MARCIA CLARK: LOOKING NORTH at the Blue Mountain Gallery

by Robert Sievert

In her Show "Looking North" Marcia Clark focuses on the vastness of the northern landscape. Her work manages to capture the expansive and dramatic quality peculiar to the North. Her paintings burst beyond the confines of a rectangle. They are made up of overlapping sections that are pushed into expanded visions . The overall look of the show is impressive. There are a number of small studies of northern mountains, valleys and lakes; then there are larger pieces consisting of sheets of Mylar pinned to the wall in a strategic effort to represent particular landscape situations.

Clark's fascination with northern landscape began in the early 1970s, with a residency above timberline in the White mountains of New Hampshire. Her recent paintings of Moraine Lakes were done as result of a residency at the Banff Center for the Arts in the Canadian Rockies.

The Moraine Lake paintings are spectacular views of peaks and glaciers from the Moraine Lake path, traveled by the artist again and again. They convey the feeling of walking under the confers with many glimpses into the vast and magnificent landscape. These oil paintings are done on Mylar and have a watercolor like luminosity.

Her English paintings from September of 2000 are done using a variety of materials, oil on linen and small aluminum panels. While doing these paintings she remembered the work of Brueghel where all creation seems visible in his "Tower of Babel"; a giant hulking tower is offset by the flat northern landscape seen far below.