I first met Irene Clark when I interviewed her in a feature article titled "The Artist's Eye as a Camera," for Business Review Weekly in 1995. At that time she was working on large "genre" paintings which depicted notable subjects from Australian corporate, political and academic life. She explained how her work was a record of events in her life at that time and even though she once taught art, her own work was an intensely, personal thing.



"The work I do is not about capturing the exact image. It is about capturing the spirit," she said. In many visits to her studio over the years, she showed me how she delicately layered oil paints to capture a rich depth of colour. Her work has always had a lightness of touch.



Her painterly technique has been influenced by many before her, more recently by the German Romantics of the 19th Century like Caspar David Friedrich and the British J.M.W. Turner.



Those who know Irene will appreciate that her eye is indeed acute and that she sees deeply into environment and humanity with all its contradictions, its joys, flaws and irony. They also come to know a sharp wit behind those observational skills. I have been fortunate to watch Irene's work change and develop over these many years since our initial BRW interview encounter, as she has continued to pursue her journey into abstraction.



Her earlier works have now given way to soft and carefully considered abstractions using the Old Master, glazing techniques. Control has given way to lightness and a release in the rendering. The luminous paintings in this latest exhibition "Die Reise", (the journey), now bring us to this point as she continues.

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Narelle Hooper, Editor AFR BOSS Magazine, Australian Financial Review, January 2013.