Fred Clarke – (d. January 8, 1992) – Master color separator for the screenprinting industries. Fred became interested in photography while serving his country in United States Navy. Afterward, Fred founded an offset printing business in Dallas, Texas. His company printed greeting cards and other paper items using the four-color process. Clarke’s wife, Pat Clarke, ran the office, and Fred spent all of his time in production.

Producing color separations was quite different in Clarke’s early career. The original art was photographed using color separation filters. This process produced four continuous-tone panchromatic color negatives. Then each negative was transferred by projection to film positives using masking techniques. As the business grew, Clarke would invest in a high-resolution scanner that simplified the process of color separation.

As Joe Clarke (no relation) stated in his book, Control Without Confusion – Troubleshooting Screenprinted Process Color, “Fred Clark’s…years of experience in lithography and all forms of camera work, as well as scanner separation, quantify Clarke as an expert in his field. Perhaps his forte is his ability to sort out his clients’ goals, process this information, and return quality film work for the textile screenprinter.”

In the early 1980s, Clarke received requests for four-color separations from textile screenprinters. At the time four-color process was an innovation for textile printers, and few printers had any real experience in producing process color work. Clarke invested the time to understand the difference between printing on smooth white paper and rough, multi-colored fabrics. His work paid off, and soon Clarke was busy with work from screenprinters.

One of his first clients for textile separations was Bill Wainner, who was with the Dallas-based shop T-Shirt Authority. When Wainer was tasked with printing the Legendary Nocona Boot Series. The award-winning prints went viral, and Fred Clarke became famous overnight as the go-to separator for the screenprinting industries. It also helped that Wainner gave references to others.

He would eventually work with Andy Anderson of Anderson Studios in Nashville, who won a Golden Squeegee Award for the first four-color process job he printed – a reproduction of a Kenny Rogers’ album cover.

When Wainner closed T-Shirt Authority, he turned the Nocona program over to Mark Coudray in San Luis Obispo, California. The Nocana series became the foundation for Joe Clarke’s definitive book on Four-Color Textile printing, “Control Without Confusion,” in 1986.

When Fred decided to retire, he did not want to shut down the business and leave screenprinters without a resource for color separations. After several years of searching, he finally decided to turn the business over to Greg Davis, who continues to run Serichrome Seps today.