Ed Clark
Ed Clark’s bright abstractions at G.R. N’Namdi are energetic, even boisterous, with huge swaths of color interrupted by splatters or the engaging swirl or two. Clark, 80, is a second-generation abstract expressionist who grew up in Chicago but lived in Paris and New York in the 50s; he knew some of the original abstract expressionists, drinking with them at the Cedar Bar. But his paintings are more improvisational, open, and lushly sensuous than their work, in which abstraction was often meant to be a path to some truth.
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Clark, who’s African-American, says that he feels race has “held me back” but has also made him try harder. His light-skinned father was fired from his job at Western Electric in Louisiana in the 20s when someone told the company he was black; after that his dad became a gambler and the family moved to Chicago, where Clark’s mother worked as a seamstress to help make ends meet. Clark copied pictures of movie stars while admiring the renderings of old masters at the Art Institute. He enlisted in 1944 hoping to become a fighter pilot but wound up on Guam. After he returned to Chicago in 1945, a Cezanne in a magazine inspired him to enroll at the School of the Art Institute. Clark considered becoming an architect but “didn’t think they would entrust a black man with a big building,” he says, whereas “there was nothing except talent that could prevent me from making the greatest painting in the world.” He did figurative work but, influenced by Cezanne, “flattened out” his images. He moved to Paris in 1952 to continue his studies and like other African-Americans discovered that “racism was not a factor in France–they categorize you by nationality.”
