John Clark, 64, is an artist, writer and creator of the Indy zine “pLopLop.” He has a thing for transforming old paintings. He might take a thrifted painting of a sailboat, for example, and paint a colorful bird peeking over its sail.
On May 9 and May 10, you can enter into Clark’s playful, surrealistic world at “I Painted Too Much!, a Pop-up Show and Sale” featuring nearly 400 paintings, plus drawings, sketchbooks and memorabilia at Storage Space Gallery.
If you go
I Painted Too Much!
Art show and sale by John Clark
🗓️ 6-10 p.m. May 9 and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. May 10
📍 Storage Space Gallery, 121 E 34th St., Indianapolis
🎟️ Free
For Clark, there’s no precise line you can draw between collecting and creating. “I guess I’ve always enjoyed collecting canvases, and even the slightest little thing can turn it into a surrealist image,” he said. “I guess that’s the best way to explain it.” Of course, he’s painted numerous empty canvases as well.
Over the past few decades, he’s painted many more than he can give away or sell, and many ended up in his house in Grace Tuxedo Park, a neighborhood on the Near Eastside, which he owned for the past 25 years.
In early March 2025, with the help of friends, many of them artists, Clark went through the daunting task of quickly cleaning out this house to get it ready for sale. He now lives with his partner, Janet Fry, in their house near the Downtown Canal.
“It was nice to see a bunch of artists coming together at his place to help out their fellow artist,” said Brent Lehker, who pulled up the carpet in the house. But nobody wanted the artwork and other items found there to get tossed in the dumpster along with the carpet.
A fan of Clark’s work, Lehker runs Storage Space Gallery. He was happy to schedule a show and sale of the salvaged items when the idea was proposed to him by Indy-based entrepreneur and developer Tom Battista.
Storage Space has featured Clark’s artwork before, but this upcoming show might just resemble a moving sale as much as an exhibition. It will consist of Clark’s watercolors, surrealist drawings on old Indianapolis blueprints, paintings on canvas, drawings and sketchbooks — all retrieved from his old house. You’ll also find original rock posters, mix tape cassettes and other ephemera.
The art is expected to be priced so that anyone can go home with a John Clark painting.
‘pLopLop,’ Vonnegut and Bukowski
Clark hopes that the pop-up show will inspire people to make art, just like he has been inspired by his artist heroes.
Keep that in mind if you’re lucky enough to find one of his sketchbooks for sale. Looking through them, you just might find hints of his literary and artistic influences, a drawing of Kurt Vonnegut here, a painting of Charles Bukowski there, while some of his paintings might make you think of the European surrealist and dadaist painters who gained prominence after World War I.
Clark counts German painter and writer Max Ernst among his greatest influences. In Ernst’s paintings and collages a birdlike character called Loplop often appears. One day in the early 1990s, this bird got into Clark’s head. That is, one day, he was fooling around, daydreaming, and he put a “p” in front of the “L.” And thus “pLopLop,” what some might call a legendary local literary zine, was born.
The first edition came out in 1992. Its ethos was decidedly do-it-yourself. It was saddle stapled — often with hand painted embellishments to the covers. Despite, or because of this aesthetic, Clark was able to attract some of the best-known writers on the planet as contributors, including Charles Bukowski, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Eileen Myles, Wanda Coleman and Kurt Vonnegut.
“pLopLop” was, in effect, as much a surrealist canvas as it was a literary zine. Or, as Clark, calls it, an antholozine.
Alongside the poetry, prose and oddball personal reflections to be found in pLopLop, you could find a healthy selection of Clark’s doodles. But most of all, it was the covers that set “pLopLop” apart, covers that Clark often hand-painted.
The work published in those pages was accessible, unpretentious, and funny — the same things you can say about his own artwork. Opening up “pLopLop #3,” for example, you’d find Charles Bukowski expounding on the subject of poop.
Clark got the legendary writer into the pages of “pLopLop” by writing a letter to him with a request. “The reason why it was called the “duh turd issue” is because I’d asked him, ‘You’re like the poet laureate of defecation, can you write something?’” he said. “And it was a glorious celebration of just defecation.”
At the time Clark worked as a bookseller in Borders Books near Castleton. Borders went bankrupt and ceased to exist in 2011.
Sue Kennedy, 74, who was the manager of that location, recalls that time well.
“When I signed on as manager in 1992 I found a cohesive, creative group of readers, collectors and aspiring writers,” she said. “John Clark brought his own imaginative sensibility to the mix when he joined the staff, contributing to Open Borders poetry readings and launching ‘pLopLop #1.’ It blended local contributions, including from staff, with amazing responses John got from writers like Vonnegut. And clearly it has stood the test of time from those early roots!”
For Clark it was a dream job: “It was really sort of an early form of what is now known as placemaking — having a community place where people get together and can read poetry or just read together and talk.”
Clark was able to sell “pLopLop” at that Borders store, and have pLopLop-themed events there.
“pLopLop,” like Borders, was not fully a creature of the internet age. It was only published intermittently in the 2000s and beyond. That is to say, the extremely tactile magazine never really migrated online.
‘Just do transformations’
But the same spirit that animated “pLopLop” animates his current work as an artist and guru to aspiring artists of all ages he meets through his art workshops with Big Car Collaborative, where he is a co-founder and member. That is to say, the spirit of “pLopLop” is doing just fine offline, thank you very much. Although pLopLop isn’t widely available, it is available to view at the Central Library Special Collections room.
Taylor Lewandowski, who is the owner of Dream Palace Books, was one of the artists that helped Clark move out of his house. When Lewandowski was 16, he interviewed Clark as part of a documentary project for Big Car Gallery. He interviewed Clark again for NUVO in 2022. Now, Lewandowski hopes to help create an archive for “pLopLop.”
Clark prefers art to be spontaneous, engaging and — above all — fun. This is his guiding principle in the art workshops he’s led.
“Rather than having to do something perfect, you can just do transformations,” Clark said.
During the workshops, Clark asks participants to create drawings, short stories or poems, and provides guidance on making zines. One of these activities is creating an Exquisite Corpse, a chance-based art-making technique — where a group of participants collectively create a work of art, often without viewing the entire work while it’s being made.
“There are two things that drive John Clark and are key to understanding his work: experimentation and encouragement,” said Fry, his partner and an artist. “These two qualities explain his love of the Beat poets and the art of the Surrealists, but also his love for the Indy arts community. He lives to play and experiment and to encourage others to do the same.”
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Dan Grossman is a Mirror Indy freelance contributor. You can reach him at grossmandanieljames@gmail.com.
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