Peter Clarke was born in Simon’s Town, in the Western Cape, and after leaving school he worked in the docks from 1944. In 1956, after a three-month visit to Tesseslaarsdal, in the Overberg region, he decided to become a full-time artist.

He studied etching at the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town in 1961, as a short-term student under a special permit; as a ‘coloured’ student he was not permitted under apartheid regulations to study full-time at a ‘white’ institution. He also studied at Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam in 1962/3, and participated in a course on printmaking at the Atelier Nord in Oslo, in 1978.

In 1967, during the apartheid era, Clarke and his family were ...