Beach71 Painting

Barry Clark began painting in a semi-abstract style as a teenager growing up in Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada. Later he studied at McGill University in Montreal and was awarded the first prize in the Ecole de Beaux Arts annual competition. One of his large abstractions was selected as a finalist in the Salon de Printemps of the Montreal Museum of Art in 1957, and another was exhibited and acquired by the National Gallery of Art in Ottawa, Canada. He was given a one-man show at the Denise Delrue Gallery in New York and was represented by Denise Delrue for several years, including his period working in New York. While resident in NYC in the late 1950's, Clark's style evolved into full-scale abstract expressionism, usually executed in bold blacks and browns and often involving paint that was scraped onto the canvases with a trowel or a board. He relocated to California in the early 1960s, where he worked on experimental films that involved the application of paint directly to film. These films were often projected on dancers at clubs in San Francisco's North Beach, frequently to the accompaniment of Indian ragas or, on one occasion, to five separate radios, randomly tuned to separate stations. The artist re-located to Los Angeles in the mid-1960s and began painting in a more colorful style of abstract expressionism, his paintings often reflecting the soft air and pastel landscapes of Southern California. More recently he has worked on the creation of large multi-paneled diptychs, executed in the scrape style he first used in New York. Several of these were painted on commission for East Coast buyers. The artist's output, which comprises more than 500 works, is represented in the private collections of dozens of individuals in the UK, Canada, and the United States.