Plexiglass artist Candy Clarke – “Art doesn’t have to be grumpy”

Nelson artist Candy Clarke has made a name for herself painting her bold and bright abstract art backwards – by layering acrylic paint on Plexiglas from the back of the picture.

She calls her husband Ben Wouts her trailblazer and supports her artistic career as he has done in their 38 years together.

You live in a 130-year-old three-bedroom villa – with your own bedroom, an artist’s studio, and a third room that doubles as the “salon of rejects” – a room full of art, Clarke’s own and others.

CANDY CLARKE:

My whole family is creative. It’s innate.

I remember going to kindness and thinking, ‘Oh yeah, it’s finger painting day’. I even had to go to boarding school in Auckland because there was no art in high school at Kerikeri High School.

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I went to Dunedin Art School in the 1980s and studied printmaking. I met my husband Ben there. He studied accounting.

My husband was always the pioneer. He makes the money and I spend it – that’s my line. He is a rural accountant. He now has every other Friday off – he’s just not allowed to retire yet.

We like to travel or sooner. After the children left home, we took a month off and went abroad every year.

I discovered painting on plexiglass by chance 20 years ago.

I wanted to frame a painting and had a piece of plexiglass to cover it so I tried painting a white border on the plexiglass and it stuck pretty well.

When you paint on glass, it comes off easily, but it turns out that acrylic paint sticks to acrylic – which is what Plexiglass is made of.

I want my job to be happy. So many New Zealand artists think being taken seriously has to be grumpy.

But what looks bright and bright often has a sub-story as well. It’s not always as cute as it looks. Sometimes I have an excavation; that is mostly at my expense.

When our two boys, Saaben and Yannik, were two and four years old, we decided to go on a little adventure to Papua New Guinea. Back then we went there blind. There was really no internet.

When Yannik was about to start high school, we moved to Nelson. We bought a small house. And when the boys left the house we found out we had some money. So we bought this lovely old villa. We have only been here five years.

Since we’ve been here we’ve been isolating a lot, a lot. The fire works, but the house has some leaks. All of these sash windows are pretty leaky.

I’ve always had a studio at home.

Working from home is great and I’m pretty disciplined. I work five or six days a week. I do housework in the morning. I get in after lunch until Ben comes home around 6 p.m.

I do things that need to be done like doing laundry, going to the grocery store, hanging the laundry, meeting friends for coffee. When I finish them all, I’ll be clear. I can devote the rest of the day to work – that’s my reward.

I love my job.

It’s been lean years. Ben just says: ‘Go for it’. He wants me to be happy.

We have always been a single income family. We only have one car and we don’t buy things all the time. But we’re going to eat. And I’m probably making some money now.

I sell my work in The Poi Room in Newmarket and Ponsonby, and a few other galleries scattered across the country, as well as the Red Art Gallery in Nelson. Sometimes they don’t even make it to the wall, they sell so quickly.

It was brilliant in the beginning, but now it feels a bit like a job. It’s like, ‘Holy Moly, you only have two left.’

I feel pressured to do more. But I have to ride the wave while the surf is high. It hasn’t slowed down in years. It’s fabulous, but also kind of exhausting.

I have a lot to do around the house.

Most of it is work I wanted to keep, not stuff I couldn’t sell.

There are things in the salon that were outside that weren’t sold. That’s why I call it the Salon of Rejections, after a series of works that were rejected by the Paris Salon in 1863.

I had an art tour here once, all these ladies from Auckland. They were like seagulls grilling. I thought they’d just come and see. But I sold a lot of pictures: it was a scream.

Making art is a beautiful thing.

I’m doing something that I love very much, set up in my pretty, cozy little studio and overlooking the garden that my husband tends for me. And people take home something that they love and that they will look at forever.

99 percent of the time I don’t know who these people are. But it feels good to know that my work is out there making someone happy.