Moira Clark, Park Bench (2025)
Moira Clark
Park Bench
2025
watercolour on Arches paper
11 x 15 inches
Dark Landscapes
Since 2022 Moira Clark has been painting Toronto’s natural landscapes in areas such as the Leslie Spit, the new and old Don River, and the Toronto Islands. These paintings have become a series of more than 100 paintings in monochromatic ivory black watercolour that now also includes the city parks of High Park and Trinity Bellwoods, “rewilded” areas such as The Brickworks and Humber Bay, and natural spaces found around her neighbourhood in the west end. The images are meant to express the contrasting juxtaposition of the Toronto urban environment with the bucolic areas that co-exist within and on the edges of this city. Over the past four years her series has also become a document for some of the changes that have happened in these places such as in the re-routing of the mouth of the Don River, the increasingly dense foliage on the Leslie Street Spit, and changes in city parks. For Moira Clark these paintings also underline the importance of the natural spaces that exist within an urban environment as places of rest, respite and even refuge for humans and other creatures.
Moira Clark was born, lives and works in Toronto where she has been a printmaker and a painter in acrylic, oil, and watercolour media. Her work has explored many subjects from representational still lifes and interior views and references to light, to abstract paintings motivated by colour, geometry and organic forms drawn from architecture, landscape, and music. In the winter of 2021-22 Clark began a series of watercolours in black pigment working from her photographs of Toronto. These Dark Landscapes signify a return to monochrome and tonality from her earlier career as an etcher and a new venture into observations of landscape.
Clark earned a BFA from York University and has shown her work in solo and group exhibitions in Toronto and across Canada at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Art Gallery of Hamilton and Albright Knox, Buffalo, NY. Her prints and paintings have been bought by the Art Gallery of Hamilton, The Canada Council Art Bank, BMO and the Toronto Reference Library. Clark made etchings at the Toronto atelier Open Studio, and was a founding member of the artist-run gallery collective Loop in 2000. In 2008 her work was represented in the Magenta publication Carte Blanche Vol. 2: Painting, showcasing 42 contemporary Canadian painters. She was an artist-in-residence at Pouch Cove, Newfoundland in 2004, and at Alchemy, Prince Edward County in 2019. In 2017 she received an Established Artist Grant from the Toronto Arts Council. In 2025 Clark was selected for Nuit Blanche as an Independent Artist where she exhibited 105 works from her Dark Landscapes series at Youngplace, Toronto.
