Glen Clark’s Trailing Edge Art

By F. Josephine Arrowood
Sun contributor
Visitors to Empire’s Glen Lake Library may have seen two posters that appear to be of 1930’s vintage, touting the glories of Sleeping Bear Bay and the Empire Bluff in muted blues, taupes and charcoal hues. Yet these retro-chic artworks are new, original creations of Traverse City native Glen Clark and his Outernet Arts company.
Of Sleeping Bear Bay, the first in the series, the self-taught artist says, “In my mind, I saw a white pine with island and beach — an iconic image that I’d wanted to reproduce for years.” For Glen, trees personify the spirit of this wild place. White pines in particular, he reflects, “draw us into the ‘zoosoul’ of the region, and remind us that we’re only here for a short time.”

“I feel like an archivist,” he says somewhat ruefully, trying to pass on images that may soon vanish forever from the Leelanau landscape. He has noticed more trees of our boreal forests that appear sickly or dying, possibly from high plywood factory and paper mill emissions in Wisconsin traveling across Lake Michigan.
His attraction to what he terms “trailing edge technology” of the mid-20th century led him to study vintage Swiss and French travel posters, and inspired his use of simple, stripped-down shapes and bold blocks of colors, meant to be viewed at a distance. In a nod to modern printing methods, he produces the posters on a wide-format printer from his computer, where he creates the original artworks.
One sign of Glen’s success in recreating the romantic atmosphere of bygone northern Michigan vacations came on the first day his work appeared in Glen Arbor’s Forest Gallery. A visitor saw them and said delightedly, “Oh, you had these old posters reprinted!”
In addition to the annual poster series, Glen is hard at work on Stereograf, a unique three-dimensional photographic project that allows the viewer an eye-popping take on some of the most gorgeous landscapes and scenes of the area.
Utilizing more retro technology that harkens back to 19th century physicist Sir Charles Wheatstone and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Glen photographs two images at slightly different angles, which are mounted side by side, then viewed through a device that draws the object together in the mind to create a scene with incredible depth and sense of immersion. “There’s a huge amount of visual syncopation the brain will accept,” Glen notes, although his low-tech approach with a single camera means that timing can be crucial in capturing images with similar light quality. He also jokes that he’s now starting to see everything stereoscopically.
Each postcard-sized Stereograf packet features five views and the folding, mailable viewer. Current offerings include the Leelanau County/Grand Traverse Bays packet and a Mackinaw Straits/Eastern U.P. series, while future works will feature wildflowers, champion trees, farmsteads of Sleeping Bear, and private commissions.
Glen Clark’s work is available at the Leelanau Historical Museum in Leland (256-7475), DeYoung’s in Traverse City (946-8021) and the Forest Gallery in Glen Arbor (334-3179). For more information, contact Glen at 342-0684 or e-mail him at outernet@charter.net.