Clark Mitchell's work captures the energy and emotion of the landscape, rooted in a lifelong urge to record it on paper and canvas. "Nothing excites my creative urges more," he says, "than to get down on paper or canvas my feelings about the landscape." That impulse takes two distinct forms in his practice: outdoors, the work is about response and discipline — meeting the scene as it actually is. In the studio, it opens up. Memory, imagination, and years of handling pigment let him push a piece further from the literal, building on what he saw in the field rather than simply reproducing it.
He was raised in the country outside Denver, Colorado, and began recording the landscape around him from an early age. The turning point came as a teenager, when his father returned from a trip to Europe with a box of fine German pastels. Every plein air piece he's made since has started in soft pastel, a medium chosen for its immediacy and its ability to keep pace with changing light.
Back in the studio, those location studies become the raw material for something larger. He carries them forward into oil, and increasingly works copper, aluminum, or composition gold leaf into the surface — a way of adding weight, reflectivity, and a kind of quiet drama that pastel alone can't produce. The metallic leaf catches light differently depending on where a viewer stands, giving the finished piece a shifting, almost atmospheric quality that echoes the changeability of the landscape itself.
Mitchell holds a B.A. in Fine Arts from Colorado College and continued his studies at the Academy of Art College in San Francisco. He has also studied with respected landscape painters Albert Handell, Clyde Aspevig, Michael Lynch, Skip Whitcomb, and Brooks Anderson — a lineage of plein air and studio painters whose influence shows in his handling of light and his willingness to let a piece move between observation and invention.
He has made Northern California his home for more than fifty years, and its hills, coastline, and shifting light remain a central subject of his work.