executive artist
Kay Knight Clarke proves that it’s never too late to get hooked on art
By Laura Raskin
Independent Arts Writer

T.S. Eliot’s poems “The Four Quartets” were considered the American-British writer’s masterpiece. Published individually from 1936 to 1942, each was named after a place that was important to Eliot. They speak to the cyclical nature of experience.

“What we call the beginning is often the end/And to make and end is to make a beginning/The end is where we start from,” Eliot writes in the fourth and final poem, “Little Gidding.”

This Friday, the South Wharf Gallery will exhibit oil paintings by artist Kay Knight Clarke. Her paintings were inspired by “The Four Quartets” and show four stages in Clarke’s life while highlighting Nantucket and the Connecticut River, where she spends the rest of her time.

Clarke is, in a sense, returning to her beginning. Not far from a career as a high-powered corporate executive, she only came to painting five years ago. But she received a B.A. in 1960 in English literature and music.

She went on from there to earn a Ph.D. in statistics and mathematics. She became the executive vice president of McGraw-Hill, Inc. and Arthur D. Little, Inc., and the corporate director of Guardian Life Insurance and the Providence Journal Company, just to name a few.

But lately, it is painting that has consumed Clarke — so much so that she has scaled back her consulting business and rearranged the time she spends on Nantucket so that she can go to school.

She graduated this month, at 66, with a B.F.A. in painting from the Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts and is already enrolled in an M.F.A. program. It is a long way from her career as a corporate consultant, but it’s not the antithesis.

“Painting is intense. It’s not relaxing per se, but it means you are fully involved,” she said.

Considering she has a résumé that busts apart any stereotypes about women at the top (she also had a career as a competitive single sculler), it is a surprise to hear that one of Clarke’s paintings in the Eliot series is about the hitting the glass ceiling.

It is a scene of buildings with no doors or windows.

“Eliot felt that urban civilization was the negative side of man. This painting represents discrimination in my life,” she said.

She quotes the second of the four poems, “East Coker”: “O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,/The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,/The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,/The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers,/Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,/Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark …”

“I don’t tend to let a lot of things stand in my way,” said Clarke in a telephone interview from her home in East Haddam, Conn.

In 2000, Clarke wanted to get back to something creative. She took a one-week pastel workshop during a vacation. That led to painting courses.

“By the end of that year, I was hooked,” she said.

“I thought I would have the best chance of achieving something,” she said about going for a degree. “School was necessary for the amount of learning I needed. It is rigorous and has taught me all the techniques I needed. I think a degree is the best way. It focuses you.”

She is principally an oil painter, but sometimes works in watercolor or pastel.

“I’m still sorting out my artistic identity,” she said, naming contemporary painters Paul Resika and Helen Frankenthaler as muses, as well as Pierre Bonnard, Paul Cézanne, and British landscape painters John Constable and Joseph Turner.

She prefers to paint landscapes with a lot of color.

“Nature is spirituality to me,” she said. “I would like to convey beauty in my paintings. Some people say it’s out of fashion, but I don’t care.”

Clarke aims to exhibit more – currently she shows in Connecticut and here at Nantucket Looms and the Straight Wharf Restaurant. She is a member of the Artists’ Association of Nantucket and has a show later this summer in Blue Hill, Maine.

She takes consulting jobs when they come up and still sits on corporate and nonprofit boards. “Now I’ve admitted to them what I’m doing,” she said.

As for future projects, Clarke would like to keep experimenting.

“I don’t know yet what that means,” she said.

The South Wharf Gallery will have a reception for its 2005 Opening Show featuring Kay Knight Clarke this Friday, May 27, from 6 to 8 p.m., 20/21 Old South Wharf, 228-0406.