Guest lecture on life and work of Peter Clarke
ROSHIELA MOONSAMY
A picture was painted of the life of the late Ocean View artist Peter Clarke during a guest lecture at the St Francis of Assisi Anglican Church in Simon’s Town on Saturday June 24.
Artist and cultural activist Lionel Davis, 87, and artist, writer and retired art teacher Barbara Voss, 71, from Muizenberg, who are life partners, discussed Mr Clarke as three tall stained-glass windows designed by Mr Clarke glowed in the late afternoon winter sun on the sides of the historic church building.
Ms Voss said in 2021, a few months after she had retired from teaching, Bridget Thompson, director of the Art and Ubuntu Trust, approached her about writing a book about the art of Mr Clarke.
Ms Voss said she was excited and overwhelmed because there already was a well-researched book on Mr Clarke’s work called Listening to Distant Thunder by academics Philippa Hobbs and Elizabeth Rankin.
Ms Voss said she and Mr Davis had known Mr Clarke for many decades. They were all artists, art teachers and all passionate about art.
Mr Davis said he had first come across the name Peter Clarke while he was in primary school, but only met Mr Clarke in 1978.
Mr Davis said he himself only started making art at age 41 after serving seven years as a political prisoner on Robben Island and five years under house arrest. There was no trauma counselling at the time. He came across the Community Arts Project where he got his first art lessons and that's when he met Mr Clarke.
In 1982 they were part of a contingent from Cape Town, including painters, writers, musicians and academics, who went by bus to a cultural festival in Botswana which was organised by the ANC in exile.
“The idea was that people would go back into their communities and take the skills that they had acquired and to teach those skills wherever they went. In South Africa we were asked to join up with non-governmental organisations and use the ability that we had and to impart to others who had been less privileged.”
They came back and formed an organisation called Vakalisa, which went into communities such as Gugulethu, Khayelitsha and Grassy Park to teach and display art..
Mr Davis, Ms Voss as well as Fabian Hartzenberg from the Peter Clarke Art Centre in Newlands, who attended with a few students and displayed some of their art, all said how important it was for Mr Clarke to share his skills with the younger generation.
Ms Voss said Mr Clarke’s work is now studied by Grade 12 visual arts students.
Mr Davis said Mr Clarke believed that through art young people could expand their horizons.
Ms Voss showed some examples of Mr Clarke’s work, including paintings and prints as well as meticulously handwritten posters for his exhibitions and hand-drawn business cards. She also pointed out his use of birds as a symbol.
Ms Voss later said: “I think the birds symbolise freedom, but, of course, this is open to interpretation, depending on the context of the work. He loved nature and birds were one of the many living creatures, animals and plants that he depicted.”
The new book will be titled I Have Something to Show You and subtitled Looking at Peter Clarke's art.
Mr Davis also spoke about how people had often mistook him and Mr Clarke for each other as they shared a likeness. He said this could have been because they had shared ancestry going back to West Africa.
“Fortunately Peter was a very respectable man and not a thug, otherwise I would have been beaten up many times,” joked Mr Davis.
Mr Davis read a poem called D.J. Ancestor that Mr Clarke had written about an ancestor in his book called Plain Furniture, which was published in 1991 and contains short stories, poems and illustrations.
Ms Voss gave a timeline of Mr Clarke’s life. He was born into a working class family in Simon’s Town on June 2 1929, the third of six children. A primary school teacher spotted his talent and told him he should become an artist or writer.
He attended one year of high school at Livingstone High in Claremont but Ms Voss said Mr Clarke dropped out of school because he couldn’t stand the regimentation.
“He couldn’t see the purpose of a lot of the things he was supposed to learn but he nevertheless was an extremely well-educated, self-educated, well-read person. He was also mostly a self-taught artist. The only formal art education that he had was evening classes at St Philip’s Church in Woodstock, which he visited sometime during the 1950s. He also got special ministerial permission to study at Michaelis, UCT’s art school, because during the apartheid-era black or so-called coloured people were not allowed to study at the university, so he actually had to get a minister's permission to do so and only for three months.”
Ms Voss said Mr Clarke sold his first painting at the age 16 through his mother who worked as a domestic worker in Simon’s Town and showed his work to her employer who was so impressed he decided to buy it.
His first solo exhibition was in 1957. From then on he became well known in Cape Town, received positive reviews, held exhibitions annually and had opportunities to study overseas.
Ms Voss said that while Mr Clarke was not one of the outright protest artists, he created his own set of symbols to protest as an individual against the injustices of racial discrimination.
Ms Voss said Mr Clarke also received numerous awards for his writing and it is a pity that he is not as well-known as a writer. In the 1950s he wrote under the pen name Peter Khumalo.
Mr Clarke was awarded the Order of Ikhamanga by former president Thabo Mbeki in 2005 for his contribution to South African art and culture.
The Reverend Bob Commin, former rector at St Francis of Assisi Anglican Church, who also presided over Mr Clarke’s funeral in 2014, read three of Mr Clarke’s poems: Registering for School 1936; Beachcombing; and Mr Ramjee, shoe repairer: Simon’s Town.
Ben Cousins, an ex-UWC academic now living in Simon’s Town, said Simon’s Town Museum and Simon’s Town Civic Association had committed to installing a memorial below the historic 20 Steps to remember apartheid’s forced removals and Mr Clarke. Mr Clarke had depicted the stairs in a print called Twenty Steps, Rectory Lane, Simon’s Town.
