Moira Clark’s art career has taken two paths. She spent the first fifteen years as a printmaker and then about twenty years ago decided to become a painter. The ideas for her prints were drawn from still life, domestic scenes and landscape. She became a painter in order to be able to work more with colour but continued to draw her imagery from the same sources. Over the years the paintings evolved from representation to abstraction and now she goes back and forth between these two forms. Her latest work has been influenced by views from her second floor studio window near Queen Street West and Ossington.
Clark started teaching in l978 as a printmaking instructor at Open Studio in Toronto. She has taught printmaking at Three Schools of Art, Toronto School of Art, the AGO and painting at the Avenue Road Arts School. Her students have ranged in age from 8 years old to adults of all ages. In 2002 Clark became a professor of painting to first-year students in the Art & Art History Program at Sheridan College/UTM. She never went to teachers college and learned how to teach from her artist colleagues and by practice. “Teaching is an ongoing learning experience where the students teach me as much as I teach them.”
Walking Distance
I like maps and can spend a long time looking at them contemplating where things are, where people live and measuring the distances between places. They are abstracted landscapes and can be very beautiful. So in some ways maps are like paintings.
Walking Distance is a map of my neighbourhood and the boundaries shown are the general limit of my everyday life outside of (ironically, in light of this exhibition) my teaching assignments, which take me to St. Clair and Avenue Road and Spadina and Adelaide in Toronto and to Oakville, Ontario. Otherwise I walk or bicycle mainly within this particular locale. Many of my artist friends and my partner’s musician friends live within these boundaries and the art galleries and music venues where we exhibit our work are often here too. A musician friend refers to this area as The Meadow and I like this because it recalls the time before Toronto was divided up into a grid of streets. This region was a landscape of farms and pastoral lands with meandering streams and marshes. The street where I live, Brookfield Street, was once a marshland and had a dairy on it.
In making this painting I started with a map and conformed the dimensions to fit the size of a bulletin board in Room 56A. I drew the streets freehand, using a very minimal grid system and then painted using colours derived from the bricks, roofs, siding and paint colours appearing on the houses and buildings of this Toronto vicinity. The streets are blue like the old waterways and the major roads are pink. College Street and Dundas Street are old First Nation pathways.
The context of this work in relation to Art School {Dismissed} is that, first, it’s a painting and I teach painting. Second, it refers to an object (a map) that is often found in school classrooms. Third, the bulletin board to which it is installed is framed in woodwork that resembles a conventional painting frame hence the painting was made to fit the frame instead of the other way around. Walking Distance started with a map but there is none of the information that would normally be present such as street names or distance keys. I think of the piece as an abstract work that comes from a landscape origin. My abstract paintings often deal with grids and patterns that are drawn from various sources such as poetry, music, weaving and textiles, so the pattern/grid in a map presents a ready made composition that I can manipulate with colour.
Moira Clark – May 2010