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Portrait of Ed Clark. Photo by Chester Higgins Jr / The New York Times / Redux. © Ed Clark. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth.
I could draw better than everyone else. And one day this nun had a contest of who could draw a tree. We were in kindergarten. And so everyone started drawing a tree but I drew a tree with branches on it and whatnot. Whoever was going to draw the best was going to get a gold star on their head. She came to mine—she didn’t like me for whatever reason—and rather than give me the gold star, she just dismissed the class. That made me realize [that] I could be the best all my life and not get recognized.
Ed Clark, Untitled, 2000. © Ed Clark. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo by Thomas Barratt.
I’m the first to use [a push broom]. There were two artists in Paris, Hans Hartung and [Pierre] Soulages. They used the broom but they didn’t use a push broom. The moment you use a push broom, you do something else. Straight up and down. But I never liked their work much.
Ed Clark, Untitled, 2010. © Ed Clark. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo by Thomas Barratt.
[The shaped canvases] struck everybody. They’d never seen a painting like that. And they wrote about it right away. I was the first, and it’s documented.
Ed Clark, Untitled, 2005. © Ed Clark. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo by Thomas Barratt.
An abstract painting, how do you talk about it? [. . .] Most people, when they look at a work, they say it looks powerful, or present, or original. When I’m painting, I’m not thinking about that. I know who I am.