As well as being an experienced painter of oils, acrylics and watercolours for many years, Clive is perfecting a technique of painting with watercolour on canvas.

Born in Melbourne 1951, Clive Sinclair commenced serious art training in 1973, studied art overseas in 1975, and on his return undertook further study with John Lennox and subsequently with tonal realist Max Casey.

Uncommon in traditional Australian realism is his reductionist or minimal attitude to evoking the landscape, historically rooted in Impressionism and here specifically influenced by Clarice Beckett’s limpid washes and ambiguous solidity of form – hence, both artists echoing some of abstraction’s formal concerns.

However, what is Clive’s own vision is his richly redolent colour mixes evident in both the disciplines of oil and watercolour, perhaps with a certain higher pitched resonance in his oils, and his finely tuned tonal washes – which never degenerate into flat field colouring.

Here his minimalism stands alone as it boasts an energetic solidity of sculptural form, an economy of gesture, and a willingness to not push aside representation for superficial gains in overall emotional effect in the viewer – in his minimalist pictures the very lack of specifics creates pictorial substance rather than vacuousness.

As Clive’s simplified painterly style communicates only essential pictorial elements as a code to a greater emotional memory in the viewer, it is not surprising that a particular landscape aspect will be instantly recognised – quite and achievement for any minimalist work. One is equally transported by the atmospheric light, quiet moods and nature’s implied narrative.

He is a member of the Watercolour Society of Victoria, The Twenty Melbourne Painters Society, The Melbourne Five, the Australian Guild of Realist Artists, and is a Victorian Art Society Signatory.

He has taught at the Victorian Art Society, Peninsula Art Society, and Hampton Community Centre, and is currently teaching at the Mentone Art Group and The Brighton Art Society. And he has won numerous awards.