Hockey is Canada’s national winter sport so it’s little wonder that Glenn Clark’s almost life-sized images of hockey players are drawing cheers in the B.C. Interior.
Clark dropped the puck on his latest hockey-themed work in 2013, when he exhibited a 32-foot-long mural based on a table hockey game from the 1950s. The mural, in a linear gallery at Kelowna’s airport that’s curated by the Kelowna Art Gallery, was popular with travellers and also caught the eye of other regional galleries.
Clark, who lives in Penticton, has gone on to make a dozen other pieces featuring hockey players. He paints each one on metal – sometimes including real hockey sticks – and mounts them so they stand in shallow relief up to six inches off the wall.
Glenn Clark, "Glove Save", 2014, mixed-media kinetic enamel on metal, 50” x 45”
Glenn Clark, "Glove Save", 2014, mixed-media kinetic enamel on metal, 50” x 45”
His focus now is on stars from his younger days – guys like Bobby Orr and Gordie Howe – when players took a pass on helmets and mega-salaries. “It was more of an honest game,” says Clark.
As you might expect, Clark is fond of table hockey. “I’m still the champion over here,” he says with a laugh, referring to recent match-ups with his nephews.
Clark painted an earlier series about the Penticton Vees, a senior men’s team that won a world title in 1955, but mostly spends his time outdoors painting landscapes. One recent project, completed with fellow painter Peter Corbett, documented scenes along the proposed route of the Northern Gateway Pipeline from Tumbler Ridge to Kitimat. The series, Abandoning Paradise, was shown at four B.C. galleries.
Glenn Clark is represented by four galleries in British Columbia – the Lloyd Gallery in Penticton, Headbones in Vernon, Gallery Odin at the Silver Star ski resort, and the Chazou Gallery in Kamloops, where he is part of a three-person show, Hockey Night, that runs Feb. 5 to March 11. His work sells for $500 to $10,000.