to produce objects whose meanings are a little more slippery than their motifs suggest. Sometimes they give way to more dispassionate considerations arising out of the history, potential and process of painting.
Recently Clark began making paintings of digital models in which only a few elements in which figures are deployed on a plane, often set against black. The products occupy a space somewhere between still life and traditional narrative painting. His painting style went through several stages of development. He started with direct studies of objects then moved to using images from imagination and the interior realms of autobiography. The strongest foundation of his art remained his ability to draw expressively, and by drawing to secure the boundary of form, to create pictorial space, and to build up volume.
