Fly Artist

Richard Clarke

From a very early age Richard Clarke wanted to be a scientist, fortune-teller or Prime Minister of Tonga.

But it soon became evident to his parents and teachers that his ambition and natural ability were mutually unsympathetic.

By the time he was finally allowed to enter the secondary education system (thanks largely to the timely donation by his father of a new polo stables wing to St Judas’ College School for Girls with Dwarfism) he had lowered his sights and focused on a career in quantity surveying or hairdressing.

The pressures of trying to learn to read and pretending to be a short girl proved too much for the teenager’s already over-taxed mind and in 1975, after failing all six end of year exams (including sewing theory, remedial home economics and adding up) his parents moved to the United States of America where Richard was enrolled at the University of South Carolina double majoring in Flea Circus Management and Usury.

In 1976 he completed his PhD and returned to Australia in search of a flea circus or bank to manage.

It soon became evident that Richard would have to again reduce his expectations.

He tried to get into sewage farming and failed.

His attempts to begin a career in naturopathy and supermarket trolley collection also proved futile.

Finally he confronted his last two options - suicide or advertising.

Unable to find a suitable length of rope, he became a copywriter at DMB&B.

To that point Richard’s goldfish-like attention span and puerile sense of humour had proved to be an impediment to progress.

But in advertising these qualities, along with his inability to use big words, made him an instant professional and social success.

By 1984 he was the agency’s youngest-ever creative director and in 1986, in partnership with Russell Bowtell, he left to begin Western Australia’s newest agency, Bowtell Clarke.

Over his decades in advertising Richard promoted everything from potatoes to politicians and the nine things in between.

Even more surprisingly, much of his work in radio, television, press and print became award-winning and he published three books on advertising, none of which has won a Pulitzer prize, or been read in its entirety.

Not surprisingly.

After 20 years, the allure of advertising banality - selling the unnecessary to the undiscerning, and making the unremarkable irresistible - began to wane.

In 1997, while looking for a unique souvenir art piece in New York he realised that there, even in this world capital of creativity and consumerism, there was very little original artwork that appealed to him or was affordable.

There was nothing that was funny, instantly intelligible and would fit in with his living room colour scheme.

And so Fly Art was conceived.

Over the following years, in collaboration with several far more talented artists, Richard set about creating the first single-themed series of accessible, real-fly-based, humorous art, created on earth.

“So what?” you may well ask.