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 forcibly moved under the Group Areas Act of 1950 and relocated to the bleak new, ironically-named township of Ocean View, where for more than 20 years he ran an art workshop for underprivileged children. He was a prolific artist, and during a career spanning more than six decades, he worked tirelessly as an artist, poet, and author in a broad spectrum of media – painting, printmaking, drawing, collage, and his distinctive hand-made artist’s books. His work deals with repression, poverty, and dispossession, but the incisive social commentary is tempered by the overriding sense of a celebration of life.

In 2013 a major retrospective of Clarke’s work was presented by the Standard Bank Gallery in Johannesburg and the Iziko South African National Gallery in Cape Town, accompanied by the comprehensive publication on his life and work, Listening to Distant Thunder: The Art of Peter Clarke, by Phillipa Hobbs and Elizabeth Rankin (2011).

Local and international honours awarded to the artist include Honorary Life Membership of the Museum of African American Art, Los Angeles (1983); the Order of Ikhamanga (2005) awarded to South Africans who have excelled in the fields of art and culture; and the Arts and Culture Trust Lifetime Achievement award (2010).