Clark Valentine is a Little Rock artist originally from Colorado Springs, Colorado. He attended the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs and then earned an MFA in drawing from Colorado State. In 2023 he was recruited to the School of Art and Design at the University or Arkansas at Little Rock, where he serves as head of the drawing program and coordinator of the BFA program. His extraordinary drawings have been exhibited across the globe and are in significant collections. More of Clark’s drawings and other collaborative work can be found at his Instagram and at clarkvalentinefineart.com.

AAS: Clark, are you an Arkansas native?

CV: I was born and raised in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Growing up in the West, I owned horses throughout childhood and competed in rodeo as a teenager. I spent a lot of time running and hiking and filled my summers with road trips - often through Wyoming, Montana, or New Mexico. I don’t think I fully understood the impact that the vastness of that landscape has on someone until I moved away. My artwork definitely reflects the space of the West.
I stayed in Colorado for all my schooling, attending the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs for undergrad, followed by Colorado State University, where I received my MFA in Drawing. After graduate school, I was a Visiting Instructor at my alma mater, teaching painting and drawing courses.
In 2023, I was offered a professorship here at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, where I am now head of the drawing program. I am settling into my second year here in Arkansas and am grateful for the strong artistic community we have here.

AAS: Did you know as a kid that you wanted to be an artist and teacher?

CV: Art is something that I truly fell into, almost by accident. I didn’t grow up making art and started university thinking that I was going to make a career in a religious setting. I have always been deeply invested in spirituality. As I took my first studio classes (initially as electives), I discovered art-world as a space to have open-ended and inclusive conversations about religion, the spiritual, and the nature of being. I believe that making art allows us to explore the questions we have about ourselves without forcing conclusions or specific answers.
Now as a professor, I love helping my students make artwork that isn’t just about expressing themselves, but rather to develop a process of discovering themselves. I am inspired by the diversity of ideas in my classroom and seek to create spaces for artists to feel heard and understood.

AAS: Your drawings and other works explore repetition and angular forms. I am thinking here for example, Untitled (Triangle Pattern no. 10). Tell me about that piece and did you develop this fascination with lines during your MFA?

CV: As a student, I was inspired by artists working in traditions of minimalism, especially those in the American Southwest - Agnes Martin being of my biggest influences. I resonated with the history of geometric abstraction and images of the grid.
In works like Untitled (Triangle Pattern no. 10), I am striving for an image that holds a sort of sensitive tension. I am really excited about the way my woven marks are cleanly sliced at the edge of each form, spilling into the void of the black paper. The triangles are suspended in a vastness that we only access in the slivers of negative space between the shapes.
I think this balance between rigidness and fluidity is informed by the aesthetic of an iconoclastic, Baptist upbringing. The simple geometries of Protestant stained-glass windows – or even the empty cross, hung on a blank wall – are fascinating to me. These reductive, muted forms become stand-ins for the intangible expansiveness of the divine.

AAS: The sense of depth and topography you achieve in Untitled (Interactions no. 6) are remarkable.

CV: The marks I made are not choreographed. I don’t set out with a complete vision in my mind of what a work will look like. In each drawing I give myself a set of rules – often just boundaries and the starting marks from which I build. Then after drawing the first line, I work to painstakingly mimic it in my second mark. As I work to make this copy, there are going to be some natural deviations. Then, my third mark becomes an attempt to copy the second. The deviations of my second mark become accentuated and new ones appear. The process continues…
These waves or folds are not planned and emerge organically as consistent rhythms in the marks begin to emerge. Credit should be given more to the human eye’s incredible ability to find patterns. These natural curves become opportunities for us as viewers to infer illusionistic space into the image. We get the chance to play in the space between seeing the illusion and knowing that it is just flat marks drawn on paper.

“I find the process of making my work to be more rooted in cultivating a space for exploration and care. The act of making becomes a time of reflection for me – a space to feel fully present.”

AAS: Tell me about your process and the time it must take you to complete a work. Is it a form of meditation for you?

CV: This is the first question I get from most visitors in the gallery. For my largest works, each piece takes somewhere between three and four months to make. Smaller works take anywhere from a week to a month. I have a studio routine that requires daily progress. When I am teaching, this often takes place early in the morning. Some of my favorite days are when I am working quietly in my studio and get to see the sunrise pour in through the window as I draw.
I have been thinking a lot recently about the difference between dedication and devotion. I feel that my practice is heavily rooted in a practice of devotion. I find the process of making my work to be more rooted in cultivating a space for exploration and care. The act of making becomes a time of reflection for me – a space to feel fully present. This is different than a mindset of dedication, where a daily practice is a chore, where deadlines become too prioritized. I am continuously working to build a life that fosters the space for my studio to thrive. I feel that this is important, both as I grow in my own work, and as I strive to create spaces of present-ness for my viewers.

AAS: When I look at one of your drawings the repetition and rhythm and fluidity of the lines make me think of the time I visited China and watched large groups of people practicing Tai Chi in the parks in Beijing. When you are working on a piece, do you get swept away or pulled into the flow of your lines?

CV: I love that you see this connection! When I was a student at Colorado State, I took an independent study semester where I sought out teachers beyond the university setting. During this course, I discovered a Taoist Priest and Tai Chi master who lived way up in the Rocky Mountains. Over tea, our conversations circulated around the relationship of art and spirituality.
One defining concept I took from this experience was the true nature of meditative states. Meditation isn’t the emptiness of the mind, like we are often taught. Instead, these flow states are a place where our mind is balancing acute, active focus with a degree of passive response. Drawing – like the movements of Tai Chi – require an intense amount of focus. When I am drawing, I have to be fully present with the mark that I am making. The lines before and the lines that will come after have to disappear from my mind. I have to cultivate a space where all my attention goes to making a single mark, free of mistakes.
When I am in this space, it doesn’t guarantee that I will find a flow state. Oftentimes, I don’t. But in this environment of hyper-intense focus, I am inviting the opportunity for peacefulness, clarity, and flow to find me.

AAS: Of course, I want to ask you about Untitled (Weaving no. 7), which was just in the 2024 Delta Triennial. It is an extraordinary drawing that is mesmerizing. Tell me about why you created it?

CV: I am extremely grateful to have been a part of the 2024 Delta. It was a fantastic cap to my first year in Arkansas. The space was curated so well and it was incredible to see the variety of work that is coming out of our region. It was great to show with so many artists who I have admired well before moving to the mid-South.
Untitled (Weaving no. 7) is a really special piece to me. On one hand, it sits squarely within the body of work I have been making over the past several years. It is one of the largest works in this series, and I am happy with the vibrations the marks make in this particular work. But beyond that, this piece was made during a wild period of transition in life. Over the course of nearly two years, this work moved with me through five studios, in three cities, and two states as I created it. In each space, I worked on it as much as I could, but never finished it until here in Little Rock.
As I went through life transitions – new cities, new jobs, and even a couple heartbreaks – this work was always a reminder of the consistencies we can make for ourselves. I don’t know that this is important information for my audience to have about the work itself, but it was very fitting that this piece (documenting two years of transition) was selected for a moment where I felt like I found my place within our region’s artistic community.

AAS: You have studied in New York, Germany and Uruguay. What were those different experiences like and how do you think they have impacted your drawings.

CV: I count myself incredibly lucky to have had several experiences to make work in new locations with artists from around the world. From living in decommissioned military barracks in Germany to cattle ranches and small villages in rural South America, I find these experiences to both benefit my studio-practice and help me to connect with people I would not otherwise meet.
My role as an artist gives me the opportunity to travel in ways that break free of a tourist experience. I have been able to land and immediately connect with people through the work – somehow circumventing language and cultural barriers. More than anything, I think these opportunities have given me a new lens through which I can view my work. When I have these experiences, I am forced to consider how my work relates to perspectives beyond an American-centric worldview. I see the universal need for us to slow down and how abstraction can be a tool for us to find moments of mindful rest.

AAS: You’ve been involved in several collaborative projects like one for the 2022 Melbourne Design Week. How did those projects come about?

CV: Collaboration has truly become half of my studio practice. While my drawings are made at a steady pace, I pursue collaborative projects as they organically come up. One example of this is my Vase I project, completed with the artist Alec Schweiger, who is currently teaching Metals at the University of Wyoming. In this project, Alec and I were responding to a call by designers Mark Dineen and Dale Hardiman. The proposed project was to explore the limits of a vase. In this, Alec and I were each able to explore our areas of formal interest – my mark-making methods and Alec’s expertise in furniture, materiality and engineering.
In my collaborative work, I am conceptually interested in how we as creatives can generate ideas within democratic systems. How can multiple people allow a concept to emerge organically through trust in each other’s expertise and mutual curiosity. I find this method of making to be immensely fulfilling as it celebrates inclusivity and cooperation and often generates work that is greater than the sum of its parts.

AAS: Another especially fascinating collaboration you are involved in is the I Found U Collective. What is the story behind it?

CV: The I Found U Collective is a collective that was originally organized by me and artists working on four different continents. Currently we have artists working from the US, South America, and Europe. We meet digitally in weekly meetings and explore ideas of collaboration and our relationships with technology in a globalizing world. We have been working together since 2020 and have forged lifelong friendships in addition to our professional relationships.
Our projects tend to investigate the overlap between physical and digital space. For example, in 2023, we completed an installation at the Museo Maeso in Villa Soriano, Uruguay. For this installation, only half of our members were physically on-site. The other still equally contributed to the installation, both by sending works and consulting with us over frequent Zoom calls. This was a fascinating exercise in idea generation and trust. As artists, we generally think with our hands. So, those who were working on this project remotely had a unique challenge of having to verbalize their vision and trust their colleagues to execute it within the physical space.
I believe that collaboration is the way of the future in our art world. We have progressed beyond the illusion of the artist as a unique genius who can only create when alone. Methods of collaboration allow us as artists to build open-minded, inclusive spaces and to create work that celebrates connection with other people through the exchange of ideas.
Each artist in I Found U maintains a personal studio practice. We all show on our own and have our own styles and materials. I think that having these two, coinciding practices allows us to hold space for community while maintaining our own independent voices.

AAS: The School of Art and Design at UA Little Rock is a terrific program with a talented faculty and top-notch facility. As head of Drawing and BFA director, what have you found that most students are looking for in a BFA degree?

CV: The Windgate Center for Art + Design is hands down the best art building I have ever been in. Our faculty has a sense of community that is exceptional and the University does a great job supporting our mission. But even more importantly, I am thrilled to join a program that is so student focused. At UA Little Rock, students are able to invest deeply in their areas of study while still having access to faculty from across the School.
In my classes, it is my goal to give students the tools they need to develop a sustainable studio practice when they leave school. This involves formal expertise and an understanding of their place in the context of contemporary art. But even more importantly, I hope to give my students a safe environment to ambitiously take risks in their work. Many of our students hope to pursue a career as practicing artists. In my drawing program, students have the chance to create a community of creatives who will support them in both their successes and failures. I believe that facilitating an environment of safety enables students to find their voice and create work that will lead to lasting social change, both at UA Little Rock and in our community.

AAS: Clark, what’s up next for you?

CV: This is a busy year for me! I have upcoming projects on local, national and international levels. In our region, I have solo exhibitions scheduled for 2025 at UA Pulaski Tech in North Little Rock and at Ouachita Baptist University in Arkadelphia. Nationally, I have solo shows at Auric Gallery in Colorado Springs this October, and at the Peoria Art Guild in Peoria, Illinois in the spring of 2025. And finally, I have an upcoming residency at Space A in Kathmandu, Nepal – scheduled for June 2025. I will spend at least a month in Nepal, making work, exhibiting, exploring the landscape, and connecting with the community. In the coming year, I’m eager to connect with new people and to find new ways to invest in our art community here in Arkansas.