With the music playing and his brush to the canvas, a visitor to Clark Prosperi’s studio might find themselves knocking twice to coax him to the door. Currently affixed to his easel is a commission from one of his adoring collectors, a portrait of their two King Charles spaniels. A laptop is zoomed in on the eye of one of the dogs as Prosperi tries to fathom the intricate refractions of light in the dog’s shiny orb. Between the exquisite photorealism he employs and the large size of the canvas, this level of detail is doubly important.
PHOTOGRAPHY BY WYATT KOSTYGAN
“More than anything now, I try to train myself to see color and light and make sense of it,” he says. He talks a lot about training and practicing for someone with his level of success, as though he considers himself a great striver more than a great artist. “You have to keep pushing yourself stylistically and with technique,” he says, and for this reason, he makes it a point to spend time with other painters, probing for the essence of their approach, watching the way they work, hoping in this way to elevate his own skill and exercise the senses with which he experiences the living world inside the canvas.
PHOTOGRAPHY BY WYATT KOSTYGAN
“Sometimes the best way to get better is to watch how a great artist does things.” In his early days in the advertising industry, he never had to look hard for that inspiration. “I started when I was 17, and I was very, very lucky to be around a lot of really great artists and designers,” he says, “and I was like a magnet pulling on all of these influences.” His career took him all over the world and brought him into the orbit of luminaries like Milton Glaser and David Bowie (once, in an elevator). “Maybe they thought I was crazy, but I never missed an opportunity to rub shoulders with great artists and get some of that energy,” he says. Another word he uses frequently is “curious.” “I’ve always been curious about everything since I was a little kid,” he says, “and I was never afraid to ask questions.”
PHOTOGRAPHY BY WYATT KOSTYGAN
His curiosity means that no subject matter is off-limits for his interpretation on a canvas. Scattered around his studio is a variety of paintings—a Coco Chanel perfume bottle, a loggerhead sea turtle, a crab—that demonstrates Prosperi’s wandering eye finds beauty in places where others see the mundane. The objects feature a style he has been working on for a couple years, a rendering of an object or animal on a white background brushed on with colored oil paints. “Actually, I was stressing out trying to decide the background for the crab,” he says, “and my sister said, ‘Why do you need a background?’”
PHOTOGRAPHY BY WYATT KOSTYGAN
The resulting crustacean pops from the canvas as though from a hole in the sand, assertive but without ostentation, the light across its back so delicate, warm and true to life that his studio seems less real by comparison. The style—accessible, refined, technically masterful—certainly found an audience in the region and nobody would fault him for hammering that note ad nauseam. But he has plans for new subject matters and styles, new techniques and new horizons in the development of his craft. “You can’t stop working toward something,” he says, “you have to just keep asking yourself, ‘What’s next?’” SRQ
