For more than a decade, the Penticton artist Phil Clark has produced work related to the ranching industry. His contributions to the Kamloops Art Gallery auctions over the years introduced his works to local collectors and found avid purchasers.

The appeal of Phil Clark's work is immediate and direct. His contemporary depictions of the work of the cowboy on ranches, such as the Douglas Lake Cattle Company, have a strong regional connection to our area; but they also have other qualities as well. There is a sense of immediacy about them. They do not resort to sentiment or melodrama and avoid any cliché associated with cowboys and the mythic west we all know from countless ‘Westerns' produced by the entertainment industry.

Clark's work, in fact, challenges many of our notions of contemporary art and the hierarchies we have constructed around these notions. While on the surface Clark's work may be associated by its subject matter with the work produced for an enthusiastic group of collectors of "Western art" by painters who employ their skills to supply works for that market, there is much, in Cark's training, background and motivation, that contributes to set his work apart from the commonplace of so much ‘Western' art.

Clark was born and raised in Vancouver in 1925 but came to farming in Ladner as a teenager. In 1942, he visited the Muir & Watson Ranch near Savona, accompanying a younger school friend deemed too young by his parents to make the trip alone. Conscripted in 1945, he had not completed his military training when the War ended. His decision to use his ability for drawing to earn his livelihood after his discharge from the Army led him to commercial art where he gained a reputation as a fine creative illustrator, capable of meeting seemingly impossible deadlines. He worked at this for almost thirty years in both Vancouver and Toronto, sometimes working as part of the team of artists working in the large commercial art studios of the time, and occasionally as a free-lancer. Eventually, he decided to leave the rat race behind him and settle on a larger piece of mountainside property just southeast of Penticton.

He 1982, his former colleague Dudley Witney visited him in Penticton on his way to visit some nearby ranches, such as the one at Douglas Lake, as he was photographing ranch scenes for a picture book on the subject. Tired of driving himself, Phil Clark offered to drive him around. It was there, on the Douglas Lake ranch, without a camera or sketchbook that Clark experienced what he calls "the almighty click." He recalled his visit to the Muir & Watson ranch forty years earlier. He made arrangements to return to the Douglas Lake ranch and soon after began to work on watercolours based on contemporary cowboy work.

Early works, such as Finishing Supper (1982), are very close to the artist's characteristic illustration style of his commercial work, but very soon the artist developed a technique of watercolour over a piece of illustration board, coated with gesso. This allowed him the intensity of colour he wanted, and he found he was able to develop his deft draughtsmanship into watercolours which seem to capture the immediacy of the moment. Not incidentally, his days spent on the ranches were utilized to capture what he saw on fast black and white film, preferring his memory to govern the choice of colours. A work like Cutting, 1987, illustrates how the camera captures the action, heightened by the colours and the rapid brushwork.

Not surprisingly, all these qualities contribute to give Clark's work a great deal of fidelity to the original. This 'truthfulness,' he says, is what he is after, and most of his paintings arouse that kind of recognition in his viewers even if they have never set foot on a ranch. They are reminded by these works that within an hour's drive, ranching is alive and well, and there are some very real cowboys on these ranches whose work allows us to enjoy a good roast of beef. That, after all, is what ranching is all about.

Text © Roger H. Boulet and the Kamloops Art Gallery.

Selection of Works by Phil Clark