(Above: Barn Landscape by Mark Clarke)

By Randi Bjornstad

At least once a year, works by venerated Oregon painter Mark Clarke, who died in January 2016 shortly after his 80th birthday, appear on the walls of his daughter Karin Clarke’s downtown Eugene gallery. An artist herself as well as a gallerist,  Karin Clarke says that this spring’s show, which opens April 14 and runs through May 29, will offer even his most avid admirers some surprises.

In announcing the new exhibit, Clarke described “a recent dip into his studio storage” that revealed artwork new even to her and her mother, Margaret Coe, also a well-known artist whose work appears annually at the gallery.

During his 60-year career, Mark Clarke specialized in muted, ephemeral landscapes, many recalling familiar scenes of his growing up years in the Willamette Valley farming community of Junction City as well as the Oregon coast. But he also created portraits, abstracts, collages, and in recent years, vibrant depictions of scenes in the Eugene’s more urban environs.

Some of the show’s surprises include “rolled-up canvases and never-exhibited paintings,” Clarke said. There also are “a few (of his) trademark barns, coastal works, figurative pieces from his imagination, ranging from large to medium in scale.”

Her father spent most of his life in Oregon, and he never tired of rendering its scenery in oil and later in acrylic.

After graduating from high school in Junction City in 1954, Clarke enrolled at Oregon State University. An art class he took during his freshman year at OSU  set him on his lifelong, six-decade course as a painter.

He transferred to the UO as a junior and graduated in 1958, after which he was drafted into the Army. Back at graduate school at the university, he met his wife and fellow artist, Margaret “Peg” Coe, while working on his master’s degree in fine arts, which he received with honors in 1964.

During the celebration of life for Mark Clarke five years ago, which drew many memories of his personality and his work, art collector and curator Roger Saydack offered his view of Clarke’s approach, focusing on the ability of an artist to look at the world and recreate it for others.

“The first time I saw one of his landscape paintings 40 years ago, I thought, ‘This guy really knows this part of the country,’ ” Saydack said then. “Some artists try to make scenes extraordinarily beautiful, but he made them look absolutely real — form, pattern, light, weather. And it always seems that we know the places he painted and can experience them the way he saw them.”

At the time, he had one of Clarke’s large coastal paintings hangs in his office, Saydack told the crowd at the gathering.

“And sometimes when I need a break, I just turn and look at it, and I’m there, walking on the beach, just the way it is and the way he knew it. The fog, the gray, the mist — it is an honest painting of a real moment.”

Discoveries: Paintings from the archives of Mark Clarke (1935-2016)

When: April 14 to May 29, 2021

Where: Karin Clarke Gallery, 760 Willamette St., Eugene

Hours: Noon to 5:30 p.m. Wednesday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturday

Information: Telephone 541-684-7963 or online at karinclarkegallery.com

“Back Field Conversation” by Mark Clarke