GRAHAM CLARKE SHOWCASE AT GALLERY PLUS - WELLS-NEXT-THE-SEA, NORTH NORFOLK

Saturday 5th to Sunday 27th September 2009

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 rural life and history, and of his own humorous view of the world.

Until April this year, Graham had not exhibited his work in Norfolk, but when Trevor & Joanna Woods opened Gallery Plus in Wells-next-the-sea, he was on their first line-up of artists. Trevor's family are originally from Kent, where Graham also hails from, and having followed his work for many years it seemed perfectly fitting for them to exhibit his work. Graham's hand-coloured etchings, books and cards have already proved to be very popular at the unique open and airy gallery, which boasts unrivalled natural light.

Born in 1941, Clarke's upbringing in the austerity of war-time and post-war Britain, made him reliant on his own imaginative resources. 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 was educated at Beckenham Art School and at the Royal College of Art, where he specialised in illustration and printmaking. With encouragement from Edward Bawden, Graham began refining an individual aesthetic, printing traditional landscapes marked by a sense of locality and genre. Graduating in 1964, he benefited from the print boom of the decade and, with commissions from Editions Alecto and London Transport Publicity Department a promising career was launched. The publication of his first hand-printed "livre d'artiste", Balyn and Balan won recognition from the most influential patron and connoisseur of the day, Kenneth Clark.

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 sold out.

Examples of his work are held by public and Royal collections, including the Victoria and Albert Museum, the British Museum and the Tate Gallery, as well as the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, 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, collected systematically by devotees, as well as singly by ordinary art lovers who "know what they like".

His large etching 'All the World in London' was produced at the suggestion of the Olympic bid committee. Graham likes to think it made a contribution towards the successful outcome. A copy hangs in the Olympic Museum in Geneva.

Although internationally recognised, Graham Clarke takes pride in his view of himself as a local man, a "Man of Kent". As such, life and art have always been interdependent, mutually sustaining activities. With the extraordinary rapid technical developments in fine art reproduction used by so many others, he feels ever more convinced that works produced entirely by hand using traditional processes have a splendid and secure future. The scenes he depicts represent both for him and for his ever-widening audience, an idyll and a universal ideal.

Gallery Plus is next to Big Blue Sky on the Coast Road in Wells-next-the-sea, on the beautiful North Norfolk Coast.
The exhibition opens at 10am on Saturday 5th September and continues daily, from 10am-5pm Monday to Saturday and from 11am-4pm on Sundays, until Sunday 27th September.

For more information visit www.gallery-plus.co.uk or telephone 01328 711609.