Graham Clarke, artist, author and humorist, is one of Britain’s most popular and best-selling printmakers. He has created some five hundred images of English rural life and history, of the Bible and of the Englishman’s view of Europe. Responding to the comedy of everyday life, he brings his own unique brand of humour to his interpretation of past and present history through the eyes of the common man.

He has attracted universal admiration for his revival of beautiful, hand-coloured prints in the tradition of Thomas Rowlandson. The famous ‘arched top’ etchings, with which Graham Clarke established a widely successful reputation in Britain and overseas, came to public attention in 1973 when the first of these, Dance by the Light of the Moon, was exhibited in London at the Royal Academy of Arts Summer Show, and the edition sold out.

He is proud to explain that his particular etching technique is essentially 200 years “out of date”, each work being produced entirely by hand from the etching of the copper plate through to the hand driven etching press and eventual hand colouring. The rapid advances in graphic technology hold no fears for him, art produced by hand and eye rather than electronic wizardry become all the more special and in his case highly collectable and sought after by enthusiasts all over the world.

Examples of his work are held by Royal and public collections, including the Victoria and Albert Museum, the British Museum, the Tate Gallery and the National Library of Scotland in the United Kingdom, as well as by Trinity College, Dublin, the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., the New York Public Library and the Hiroshima Peace Museum. Many more are to be found on the walls of private homes all over the world. For over thirty five years Clarke has sustained a remarkable evolutionary development of his work, while remaining true to a philosophy of life and to a democratic ideal which he was already formulating as a schoolboy.

His books, Graham Clarke’s “History of England”, Graham Clarke’s “Grand Tour” and “Joe Carpenter & Son, An English Nativity”, were published by Phaidon Press. The latter, a verse play, now having been performed more than 300 times in churches and schools worldwide. His ‘discovery’ of “W.Shakespeare Gent. His Actuale Nottebooke” saw the publication of a quite different work in 1992. This has been followed by “Engelskmann I Lofoten” a Norwegian Sketchbook in 1996. Spring 2000 saw the publication of “Bait Box Stew”, sketches and notes from his beloved Cornwall, and “Kent”, a collection of watercolours and jottings on his home territory.

At a ceremony in Canterbury Cathedral in July 1993, an Honorary Degree of Master of Arts was conferred upon Graham Clarke by the University of Kent and in August 1993 Graham was made a Chevalier de la Confrerie du Ceps Ardechois in his favourite part of Southern France.

Graham Clarke is a man with an overriding sense of tradition, and of religious, social and historical continuities. He takes pride in his view of himself as a local man, a “Man of Kent”, for which county he has been made an official Ambassador, with a firm faith in the peace and stability of family, home and community. As such, life and art have always been interdependent, mutually sustaining activities. His wife Wendy, his four children, his animals and friends, the cottage industry he maintains in the village of Boughton Monchelsea where he lives, his comedy band, and the surrounding landscape, offer a microcosm of the world and its history. The scenes he depicts represent both for him and for his ever-widening audience, an idyll and a universal ideal.

© Graham Clarke July 2002

Up the Garden Studio, Green Lane, Boughton Monchelsea, Maidstone, Kent, ME17 4LF

Tel: 01622 743938 Fax: 01622 747229
E-mail: info@grahamclarke.co.uk Website: www.grahamclarke.co.uk