July 2003
Clark Stewart
Knoxville, Tennessee
fstewart@utk.eduARTIST STATEMENT
My small acrylic and colored pencil pieces, often with stick or driftwood frames, have been evolving for the past four or five years. In many ways they continue themes and interests that have defined my work for decades.The subjects involve interpersonal situations and encounters that stem from family life in a household that spans three generations, and my work with college age students during my three decades of teaching drawing in the Department of Art at the University of Tennessee. Living within a family that at one point comprised five very strong women, and teaching classes in which the majority of students are female, the characters that inhabit my work are mostly women. They are set in contexts which imply narratives loose enough to let the viewer extrapolate meanings from their own experiences, but which generally have their genesis in events from my own life.
The formal aspects of the work reflect my interest in a strong physical presence of complex surfaces and textures that give the work an intense intimacy despite its small size. Craft and a sense of closure are attractive to me and function in an expressive way. The capriciousness of elements like the frames reference folk art, but only loosely.
