Oil on canvas, circa 1946. 610x610 mm; 24x24 inches. Signed in oil, upper right. Dated and inscribed with the artist's Philadelphia address on the original stretcher bar.
Clark shows his painterly approach to social realist subjects with this canvas, one of the artist's larger works. After winning a four-year scholarship to the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art, Clark was supported by Dr. Albert C. Barnes, who gave him access to his famous collection at the Barnes Foundation from 1939-1944. In 1944, his painting Cutting Pattern was the second work by an African-American artist accepted into the Barnes Foundation, after one by Horace Pippin. He also was a colleague of Dox Thrash and Raymond Steth in the Philadelphia Fine Print Workshop and the WPA workshop from 1939-1942, where he helped develop carborundum etching. His paintings and prints are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Saint Louis Art Museum, the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. and the De Young Museum, San Francisco. Messenger p. 48.
