Paraskeva Plistik Clark

Paraskeva Clark was born in Russia and trained at the Petrograd Academy of Fine Arts and under the tutelage of Savely Seidenberg and Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin. After the Russian Revolution of 1917, she trained at the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts, which had been re-named the Free Art Studios. Her portraits from the 1930s are classic examples of social realist portraiture, and in Canada, she was well placed to be a leader in that genre. Her own personal history as the child of a Russian peasant family, a teenager who worked in a shoe factory, a young art student during the Russian Revolution and a woman who had faced tragedy early in life gave her unique insight into the struggles of class, birthright and politics. Her first husband drowned when they were newlyweds, leaving her with a small son and forcing her to move from Petrograd to Paris to live with her in-laws. There, while working at a shop, she met musician Murray Adaskin and his friend Philip Clark, who were spending the summer in France. She would eventually marry Clark and move to Toronto. In Canada she pursued her career as a modernist painter in the circles opened to her through the Arts and Letters Club. She knew Lawren Harris, Charles Comfort, Pegi Nicol MacLeod, Emily Carr and Prudence Heward, the latter of whom she greatly admired. Mrs. Ingeborg, signed and dated 1931, was painted two years before Clark painted her iconic self-portrait Myself, now in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada. Mrs. Ingeborg shows all the classic traits of Clark's finest portraits. The sitter's gaze is direct and confident, as is her carriage. Her heavily lidded brown eyes hold our gaze in a steady, forthright manner. She is a self-assured woman, clearly wealthy and wearing what must be, if we can judge from the tactile richness of Clark's applied brown paint, a fine mink coat. The coat exactly matches the colour of Mrs. Ingeborg's eyes, and they, in turn, match her hair and brows, unifying the work and conveying the sitter's sense of style and attention to detail. The coat is, incidentally, painted in the same rich shade of mink-brown as Clark's self portrait that would follow it, and the fact that Mrs. Ingeborg's coat is worn open gives the work a relaxed feeling, similar to the relaxed effect of the posture Clark used in her 1933 self portrait. It is these small aspects of her portraits - the leaning of a figure against a door, an open coat, a hand resting on a hip - that give Clark's works such intimacy, force and presence. Clark was fortunate to meet and to see the work of many of Europe's finest painters when she lived in France. She met Pablo Picasso through her first husband's family's connections in the world of theatre, and knew the work of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists. In particular, we can see the influence of Paul Cézanne. Her treatment of colour as planes of form, her interest in light, and her simple solidification of objects, shapes and masses in her compositions can be compared with much of his work. In Canada, landscape ruled as the subject of choice, but Clark was far more interested in depicting Canada's social climate. She also maintained an interest in the art of her birth country, and Soviet art, while a lesser influence in her style, was a shaping factor in her politics, and she delivered numerous lectures on this topic before the advent of the Cold War. Later, her work would take on traits of Abstract Expressionism. In 1975 she was included in the important exhibition Canadian Painting in the Thirties, organized and circulated by the National Gallery of Canada. Myself was selected as the cover image for the catalogue, having been purchased by the National Gallery. This show brought Clark's work to broader attention in Canada, proving her to be a cornerstone painter in the history of Modernist art in Canada.