Background
Clarke was born in 1938 in the community of Gonzales, a suburb close to the capital of Port of Spain.
Clarke was born in 1938 in the community of Gonzales, a suburb close to the capital of Port of Spain.
He is a self-taught artist.
He worked as a teacher in the town of John John, a suburb of Port of Spain. He held Iris first exhibition in 1962, where he sold his first painting for $15. His exhibit Labour of Love, held in 1966, marked Clarke's recognition as one of Trinidad's most talented painters.
Clarke left Trinidad in 1968 for New York City. His departure marks the beginning of a period of incredible artistic production. He was welcomed at the Studio Museum in Harlem, where he became a program coordinator and an artist-in-residence, and where he stayed until 1974.
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LeRoy Clarke considers himself an artist/poet. He thinks of his art as constantly evolving in an intense attempt to reclaim the African roots of the Caribbean and his native Trinidad. His most significant works are a series of paintings that try to produce a figurative graphic history of Afro-Caribbeans in the West Indies. He began this ongoing epic, known as The Poet, in the early 1970s, adding new murals every few years. The series has eight major murals so far. They are: Fragments of a Spiritual (1971), Douens (1979), In the Maze There Is a Single Line to My Soul (1988), The Eye Am (1989), El Tucuche (1989), Utterance (1991), Pantheon (1992), and Revelations (1994). The evolution of these works moves the Trinidadian viewer toward reclaiming his African ancestry the "natural" identity that Clarke expects his people to have.
Clarke's work is characterized by abstraction and symbolism, and he underscores his work with the use of mythical symbols. In an interview with the Trinidad Sunday Express, he sheds light on the symbolic properties of his paintings: "If you look at a garden, seeing flowers and so on, you are seeing it as it is, with your eye of actuality. But, if you stand there long enough, focusing on the one rose that stands out, you begin to interpret the presence of the rose differently. The rose is not a rose any longer. We are now moving from the realm of actuality to the realm of the abstract. What I do, is dissolve the images as much as possible, and dwell in their aura, seeing the various colors that jump out, I put these colours to canvas. This is how people are able to paint things like sounds and feelings."
Quotes from others about the person
The paintings of LeRoy Clarke resemble many of the naturalistic and primitive paintings that typify much Caribbean art production. Critics have said that his early work was heavily influenced by the work of Cuban painter Wilfredo Lam (Curnen 1997). In fact, his painting Pantheon resembles closely the work of Haitian primitivist painter Hector Hyppolite. Each element within his pictorial composition conveys a signifier that alludes to the African legacy, whether it refers to slavery, religious practices, or the like. Caribbean art critic Veerle Poupeye has characterized Clarke's work as one mostly concerned with "race and post colonial identity." She emphasizes that "he has developed a complex iconographical programme on the black experience in the New World, from oppression to transcendence".