Stella Clarke

Biography

My studio is in Haddon, in regional Victoria, where I live with my husband, daughters, dogs and chickens. Over the last decade, I have developed my art practice with a focus upon landscape, coastal and rural. I have shown in galleries and other venues in Melbourne and around Victoria, including Geelong and Daylesford, as well as interstate, in both group and solo exhibitions. My artwork has been featured on ABC TV and Channel 9. My coastal works were exhibited with Metropolis Gallery for several years (though that gallery venue like others has recently closed). I am happy to have growing success with followers and collectors of my work. I also play an active part in cultural activities in my locality, since nothing replaces connection within the community, so the next exhibition I am involved in will be in the Backspace Gallery in the Art Gallery of Ballarat.

I grew up in a small, rural village near the coast of East Anglia, in the UK. I spent most of my childhood outdoors, under big skies, adjacent to wind-raked coastal marshlands and beaches pounded by the chill North Sea. I immigrated to Australia in 1998. The wild, beautiful coasts of Victoria and Tasmania, the wide open country and forests around Haddon, and our own bush-block now replace those environments in my life, and are an endless resource and fascination.

In my work, my motivation is to help reconnect myself and people who look at my art with the natural environment around us. At a time when our biosphere is increasingly vulnerable, which means we are too, I think the role of a landscape artist can be to help make that link stronger.

My work is mainly realist and representational, celebrating the beautiful forms and textures in the wilder places that I know or visit, the hues of vegetation, the patterns in rock , the beauty of a shoreline. I like to include elements of abstraction, the energy that work with a palette knife brings to a work, or processes of glazing and layering that enhance the invitation to look at and enjoy a painting.

Though not a fine arts graduate, my professional background has always been in the arts, in as a university lecturer, a writer and critic and also as a painter. Whilst living in the UK, Europe and Italy, as well as here in Australia, I have spent years exploring galleries and developing my skills as an artist. There is nothing like exposure to the wonderful work of other artists, historical or contemporary, to inspire the making of art.