This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  The following note comes from Nathaniel Floyd:
I knew Clark and his second wife, Virginia, in Weston, Vermont in the 1970s. He was an extraordinary person who embraced objects headed for the dump and the rag and bone shop of the heart. Clark loved wrought iron and early tools that mechanization and electronics had made obsolete on farms and in workshops around the US. He educated naïve persons like me that these early crafts were worthy of artistic interest and appreciation. In showing me a decoy or windmill weights or door stops or bookends, Clark told me, "You can see here the form is right. It's the form." Nothing handmade in wood or iron escaped his exceeding curiosity. He was a picker, a dealer, a collector, and a woodcarver, but more than these things he was an advocate and artist in the American folk art tradition. He bought and sold wrought iron and carvings to support himself and Virginia in a converted barn where heat vanished as the Vermont temperature plummeted. Carving whales in his Weston barn was Clark's art work in the tradition of American folk art and artistic crafts.
Raised in Old Lyme, New York, and Bermuda, Clark shunned the fine art affectations, or so he thought, of his famous father's generation in CT. He divorced his wife of the time and journeyed to VT with Virginia. It was a new start, but Clark knew it was his destiny to discover the forgotten crafts and handmade objects in America's past when skilled men and women loved the things they made and celebrated their work in design and in form. Forms from the workshops of America's past. This is where Clark felt he was true to himself.... |
Biography from Copley Fine Art Auctions, LLC:
| | Clark Voorhees, the son of
Clark Greenwood Voorhees (1871-1933), one of the founders of the Old
Lyme, Connecticut Art Colony. Clark enlisted the aid of Wildfowler
decoy founder, Ted Mulliken, in nearby Old Saybrook, Connecticut to
initially aid in the carving of his whales. His whale carving business
was later moved to its permanent home in Vermont. His marine mammal
carvings are best known for being sold through the Four Winds Craft
Guild on Nantucket. |
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