Obituary: Peter Clarke - Poet, writer and painter of vibrant oils

1929-2014

Peter Clarke, who has died at his home in Ocean View in Cape Town at the age of 84, was a highly regarded visual artist, writer and poet.

He was not particularly famous outside the art world but his work received quite a lot of attention and recognition nevertheless.

He had solo and group exhibitions in Africa, Australia, the US, Norway, Israel, Austria, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, France, Britain, Brazil, Argentina and Japan. In 2011-2012 there was a retrospective of his work at the Iziko South African National Gallery in Cape Town and the Standard Bank Gallery in Johannesburg.

Last year his exhibition, Wind Blowing on the Cape Flats, was at the Institute of International Visual Art in London.

He received six national awards, including the Order of Ikhamanga (silver) from president Thabo Mbeki in 2005, and six international awards.

His visual work, which included oil on canvas, acrylic, linocuts, woodcuts and collages, did not receive undiluted praise. Some felt his landscapes and townscapes did not add anything distinctive to the kind of work being done by many other artists. His big collages, which he started producing from the mid-1980s, were criticised as literal and formally boring.

On the other hand, his oils, whose cubist style drew comparisons with Picasso, were praised for their striking colours, vibrancy, atmospheric mood and formal design.

Like all South African artists working in the apartheid era, but more so, he felt, as a coloured artist, he was torn between the expectation that his art should make a statement about what was going on, and his desire to do art without necessarily satisfying any agenda.

In the event he was criticised both for being too political and not political enough.

In a 1962 review of a Clarke one-man show, the future head of Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town, Neville Dubow, remarked on the absence of "social statement" in his work.

In a review of his 2011-2012 retrospective, a critic felt that his "strong identification with the political struggle was regrettable" and detracted from the artistic quality of his work.

Clarke was born in Simon's Town on June 2 1929, the third child in a family of six. His mother was a domestic worker and his father a dockyard labourer.

They inculcated in him a love for reading and were disappointed when he left school at the age of 15. This was during World War 2 and he got a job with the navy, cleaning and painting warships. He maintained a day job with the navy after the war but devoted his nights to painting.

He attended evening classes at St Philip's in Woodstock and studied at the Cape Technical College. In 1956 he was inspired by a three-month painting holiday in Caledon in the Western Cape to become a full-time artist, and he held his first solo exhibition the following year at the offices of the Golden City Post newspaper.

His sister, who was a domestic worker, mentioned to her employer that her brother liked to paint. This was brought to the attention of the head of the architectural school at UCT who, impressed by what he saw, bought some of Clarke's work and arranged for him to study at Michaelis in 1961. He also spent a couple of years at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam in the Netherlands.

In 1972 Clarke's family were moved under the Group Areas Act from their home in Simon's Town to the newly created and cynically named township of Ocean View, which was miles from the sea and had little if any sea view.

In spite of this and everything else that went with being a coloured person under apartheid, he and his work were notably free of rancour or bitterness.

Clarke never married and had no children.