Title: Fallen Tree
Medium: Mixed Media on Paper
Dated and Signed: 01/11/1957
Framed: 24.5cm x 29.5cm
In 1956 Peter Clarke decided to leave his dockyard job and become a full-time artist. He decided to go to Tesselaarsdal near Caledon in the Overberg district at the end of that year to enable him to create his first body of work. A good friend, Denis Avontuur, set him up to live with his father, Henry Avontuur, who was living alone and had a room to spare. Tesselaarsdal was the ideal place for a young artist that wanted to get away from the city. It is a grain-growing and sheep herding area with beautiful plains rolling to the horizon and the Hartebees mountains in the background (Hobbs & Rankin 2011:53&54).
The artworks he created on this first of many sabbaticals in Tesselaarsdal was exhibited in the Golden City Post newsroom, organized by a dear friend, James Matthews a reporter for the newspaper. The artwork, Fallen Tree, was one of those artworks exhibited at Peter Clarke’s first professional exhibition (Hobbs & Rankin 2011:57).
Clarke returned to Tesselaarsdal every spring from 1056 until 1960 making sure that he was back home just in time for Christmas. The sketches he made during these visits was used for many future artworks long after he stopped visiting this magical place (Hobbs & Rankin 2011:55&56). In the essay, Wintery Shepherding, written by Clarke (Hobbs & Rankin 2011:56) he explained his love for this place as follows: “My heart is in this place and I love it. That is so true and so definite. There is always a place, a kind of extra-special one, that a man sees and is attracted to and loves intensely, in the same way that he sees and admires and loves one particular woman above every other woman, with everything that is in him because that particular place, like that one woman, holds everything that his soul seeks.”
