Ben Westley Clarke
About
Trepidation that came with working with the genre of landscape, which to me was associated with the twee, was overcome, when I moved to the countryside, by wanting to convey in paint the perceptual experience of walking. When I used to walk around London, I would secretly call myself ‘The Weatherman’ – someone who was capable of survival in any situation. Could a landscape embody something terrifying instead of something picturesque? Has the landscape grown grey, like Walter Benjamin said the dream had? Could it connote national shame rather than pride? Nicanor Parra said that ‘We think we’re a country, but we’re barely even a landscape’ and I have spent the last year walking an hour to the nearest shop for groceries, visiting Dungeness for its wrecked fishing machinery, exploring Basque petrochemical factories, watching the cranes load the shipping containers onto ships at Felixstowe and wandering through forgotten woods at night.
Ben Westley Clarke (b. Ipswich, 1990) was Artist in Residence at Christ’s
Hospital School between 2022 and 2024. He studied at the Slade School of Art (2010-14), The Royal Drawing School (2016-17) and the Royal College of Art (2021- present). In 2014, he was the recipient of the Steer Prize for outstanding performance in painting and the Melville- Nettleship Prize for figurative composition. In 2018 he received the Richard Ford Award to draw at the Prado Museum in Madrid, where he ended up living for three years.
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