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John Clark was born in Howden, Yorkshire, England in 1943 and studied at the Hull College of Art from 1961 until 1966. After receiving a Fulbright travel scholarship, he completed a master's degree in fine arts at Indiana University, USA in 1968. Upon finishing his schooling, he returned to England to accept a lecturer position in painting at the Hull College of Art. In 1978 moved to Canada to become the co-Coordinator of Painting and Drawing at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax.
Clark returned to England in 1983 to take on a position as Head of Painting at Hull College of Higher Education but after two years he returned to Canada to become Professor of Painting at the University of Lethbridge in 1986 where he worked until his death in 1989. John Clark also held guest lecturer and residence teaching positions at several other institutions, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Parsons School of Art in New York, the Emily Carr College of Art in Vancouver, and the Reading University in Britain.
As an artist and as a teacher, John Clark had a major influence in Western Canada and elsewhere. In his own art, he was firmly committed to the act of painting and sought to affirm the role of painting within a period of Post-Modernist analysis and investigation. His later paintings, in particular, were often very large with emphatic design and striking, sometimes startling, imagery. His works were included in a great number of solo and group exhibitions and are represented in the collections of the Canada Council Art Bank, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, and others in Britain and Canada.
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