Ed Clark at Prospect.3

Edward Clark was born in 1926 in the Storyville section of New Orleans. After living a few years in Baton Rouge, he moved with his family to Chicago.

In 1943, at the age of 17, he left high school and enlisted in the Air Force during the height of WWII. Upon his return, he studied at the Art Institute of Chicago from 1947 till 1951 and the following year at L' Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris. While abroad, he was profoundly influenced by the tachist Nicolas de Staël. His early works are characterized by his unique push-broom technique and the monumental scale of his paintings.
After spending five years in Paris, he came back to the United States and lived in New York City where in 1957 he exposed a shaped canvas at the Brata Gallery, an innovation at the time. The first known of the sort was made in 1968 during his sojourn in France. He experimented with different techniques during his career like working on paper with dry pigments, inspired by the "pouring sand" technique of the Pueblo tribe of the American Southwest.

Now 88 years old, he was recently featured in a New York Times articles and states: "No matter what  I do, there's not a day that I am not an artist."
During Prospect.3, his work can be seen at the NOMA.

                                      

"Louisiana Red", 2004, Ed Clark

(photograph by the author)