Ann Clarke

Ann Clarke (born 1944) is a Canadian artist, who creates vibrant gestural abstract paintings and drawings which reveal her formal interests as well as a fascination with twenty-first century technologies. She is also an educator.

Career Clarke was born in Norwich, England and trained at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College, London University (1962–1966). In 1966, she won the Slade Painting Prize. She emigrated to Canada in 1968, settling in Edmonton, Alberta, then the centre of formalist abstraction in western Canada. In 1973, a workshop by Michael Steiner at the Edmonton Art Gallery confirmed her in her decision to be a painter and colourist. In New York in 1973, she visited the studio of Larry Poons and found it helpful in getting her more in touch with her materials. She was soon recognized as a key member of the group that had formed in Edmonton. In 1984, she moved from Alberta to Toronto and in 1991, settled in Tamworth, near Kingston. She moved in 1992 to Thunder Bay, Ontario but in 2013, returned to the Kingston area, to Newburgh, Ontario, where she and her son Ben Darrah have opened an art centre.

For Ann Clarke, art is a by-product of her journey through life and comes from the recesses of the subconscious. In 1967, she began making families of shapes and marks, things having relationships in her abstract work. On a trip to England in 1971, she was influenced by the large canvases of Mark Rothko, but the New York School of abstraction in general has been her heritage. She has had thirty solo exhibitions in Canada and has participated in more than ninety group shows.

Selected solo exhibitions Ann Clarke Darrah. Edmonton Art Gallery, 1973

Selected group exhibitions Five Young Artists, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, England (1966) The Slade, 1871–1971, Slade Centenary Exhibition, Royal Academy of Arts, London, England (1971) Seven Prairie Painters, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (1979) Canada X 10 Revisited, Hatch Gallery, with Solomon and Bentham (2021) Unity Road Four, Kingston School of Art Window Gallery (2022)

Collections Her work is in public and private collections in Canada, Britain, the U.S.A. and Australia in the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane

Memberships Clarke was a founding member of CARFAC in Edmonton.

Teaching Clarke taught at the Banff Centre (1973, 1976, 1979), Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (1975–1976), the University of Alberta (1971–1980) and Red Deer College (1979–1980), Red Deer, Alberta. Later, she taught at Queen's University and St. Lawrence College in Kingston. In 1992, she received a full-time appointment in the Department of Visual Arts at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay. In her almost 20 years at Thunder Bay, she became a full professor and also served as Department chair before her retirement in 2009 as Professor Emerita.