I make pictures about shapes and colours.

 

Biography

 

Gary Andrew Clarke was born in the vague city of Leicester, England in 1970. He studied graphic arts at Manchester Polytechnic (Metropolitan University) from 1989-91. He subsequently spent the following years working within the music industry for a number of major and independent bands. He later settled at the independent Twisted Nerve Records, working 8 years for friend and the 'one-man counter culture revolution' that is Andy Votel.

 

In the late 2000s he began to produce pointless graphic art to sell as prints. His work became international noticed in 2009, with a series of work based on well-known works of art reduced down to a simple grid of coloured circles. These have been reproduced in many of the leading design and art blogs. His version of the Mona Lisa, from the series, is on the wall of Twitter's London HQ.

 

His work has been featured in several popular books and magazines which cover art or design.

 

He likes biscuits.

 

Artist Statement

 

Gary Andrew Clarke is an artist of sorts, and an unapologetic child of the naively futuristic early 1970s. He lives in Manchester UK, a city that is wholly irrelevant to his output and success.

 

The central preoccupation of his artwork is one of creating simple flirtatious encounters between geometric shapes and beautiful intense flat fields of colour. They are often visual puns that might perhaps be elegant solutions to non-existent problems.

 

Ideas evolve out of stream of consciousness pencil sketching. A fascination with the magical neatness of the golden proportion often informs the overall structure of the work, its internal shapes, and the relationships between the two. The ideas are fine-tuned and constructed with help from Adobe Illustrator, whose files either become the version for print or the study for a painted work.

 

For him, the choice of colors is of paramount importance, and much of the effort is dedicated to finding the perfect partnership for each work. These colour combinations are deliberately curious and un-conventional, with little interest in colour theory. Arpeggio style colour sequences are a reoccurring motif.

 

The artworks have no narrative and are deliberately non-representational. They are not about any dramatic human condition or emotion, and are ultimately devoid of any meaning whatsoever. To quote Frank Stella, 'What you see is what you see.'

 

His art is not intended to be minimalist, but is borne out of a love of the ideas found in the 1960s-70s Hard Edge & Geometric Abstraction scenes. The art of Albers, Bayer, Claisse, Benjamin, Bill, Nicholson and Noland are particularly influential. Albers' 'Homage to the Square' is the work of art he admires above all others.

 

He has produced some 700 digital pieces over the last 5 years, some of which are available as prints on his website and other leading online art print galleries. In 2012 he moved to exploring his work on canvas, with precisely painted interpretations in acrylic. He has found that these are a far more exciting way for the ideas to exist - there are now over 30 pieces - and the future will see him focus further on painting.