Graham Clarke
Graham
Clarke, author, illustrator and humorist, is one of Britain's most popular
and best-selling printmakers. He has created some five hundred images
of English rural life and history, of the Bible and of the Englishman's
view of Europe.
Born in 1941, Clarke's upbringing in the austerity of war-time and post-war Britain, made him reliant on his own imaginative resources. Responding to the comedy of everyday life, he brings his own unique brand of humour to his interpretation of past and present history through the eyes of the common man. He was educated at Beckenham Art School, where he fell under the spell of Samuel Palmer's romantic and visionary view of the Shoreham countryside.
At the Royal College of Art he specialised in illustration and printmaking,
and pursued his interest in calligraphy. With encouragement from Edward
Bawden, Clarke began refining an individual aesthetic, printing traditional
landscapes marked by a sense of locality and genre. 
He has attracted universal admiration for his revival of beautiful, hand-coloured prints in the tradition of Thomas Rowlandson. The famous 'arched top' etchings, with which Graham Clarke established a widely successful reputation in Britain and overseas, came to public attention in 1973 when the first of these, Dance by the Light of the Moon, was exhibited in London at the Royal Academy of Arts Summer Show.
Many more are to be found on the walls of private homes all over the
world, collected systematically by devotees, as well as singly by ordinary
art lovers who "know what they like". For over thirty five years Clarke
has sustained a remarkable evolutionary development of his work, while
remaining true to a philosophy of life and to a democratic ideal which
he was already formulating as a schoolboy.
You can buy Graham's work in our webshop