At the age of 78, Mark Clarke may be slowing down — but not by much. The popular Eugene artist still heads down to his basement studio to paint for several hours most every day, and when he’s not painting can often be found sipping coffee and visiting with friends in downtown Eugene. He’s completed enough new work in the past couple years to fill his daughter’s downtown gallery with a new show that runs there through Sept. 27. I sat down with him one afternoon at the Schrager & Clarke Gallery, and he talked about painting, about the importance of encouraging children with art, and about his late friend and former painting instructor, Corvallis painter Nelson Sandgren, who died in 2006.
How much are you painting these days?
I do maybe three or four hours a day. With my energy, once a day or twice a day if I’m lucky. I’ll paint in the morning for two or three hours and then a little more in the afternoon or evening. My days of working eight hours down in the studio are long gone.
Did you use to work regular eight hour days?
When I took that nine-year leave from my job to make my fortune selling art back in the 80s. Put my family into poverty and somehow survived nine years of that. I was a househusband/struggling artist. It was an interesting time.
What did you learn during those years?
It’s good to have more than one gallery. And to keep your eye on the business of the world.
You paint in a lot of different styles.
I’ve been painting for 60 years. Most successful artists who have made it into the history books, they somehow have work that is similar to itself. it looks like one person did it. I’m a long ways from that. One week I’m working on this, and the next week I’m working on something else.
But when I look around the gallery, I clearly recognize this all as your work.
I tend to think of it as looking like a group show. Painting this way: if I’d gone on with the same way of painting, I don’t think I’d have made it this far.
What has stayed constant in your painting?
I think my fuzzy, myopic landscapes. And it has to do with, I was introduced to these cheap old hog bristle brushes. I think you can get 30 of them for less than $10 out at Harbor Freight. If you look closely at these paintings you can actually see pieces of the brushes in the paint.
You studied painting with David McCosh.
The McCosh palette, the one he used, was five colors for watercolor and seven for oil painting. I got to the point where, I use what I call the simple earth palette: Two earth colors and a blue. You could use yellow ocher for the yellow, that’s an earthy color, and ultramarine blue or a pthalo blue. And red oxide. And of course black and white. They don’t count.
Red oxide and yellow ocher make a nice orange. And of course yellow ocher and ultramarine make a nice green.
It’s just sort of a test to see how far you can go without using some other color. You can switch the ocher to a raw sienna and you can switch the red oxide to a burnt sienna. Put a little dab of white or little dab of black in any of those colors you get a whole different spin on it.
I kind of almost bragged about using that pallette to do any kind of landscape painting in the state of Oregon. There’s only one thing you can’t do: wild mustard. You have to use cadmium yellow.
And the fuzzy stuff with the raggedy old hog bristle brushes: I’ve used those for, I don’t know, 50 years. You can’t get too precise. There is something about painting like that that has always attracted me for some reason. I am not a tight painter.
And then using other tools. I have a variety of painting knives. I have one or two that are 5 inches long. This painting right here was done with a 5-inch painting knife. You can see how it’s troweled on.
This is really a fun way to work. It doesn’t take very long to cover the canvas with those big trowel-like tools. Sometimes you use a piece of cardboard or other stiff piece of material.
McCosh used to use unconventional painting materials, didn’t he?
Yep. You can pick up sticks and pieces of weed and draw with that. I had an instructor at Oregon State, he smoked a pipe, and always had matches in his pocket. And he always carried little bottle of ink in his pocket. He was left-handed. It was really interesting to watch him. He would pour a little ink in the palm of his hand and spit in it and dilute it a little bit and then take his thumb and do these spit-ink washes. And then take the matches and dip them in the ink and draw over the washes. They were beautiful drawings. But it was a great show, also.
Should artists be showmen?
I’m not. I’m still having to hide from this article in the Guard.
The Godfather?
The Godfather.
So you’ve been painting every day…
Not every day. But if I’m around, try to get some time in.
I mean, over the course of your lifetime.
I paint rather than go out. A lot of the stuff comes off the top of my head. There was a time I would go out and spend a day getting a painting or two or three started. I could go to the coast and get three or four started in six hours or less. Come back and have something to work with. For me that’s always been a real good way to work. I have the subject matter and work it just long enough that I feel I have enough information to work with.
Your work seems very easy and spontaneous. Was it always that way?
No. I grew up in Junction City, where I don’t think my family could spell “art.” No one painted. There wasn’t much art available. Magazines had commercial art. I’ve always made things with my hands, even when I was a kid. My sister found a photograph of me about five years old and I’ve got this great big hatchet my hands and I’m chopping chunks of wood off so I can whittle them.
I wouldn’t have let (his two children) Tim or Karin do that for anything.
When did you get comfortable painting?
I was never comfortable painting at home. I took over a washroom that my mom had made a studio out of it. They had a two-car garage and at one end of the garage I put up workbench to make things. I was just messing around, not knowing what I was up to. My dad had a great big machine shop. A lot of farmers and loggers and lumbermen and that kind were there, and I just never — I was uncomfortable having that kind of person around because I was doing this. I was an oddball, doing my art.
If I had been painting animals…. But it would be pretty difficult to explain what I was trying to do.
What were you trying to do?
Well, I was making bad paintings. That was the problem. I didn’t know anything about oil paint. In high school we did a mural. They didn’t have tubes or anything like that of paint. We had, what’s that oil? Linseed oil. We mixed the powdered pigment with linseed oil. The assignment was to find something in National Geographic that we could paint as a group. There were maybe 20 kids… We picked Custer’s last stand. It had a cast of thousands. Everybody had a bunch of people to paint.
We started painting it after drawing all these figures. The next day the custodian, I don’t think he was totally mad, but he didn’t appreciate the mural because it had all run down the walls. Linseed oil doesn’t dry very fast, or at all. It was a soupy mess.
That was probably my first oil painting experience, as a senior in high school.
But you were also painting at home. What was it?
Oh I don’t remember. It was probably something recognizable, landscape or something. My mom had a commercial ceramics shop. She had Grumbacher oils and brushes, and I eventually got some of that kind of paint. There was a lady in charge of the artwork at the county fair. She saw some paintings of mine, and she was the first person ever to encourage me. And she was the first person I ever met who had a Volkswagen bug. She was really out there.
She saw some of my work at the house or somewhere, and she said you have to enter work at the county fair. So I did, and I won a blue ribbon. And maybe a dollar. Just hanging a painting on somebody else’s wall was a big deal. I got big-headed all of a sudden.
I ended up down the line years and years later jurying one of those (fair shows). It was in Roseburg during a county fair one time. I gave blue ribbons, red ribbons, white ribbons. When it came to the children’s paintings I had a great time. I gave the kids all the blue ribbons I could possibly use.
When you are outside, on the coast or in the valley, do you think you see the landscape differently now because you painted it so often?
Probably. One thing you learn as a painter is to do things faster. You can take in subject matter and make some kind of a composition, limiting the color to a limited palette, so you’re not horsing around. You know how to use those colors and apply them so you can move on. As I’ve gotten older I look at a lot of stuff and almost everywhere there is good subject matter.
It’s hard to explain that to people who don’t see that way. That’s why there’s art schools, I guess.
Sometimes I think I’m going a little bit crazy looking at all the stuff as subject matter. I bought one of these little point and shoot cameras. It’s amazing. You just hold up in the air and click it and you find subject matter.
You used that at Saturday Market.
I went to Saturday Market only a couple of times. I took the little camera, and I held it in my hands and walked along and clicked. And get pieces of subject matter. I’d walk along clicking away.
I went out with Nelson Sandgren one Saturday to a vegetable area at the market tried to draw and paint. There were just too many people who came up. I got real nervous. Nelson didn’t. I admire people who can do that. But there’s always at least one person who wants to know what you’re doing and you have to explain it.
Tell me about the mysterious figures in your landscapes.
I never used to put figures in. Probably Nelson got me thinking about figures, because he put figures in his. I was taught if you put a figure in you’re kind of putting a date on it. A lot of my figures are figures that the clothing couldn’t date. And from time to time for some reason it feels like I need to put a figure in it. Some of the figures are invented. They are tried out in some paintings. I’ll stick a figure in and then see if it works and if it doesn’t I’ll paint it out.
This one: the figure looks somewhat nude and somewhat clothed. But there isn’t anything there that dates it.
When you put a figure in a painting there are a lot of little decisions you make.
Do you miss Nelson?
Yeah, I miss Nelson a lot. Every time I drive through Corvallis I get a big ache in my heart. He had studio above a bicycle shop on Second Street, right across the street from Old World deli. I’d go up there. He’d call, maybe twice a month. “You want to come up?” I never refused.
He and I were kind of on the same track as far as painting time. We had maybe two hours to get started, then go out for coffee, then come back for a little more, then go out for lunch, then paint some more, then go home about 4 o’clock. A lot of it had to do with talking about painting and talking about old friends.
He had a couple years at least with the older folks of the art department, Andy Vincent and David McCosh.
We’d talk about some of the places we’d traveled, in Europe and on the coast.
Nels was a big part of my life for years.
Mark Clarke: Paintings
Through September 27
Schrager & Clarke Gallery
760 Willamette St., Eugene