Barry Clarke
Front Gallery, 24th November–13th December 2009
Artist Barry Clarke is best known in New Zealand as a jeweller and designer. However, he has also developed a substantial body of work as a painter, with a series of images of merchant ships that move comfortably between design and fine art, alluding to objects that also act as nostalgic memorabilia. Clarke worked as a seaman in the British merchant navy from 1963 to 1971, and took up painting in 1972, attending classes at the Sir John Cass Art School in London. In 1984 he moved to New Zealand and from 1989 he has worked fulltime as a jeweller and painter, exhibiting at the Gingko Gallery in the Arts Centre of Christchurch, Form Gallery, and in Wellington, Nelson and Dunedin. Clarke’s images of merchant ships appear as painterly contour-line drawings from memory, recalling the detail of such objects, reconstructed as large-scale and engaging, elegant jewellery, on the gallery wall.