Oil on illustration board, 1970. 610x458 mm; 40x30 inches. Signed and dated in oil, lower right.
Provenance: the artist's estate, Oakland, CA, with their labels on the verso; private collection.
Drilling the Tunnel is a significant painting from Claude Clark's 1970 series of construction worker paintings, and an excellent example of his Californian period. Clark continued to be an innovative painter in his later career in Oakland.
Clark left Talladega College in 1955 to pursue a bachelor's degree at Sacramento State University and then a master's degree at the University of California at Berkeley. After graduating from UC Berkeley in 1962, Clark became an art instructor at San Francisco State University. He then was an art instructor at Merritt College in Oakland from 1968 until his retirement in 1981. Clark received his first retrospective in 1972 with the exhibiton A Retrospective Exhibition, 1937 – 1971, Paintings by Claude Clark at Fisk University in Nashville. His paintings and prints are now in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the National Gallery of Art, the Saint Louis Art Museum, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Smithsonian Institution and the de Young Museum, San Francisco.
