ABOUT ME

If it matters, I grew up in Texas. First on the coast around Galveston, then moving to Fort Worth and later to Dallas where I lived until 1988 when my wife Vicky Bowles and I moved to Florida so I that could go ocean racing on catamarans and she could work for the National Enquirer and the tabloids. We did quite a lot of both.

I studied art at the University of Texas at Arlington graduating in 1972 with a B.F.A. in painting. That was not going to prove to be a lucrative career path. After a short time the the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts in 1974 I returned to Texas looking for work that paid. Like many of my fellow art students, I ended up in the commercial graphic arts. I later moved on to typesetting when I discovered that typesetting systems, and in the 1980s, that graphics computers and I got along very well. Very well indeed it seemed. I would spend most of the rest of my working career working in, and soon running electronic prepress departments for high-end color printing companies.

After leaving music aside for sailing in Florida, I eventually returned to music making after semi-retiring in 2012. Being unsuccessful trying to start a band locally, I decided to work alone, making improvizational recordings in my crude home studio. I gradually developed an unconventional approach to both the guitar and to music as a whole.  I released my first solo album Hear Us Through the Hole in Thin Air in late 2020.

I am now semi-retired, still working for Naples Motorsports, the exotic car dealer in Naples where I've been for the past eleven years. Vicky and I live in the Fort Myers area of Southwest Florida along with our two cats, Jack and Dougie and our Anatolian Shepherd Gus.

CLARKE BLACKER