Leelanau On The Wall: Glen Clark And Those Famous Posters

Maybe you own one. If you don’t, you’ve almost certainly seen one.

Glen Clark’s Leelanau County travel posters might be the most prolific and widely enjoyed works of local art. Whether dressed up (elegantly matted and framed in an upscale home’s living room) or dressed down (bare and taped to the wall of a teen’s bedroom), these posters hang in hundreds of homes and businesses throughout the Grand Traverse region and beyond.

Clark, 69, is proud to know his work is appreciated by so many people.

“Nobody, including myself, thought that they’d remain so popular after all these years,” he tells The Ticker. “I don’t sell quite as many as I used to, but there’s still a loyal following of people who love them. It’s a wonderful thing that I was able to convey something.”

Clark grew up in Traverse City and studied music theory and composition in college. After some travels, he eventually came back to the region and married Glen Arbor artist Beth Bricker. They settled in Glen Arbor, where Bricker’s family was deeply rooted in the artist community. Her mother, Ananda Bricker, founded Lake Street Studios/Forest Gallery and helped start the Glen Arbor Arts Center.

“We were able to purchase a place out there back when somebody like you or I could still do that,” he says.

Clark, who with Beth raised daughters Ab and Hannah in Glen Arbor, always had an affinity for the big bold lines and bright colors of the travel posters that he saw in his youth.

“When I was a young lad, I was very impressed by old travel posters when I saw them in magazines and books,” he says. “We didn't go to the galleries in the big city very often, but when I'd come across them in a publication, I was always struck by their directness and the colors. And that stayed with me over the years, percolating down below somewhere.”

Clark toyed with the thought of designing his own, and even carried around with him a watercolor sketch of what would later become the first in the series (Sleeping Bear Bay). He ended up spending more than a decade working in various administrative roles at the Bay Area Transportation Authority (BATA), and it was during that time that the posters went from concept to reality.

“At BATA, I began working with some graphics software to do maps and presentations and became aware that it might be an avenue to design the poster,” he said. “Being able to design and experiment with colors and things made it much easier to get things going…even the slightest changes in adjacent colors can make a big difference in how it gets to a viewer.”

In his free time he designed, tweaked and finalized Sleeping Bear Bay and first printed it in 2004. They decided to hang one in Forest Gallery (where they are still sold today), and an elderly customer mistook it for an early 20th-century design.

“One of the old-time summer resorters came in and said, ‘Oh, you had that old poster reprinted,’” he says. “So that was a nice validation that I was really able to capture the look (of the vintage posters).”

He followed Sleeping Bear Bay with Empire Bluff and Good Harbor relatively quickly. The designs came from a place of deep familiarity developed over many years.

“We spent most of our time outside, out and about in the lakeshore. We lived in the middle of it, so that’s what we did. I was familiar with all of these places, and I could feel a certain connection and affinity with them,” he said. “They are iconic places, but there’s also a personality there that I connected with. There was a character to the elements, the trees especially, I think.”

The initial three posters were displayed in the gallery in Glen Arbor, of course, but he also got them in other locations, including the now-closed DeYoung’s (which sold art supplies, wallpaper, frames and more) in the heart of downtown Traverse City.  

“DeYoung's, especially, really sparked things early on. They put all three in their front window, which was right across from the first Traverse City Film Festival in 2005,” he says. “It was fantastic exposure.”

It was also in DeYoung’s framing department that Clark first realized how much esteem some folks had for his designs.

“I was stunned when I went in and they showed me pieces that had $400 frames on them,” he says. “Somebody from New York decided to buy your posters,’ they said.’”

In 2011 he made a new series of three: Glen Lake, Pyramid Point and North Manitou Island.

“I'd been asked for years to come up with a new one, even though I felt that I might have done it all with the first three, frankly,” he says. “And as I saw more and more people come out doing it, using that style, I wasn't sure that there was room for me to do any more. But after enough requests…I started working on that second series.”

Over the course of 20 years, he’s printed more than 6,000 of all six posters combined. Now, with his large printer broken, he wants to switch to a screen-printing process.

“We're just in the early stages, but the idea is to have that working by next summer,” he says. “They’ll be produced and put out as art pieces, rather than a poster.”

It’s hard to say if Clark will ever make more Leelanau (or other) travel posters. But no matter what, he’ll keep making something.

“Whether there are more posters in that style, more pieces like that coming, I'm not sure at this point. I've been in my ruminating mind, waiting for the right moment – it’s the kind of approach that I've taken all these years,” he says. “I'm working on a 3D piece, a piece of sculpture. And there's always music being thought of and made.”

As for the posters that already exist, Clark enjoys the though that they may become more iconic over time. 

"I guess there's a part of me that hopes that they might become, or at least the good ones, might become classic,” he says. “That might be playing out."