Wired Gallery: Travel as Muse, May 23 – June 21, 2026 profile: Marcia Clark

Marcia Clark Paints the Edge of the World
by Lynn Woods

“Travel As Muse,” a group show of paintings and drawings
currently on view at High Falls’ Wired Gallery, grew out of
the art tours gallery owner Sevan Melikyan has been
conducting since 2018. On the last trip he organized to
Istanbul three participants who happened to be artists
shared their sketches with the group over dinner, which
triggered an idea: “They need to show this work to the
public,” he recalls thinking. The result is “Travel As Muse,”
an exhibition of drawings, watercolors and acrylic and oil
paintings by eight local artists who were inspired by the
tours. Besides Istanbul, the destinations they sketched
and painted are Paris, Venice, Sicily and Malta.
One of the participating artists is Longyear member Marcia
Clark, who contributed six paintings, including of Hagia
Sophia, the harbor, and the mountainous landscape of
Cappadocia (painted in sections of canvas mounted on a
freestanding structure of foamcore). “The work all evolved
from ink drawings done in a tiny sketchbook,” she says. "I
took scads of photos, and the paintings were a balancing
act between the facts and my initial strong impression
recorded in the drawings.”
Travel to far-flung places has long been integral to her
practice as a painter. In 2022, she traveled to the
Mediterranean and the Arctic, places she has visited
multiple times. In Turkey, Greece and Italy, she painted

architectural sites as well as landscapes, while in the
Arctic the obvious point of interest were the glaciers and
the immense expanse of uninterrupted space. Painting ice
also had its appeal: “I was interested in observing the
structure of the ice and its quality of light, as well as the
simplicity of a color scheme based on blue. I was also
attracted to the bright dots of color in the landscape made
by communities of little houses mainly belonging to the
Inuit population.”
A residency in Upernavik in 2007 was her introduction to
the region. “I flew to Greenland with a group of scientists
who were on their way back to the ice sheet that covers
80% of the country, and their excitement was contagious,”
she recalls. “After the residency in Upernavik, I flew to
Ilulissat, where there is an ice fiord that you can just about
walk to. I’ve returned to Ilulissat many times and have
done paintings on site weather permitting. I usually stayed
at the Kunstmuseum”—on her first visit she met the
director, who offered her a residency the next year—“and
had a show there in 2013.”
Since there are no direct flights to Greenland, Marcia
usually gets there via Iceland, where she’s had
residencies in Reykjavik and in the north in a village that
was once the country’s herring capital. “Though I’ve
managed to find residencies at many places I’ve been
interested in, if I’ve discovered a place where I want to set

up I will look for accommodations regardless if there’s a
possible residency nearby.”
Her first close encounter with the elemental sublime was
In 1971, when she was an artist in residence at the
Appalachian Mountain Club’s hut at Lake of the Clouds in
the Presidential Range of the White Mountains. She had
to hike in with her supplies. “I do gravitate to
unencumbered views,” she says. “Above the timberline I
could see peak after peak, on a clear day all the way to
Portland. There was arctic vegetation, and the weather
was extreme. I loved it up there!”
After meeting an observer of the weather station at the
summit of Mount Washington, she was invited to help with
the planning of a museum about the mountain. She
painted the backgrounds for dioramas of the mountain’s
historic sites and painted a glacier for the geology
exhibition, using an illustrated book about Glacier Bay, in
Alaska, as a reference as well as sketches made by
Frederic Church, which were in the archives of the Cooper
Hewitt Museum.
Marcia had previously developed an appreciation of
Thomas Cole after moving part time to New Paltz in the
late 1960s and discovering the same landscape he had
painted 150 years before. “I saw how beautifully and
poetically he studied nature in his sketches and how
important it was to the outcome,” she says. “It made me

ask myself, are you looking? Well, look deeper!” She
retraced the 19 th -century artist’s travels in the Catskills and
White Mountains and wrote about it in an article published
in Smithsonian Magazine.
Large paintings of architectural sites in Istanbul (bound for
the show at Wired) and Sicily along with panoramic
landscapes of immense mountain ranges, rock-ribbed
cliffs along the sea, precipitous rocky peaks, and the
flanks of glaciers were arranged along the walls and
shelves of her skylit studio on the second floor of her
house in Rifton during my recent visit. The loose
brushstrokes, which precisely describe the convex and
concave shapes defining the complex landforms, have the
fluidity of watercolor, conveying the effects of light and
atmosphere. Rather than take in the scene in one glance,
her paintings invite the eye to travel. More paintings fill the
downstairs storage room, including ones of the
Mendenhall glacier done on topographical maps. To
capture the panoramic sweep of her subject, Marcia
frequently paints triptychs and diptychs and sometimes
extends the painting in sections outside the rectangle, as
she did in a work of the Cornish cliffs that hangs in the
living room (which she showed at Longyear a few months’
back).
There are also paintings of the local woods and scenes
from Riverside Park, some of which have the vertigo-

inducing viewpoint of her landscapes; an early painting,
from the 1980s, depicts a vertical slice of lower Manhattan
viewed from the 104 th floor of the World Trade Center.
After earning a BFA from Yale, her work “was done almost
entirely on site and was mostly small in scale,” she recalls.
“It was always based on observation, or should I say,
perception, because what you see has to be interpreted.
There is the view, but you also have a point of view.” She
also holds an MFA from SUNY New Paltz and is a
longtime member and director of Blue Mountain Gallery.
“Travel as Muse” runs through June 21 and provides an
excellent opportunity to view Marcia’s interpretations of
Turkey.
 https://www.thewiredgallery.com/