Graham Clarke

Graham Clarke, author, illustrator and humorist, is one of Britain’s most popular and best-selling printmakers.  He has created over five hundred images of English rural life and history, and of the Englishman’s view of Europe.

His work has been exhibited widely in Britain and abroad.  Examples of his work are held by Royal and public collections, including the Victoria and Albert Museum, the British Museum, the Tate Gallery and the National Library of Scotland in the UK, as well as by Trinity College, Dublin, the Library of Congress in Wasington D.C., the New York Public Library and the Hiroshima Peace Museum.  Many more are to be found on the walls of private homes all over the world, collected systematically by devotees, as well as singly by ordinary art lovers who “know what they like”.  For over a quarter of a century Graham has sustained a remarkable evolutionary development of his work, while remaining true to a philosophy of life and to a democratic ideal which he was already formulating as a school boy.

Graham is a man with an overriding sense of tradition, and of religious, social and historical continuities.  More than a little Englander, he takes pride in his view of himself as a local man, a “Man of Kent”, with a firm faith in the peace and stability of family, home and community.  As such, life and art have always been interdependent, mutually sustaining activities.  His wife, his four children, his animals and friends, the cottage industry he maintains in the village of Boughton Monchelsea where he lives, and the surrounding landscapes, offers a microcosm of the world and its history.  The scenes he depicts represent both for him and for his ever widening audience, an idyll and a universal ideal.