David Clarkson Art, Recent Paintings: Over the past 15 years, I have collected a large image library of title pages and individual
frames from American comic books, most from about 1945 to 1975; as well as numerous poster
images used to advertise science fiction and horror films from the same period. This subjectively
determined archive has slowly become a foundation of my creative work.
My paintings often depict copied fragments of landscape imagery that has been extracted from
the background of particular narrative frames.Rather than focusing on the protagonists, I
foreground the environmental events or disasters with which the characters grapple. Sometimes
these visual elements are quite innocuous in the original narrative context, but take on greater
affect when seen as a painting. Sometimes however they are spectacular and stretch the
imagination. Lately, I have been amplifying these sorts of apocalyptic images, adding one to the
other, doubling disasters.
I am interested in the fractured ruins of painting’s discourse, ideas of the Sublime and Nature,
and the distorted present day echoes of such ideas. My archival activity is not completely
backwards-looking; a phantom image of the present may occasionally be discerned there, and
perhaps, more predictive visions as well.
Science-fiction and horror narratives of mid-20th century popular media are concurrent with the
apogee of Modernism, and arguably express fears regarding some nascent dangers
accompanying it. These stories first revealed the shadow side of Modernism in which our
present culture of continual crisis originates. They outlined the catastrophes of a world yet to be,
but now existent and ubiquitous. By aligning them with the present-day dilemmas and wide-
spread dread they predate, I aim to study the mythic import of these fragmentary and degraded
images.