Clark Gussin’s kids knew that if their dad took them to the beach, he’d have his camera and sketchbook waiting in the car. “Wherever we went, I made sure it was a place I could work on my art.” Clark Gussin is an artist whose paintings evoke a time and place long past. Rural settings, cowboys, and farms occupy much of his work, including still life, portraits and landscapes. Like one of his major influences, Norman Rockwell, Clark’s technique is firmly rooted in Naturalism, art that depicts realistic objects in a natural setting. In spite of a resurgence of interest in Naturalism (also called Realism), when Clark was studying art, he had a hard time finding instructors who were interested in teaching it. Abstract art, along with pop art and expressionism, were the overriding aesthetics of the time. 
As a boy, Clark spent summers at his grandparents’ farm in North Carolina. “It was hard work. My family plowed with mules, milked cows – I can remember them churning butter on the porch.” During the school year, Clark’s family lived in Washington D.C., where he frequently visited the National Museum. His parents noticed Clark’s talent when he was very young, and encouraged him; at the age of eleven, Clark studied oil painting at the Corcoran Gallery Art School in D.C., where he stayed for two years. Public schools at that time offered a much more comprehensive curriculum in art and music than they do today, and Clark was able to spend time learning art as part of his regular studies.
After high school, Clark was drafted and sent to Viet Nam. With his G.I. Bill, he moved to California and attended the California College of Arts and Crafts (now the California College of the Arts) in Oakland. In spite of the financial help of the Bill and a scholarship, Clark still had to work full-time to pay his tuition. “I took classes in photography, painting, illustration – I had a lot of units when I graduated!” After graduation, Clark pounded the pavement, looking for work in the Bay Area during the recession of the mid 1970s. Even so, he turned down a job as an illustrator for Rolling Stone because they planned to move to New York City just few months later. “I was a Californian by then. I would have hated New York.” Clark eventually found fulltime and freelance jobs, but when an opportunity came along for a job with IBM, he took it. “I was married with a growing family. I kept asking, ‘it pays how much? Every week?’” Clark has stayed at IBM for thirty-one years, working at a variety of jobs ranging from illustration, photography, video production, and graphic design for software interfaces. “I’ve had to reinvent myself many times,” he says. That’s what it takes to be a survivor!
Like another one of Clark’s influences, Andrew Wyeth, his choice of subjects displays a deep affection for rural people, their lives, hardships and unexpected joys revealed in intimate portraits such as Evelyn’s Daughter, which is in the permanent collection at Santa Clara’s Triton Museum. Attention to detail appears in paintings like Cherokee Matriarch, where every expression a woman has ever had shows in her deeply wrinkled face. In Sole Brothers, a pair of boots lies on a wooden patio like a couple of comical old men. In the drawing A-Maized, humble ears of field corn, arranged on a wooden table, achieve a solemn dignity: this indispensable plant has kept body and soul together for unknown centuries. 
With a fulltime job and a family that includes four children, Clark is careful to carve time out of his busy schedule to paint and draw. One of his elaborately detailed drawings can take up to four months to complete; he has to be persistent to keep working on something until it’s done. “My dad used to say, ‘Everyone has the same amount of time: twenty-four hours!’”
One of Clark’s difficulties is finding the time – and energy – to take care of the business end of art: the marketing, publicizing, planning, and selling. “I just want to paint,” he sighs. “Most artists who are successful have someone else doing the business tasks for them.” For example, Andrew Wyeth’s wife Betsy was his agent and handled financial matters so Wyeth could keep painting his masterpieces.
“Strive for excellence in your work. Everything else follows that. Never stop learning and improving yourself in art. Find your voice.” Clark says that artists should look at their work and ask themselves, would someone looking at my work be able to describe me as a person without ever having met me?
You can view more of Clark’s watercolors, oil paintings and drawings at his website, www.clarkgussinart.com, and read his blog at http://clarkgussinart.blogspot.com/. All photographs courtesy of Clark Gussin.
