Moult, Allan Visual Twist of Paintings Probes the Mind The Mercury 20th July, 1985

Pamela Clarke works steadily, day by day on detailed watercolours and oils in her Huon Valley studio. The images are obviously inspires by her tranquil surroundings, but they share their gentleness with a provocative warping of the obvious. She plays with perspective with the skill of someone who has obviously understood the rules well enough to break them with gusto.

Her watercolours, particularly, share this trait. In Place By the Sea a wall ends abruptly to reveal a calm seascape featured in a painting on the wall. The eye shifts from one to the other, finally escaping to absorb the mass of detail in the Persian rug on the floor which also ends where it shouldn’t.

This visual teasing, and a remarkable sense of humour, has full rein – so to speak – in Girl on a Horse. Here a nude girl sits astride a horse, framed by two nude males (one holding a merino sheep) while a geriatric fox terrier bitch with tired and swollen teats sleeps in the foreground. Their platform is a huge, exotically detailed carpet, and on the far wall a window frames a tranquil landscape. The work demands attention and also asks questions.

Besides a superb sense of balance and composition, Pamela Clarke’s works share a warm feeling for the real world. The viewer shares the atmosphere she evokes with a quite, but forceful passion.

Girl Studying Physics is a fine example of the mood she so ably captures. It is a simple study of a girl at her desk with her back to a large window. It is late. She looks asleep. Sharing her lonely vigil is a silhouetted dog sitting on the desk and quietly contemplating a full moon which is bathing a suburban red-roofed landscape with aluminium light.

Each piece in this fine exhibition currently showing deserves quiet contemplation. Each demonstrates a high level of intellectual input.

Lees, Stephen A Private Stage The Mercury
(extract)
On first impression, Pamela Clarke appears quite a fragile woman, standing in the centre of her life. A brief scan of her current paintings, a short conversation and that impression quickly shifts to a woman with strong and unique vision and one holding firm convictions. This is the first exhibition of her work in Hobart, all previous exhibitions being in Melbourne and Launceston.

Works in both media (oil and gouache) are united by subject. The familiar carpet, curtain, fire grate and fox terrier keep re-emerging throughout the show. This gives the feeling of being inside a very personal space, a private stage, where the familiar sets shuttle in and out along with the odd living presence, maybe a sheep, a human, a plant or a foxie but all take up strict positions within these sometimes heavily, starched tableaus.

The model for many of the works is quite apparent – that most visually quoted” of painters, the Belgium surrealist (more a conceptual realist) Rene Magritte, It is to him that most of the estranging visual devices allude. The artist’s personal reworking of these creates a private play with normal notions of perception and representation.

Makin, Jeffrey Foxies Centre Stage The Sun 5 August, 1981

Pamela Clarke, at Tolarno galleries, is a Tasmanian artist whose paintings can quite genuinely be described as quite strange, haunting, and surreal. Clarke’s subject matter is actually time, space and images (like fox terriers and sheep) placed in unnatural settings to create memorable, provocative relationships. Her images are figuratively realistic and rendered with a very tonal grasp of form.

Colour appears to be used more as a stimulant. Sheep inhabit living rooms or stand beside the occasional hairy rock. Terriers pose for portraits in a space often made contradictory by use of mirrored or window-framed landscape.

Masterclass by Clarke is a homage to Delvaux and Magritte. It tells you a lot about Clarke’s artistic ancestry. Delvaux nudes, like Minoan priestesses, stand static, symbolically on the left of the picture. Magritte is centre-stage with the white winged dove for a face. On the right Clarke has personalized the painting by including a terrier or two.

Clarke’s preoccupation with terriers is continued in Fox Terrier Smooth, a portrait of Mr and Mrs (one assumes) Fox Terrier, with their pet budgies captured in rather modernist, shallow space. It’s a witty play on properties with a couple of pets assuming a centre-stage position that, until recently, was reserved for their owners.

There are 12 paintings in the exhibition. Each is painted with an equal intensity. It’s not a pretty show, yet it has a strong, brown-orange-violet, teeth-on-edge potency that is most attractive.