WELCOME TO CLARK-PAN HERITAGE COLLECTION

Clark-Pan Apparel is quality Accessories that are imaged or design by a husband and wife team Claude Lockhart Clark and Jian Ying Pan. The apparel items are Western design and carry both flavor of Africa and East Asia culture. The images on T-shirts and tote bags represent various cultures, with major emphasis on ethnic heritages. Ying makes hand made bags that carry a blind of Chinese and Western culture.

Clark is a woodcarver and graphic artist and his wife Ying is a weaver.

In the three examples shown above Clark in the first example uses the least amount of form detail to qualify his carved tray as a fish. Pan however is not interested in depicting an entire fish. The surface is enough to give a clue that these particular scales belong to a fish rather than reptile or bird. LiTing Zeng photographed the bags.

On SKYPE husband and wife discuss the progress of a sweater she is make for husband Clark. Both seem satisfied with the progress being made.

At age 12 Clark began reading his father’s college books on ethnic art and geography and at age 14 he began his own career as an African artist producing ceramic sculpture for himself. Picture at left above shows Clark age 18 with his first metal cast sculpture and at age 15 with some of is ceramic artwork. In 1954 Clark, age 8, worked with his grandmother and sister making his first ceramic item. Clark’s father took these 4 pictures above and the three pictures below. © Claude Lockhart Clark October 17, 2015.

Nineteen fifty-five was a major crossroad for many reasons. After 5 years (1950-1955) the “Modern Civil Rights Movement” which began in North Carolina was in full bloom when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. assumed the role of leadership. That same year African American boys between ages 9 and 14 had a very harsh wake-up call which brought their childhood innocence to an abruptly end. It was the assassination of Emmett Till. His mother Mamie Till kept his memory alive until we African American boys were old enough to keep his memory and legacy ourselves. He represented the Trayvon Martins, George Stinney (executed in 1944), Michael Brown, Cameron Tillman and the urgent need to focus on adult thinking; development of adult intellectual concepts at an early age. Last, in 1955 the Clark family moved to California physically, but young Clark never left Talladega mentally for he had some unfinished business that needed taken care of. Three of his father’s best art majors created a legacy that had to be broken. He intended to accomplish the task without an art major in Junior High or Senior High School art. Clark beat the three art majors in less than 4 years. He was much younger than the three adult students. Clark was living in an extremely unfriendly and socially non-productive environment attempting to pursue his vision. His family’s home was the only safe haven from a very hostile world outside. There would be no social contacts with other children. Children didn’t put food on the table and they didn’t appear to be great reserves of wisdom, so Clark decided to put friends on hold until later. His parents thought their son was being socially ignored and shutout of events by other children. Little did they know that other children were not doing anything to their son. Clark was the problem; he was shutting them out. They were not apart of his vision or his plan for the future so they had to be dumped.

After moving from Talladega Alabama to Sacramento California Clark made new friends surprisingly fast. Some would see a loss of friends as a sacrifice, but Clark did not see it that way. It came to him as a blessing. Clark was not losing anything. He had released a burden. His friends, in Sacramento, were of different ethnic backgrounds. They were not interested in pursuing their cultures of origin. They wanted an easier existence to become American, which Clark wanted no part of. He would become an African. Clark was not a person that verbalized his thoughts much. He kept what he was thinking to himself and went ahead and did it. If people did not know what He was thinking they would be less apt to try to stop him. Clark would maintain a very low profile as an artist until he was advanced in age and was surrounded by a new set of family and friends.

Clark started producing African art during the summer of 1959. Within less than a year his work looked professional. If you look at Clark’s art dating from 1960 to 1980 you will see no uneven work. The first two works were created by a child and the last two works were done by an adult; same person Claude L. Clark. Everything looks professional; same level of consistency. Boogie and Scratch utilize African principles to include both Western setting and Western materials into African Art without it becoming hybrid. In sculpture Clark learned to preserve the principles from Traditional West African sculptures and in graphics Clark learned African Art Principles from Aaron Douglas woodcuts and Jacob Lawrence gouache paintings. Both Aaron Douglas and Jacob Lawrence rarely used African environment settings to maintain the integrity of their work.

Aaron Douglas and Jacob Lawrence produced the pictures shown above.

Clark was familiar with the urban watercolor paintings of the Chinese illustrator Don Kingman and fine art drawings and paintings of Japanese artist Mini Okubo, but Clark consider them as slightly hybrid Asian and Western Artists, never as traditional Chinese and traditional Japanese Artists.