Brian Clarke
The Art of Light/Paul
Greenhalgh, 2018.
Sainsbury Centre for
Visual Arts
Architecture and Material Practice, Katie Lloyd Thomas.
Water and Dreams; An Essay on the Imagination of Matter, Gaston Bachelard.
Properties of Matter
and Imagination
FUSION OF
PHYSICAL/METAPHYSICAL
Working Title : An Inquiry with a Material Practice
The poetics of glass as
a super-cooled liquid.
Molten Fluidity.
An organic flux frozen
for an instant.
Chaos and order, flow
and turbulence, pooling and shifting translucence.
Chemistry becomes
alchemy, the banality of the raw materials - sand, metal and minerals
– turn into a magical universe of the imagination. Perhaps this is
the key to Brian Clarke's stained glass; it embodies the fusion of
two things that normally don't mingle; the physical and metaphysical.
Botanical
Cosmological
Biographical
The screens are an
intense site of innovation and artistic consolidation. Some of the
screens are principally about the organic flow of forms derived from
nature; some of them deal with ideas that push into universal
concepts and have a symbolist, otherworldly ambiance; and some yet
their driving force incidents, memories and emotions that shaped the
artist's life.
The Modern World (the
artist's attitudes to)
Life
Violence
Mortality
Many of the screens are
highly specific to an incident or influence, the titles give us a
clue to the complex symbology at work and the intertwining of the
artist's personal response with wider perceptions about place.
Contrapuntal/Counterpoint
music introduces multiple melodies that are equally important.
Polyphony describes the
use of overlapping melodies.
For Clarke the concept
of a screen as a vehicle of artistic expression is not a new concept,
rather it clearly resonates back through his life, becoming part of
his artistic consciousness virtually from the start of his work in
glass.
Literal and Phenomenal
Transparency
Layering of
Planes/Layering of Spaces
Rowe and Slutzky 1982
What exactly is a
screen and what does it mean in the context of modernity?
A screen is
simultaneously a physical object and a complex conceptual metaphor.
We use screens to divide and to mask things off from each other, and
as boundaries/barriers to hide behind. At the same time, the screen
provides ways of looking at things/displaying; we screen films and we
screen people. We look through them, and they can act as a catalyst
that changes our vision of whatever is on the other side. In its
usage in art, a screen is automatically a series of images – a
diptych, triptych or polyptych – a sequence of free standing panels
that allows the artist to develop a narrative and aesthetic theme.
Screens divide up space
and make it function differently.
Alabaster windows
before glass. (contemporary windows by both Soulages/Sigmar
Polke/Iglesias
The Glass House
The screen as
emblematic of modernity.
Conceptually, the
sensibility at work in many early Modern buildings was one of space
divided by screen walls and windows. In this sense, the giant windows
at either end of Norman Foster's seminal Sainsbury Centre building
for example are light-screens.
The nature of Brian
Clarke's architectural practice, in which his core practice is
painting.
It is through painting
that I understand how to view architecture. It is through painting
that I can appreciate the rhythm of the poem. It is through painting
that I can appreciate and draw pleasure from the structure of a
well-composed sentence. And it is through painting that the
complexity of music makes itself understood to me. It is through
painting, in fact, that I am.
Brian Clarke, 1989.
I do not identify
mostly with painting, but I identify mostly with all other things
because of painting.
Brian Clarke, 2018.
Clarke is gripped by
the technology and engineering of how a building is made, but also by
the psychological function and its emotional impact, he refers to
himself as an architectural artist.
The medium of glass in
its modern form will only be seen when people have been sufficiently
exposed to it.
During the 20th
century – the age of specialisation – theorists and historians
were obsessed with separating out the arts disciplines, positioning
them in specific groups or classes, and then subjecting them to
philosophical discourse as to why they belonged there. In short, the
Anglo-Saxon world in particular artificially created the categories
of art, design and craft, and then intellectually policed them.
Stained glass was inevitably positioned as a craft, with all the
confused cultural and economic consequences of this class allocation.
Clarke with the
complexity of his practice and interests has led to embrace the
concept of gesamtkunstwerk (total works of art). A concept first
championed by Richard Wagner, who perceived opera as a means of
combining all of the arts, including music, and literature, in order
to completely surround the spectator. In the visual arts, it is
essentially about generating a complete art environment, in which all
elements are orchestrated into an aesthetic whole.
Charles Rennie
Mackintosh, Frank Lloyd Wright, designers of the De Stijl movement.
Contemporary
Opera/Ballet/Dance : Choreography Wayne McGregor
I first consciously
noticed in 1977 that a 'duality' or 'contradiction' existed in my
work. During that year I made the pictures entitled Dangerous
Visions. These ten paintings were in large part born out of the Punk
Rock movement and carried a nihilistic attack upon the orthodoxies of
the day. They are in part an attempt to undermine conventional ideas
about art and beauty, whilst also attempting to convey primary
emotion. In the same period I designed a number of stained glass
windows and free standing pieces, some of which are abstracted
Arcadian landscapes in celebration of an as yet undefined optimism.
Brian Clarke, 2018.
The Orthogonal Grid
Interrupted by Organic Material
Neo Baroque, Postmodern rendered/computer generated surfaces.
New Forms of Media Aesthetics, Peter Greenaway
Much of his oeuvre, and
his deliberate disturbance of rhythms, of interruption as a tool in
art, and about the reconciliation of contrary forces. We encounter
this visual dialectic, of interjection and then reconciliation,
frequently across the range of his imagery. The artist often creates
a grid-like, geometric pattern across the picture frame, and then he
interjects lines and marks, often as a more flowing, organic nature,
to break this regularity.
The Interrupted
Grid/Motifs
Interjection of Lines
and Marks/Anomalies
The Fusion of Organic
and Artificial Phenomena
Incidents in his life
are fundamental to the mood of the work.
The screen confronts us
with the timeless ubiquity of death and presents the silent anonymity
that follows the chattering individuality of life.
Chill Out, a giant
collection of skulls referenced from a catacomb, Subiaco, near Rome.
Grisaille
Pointillism
Divisionism
Dot Matrix, (The
Swimmer, Clarke) see also Johan Thorn Prikker/Sigmar Polke
(Girlfriends)
The concept of
juxtaposing dots and marks of pure colour.
Mesh Topologies
Despite his deep
interest in first generation abstraction and, most notably,
Constructivism and De Stijl, Clarke has never accepted pure
abstraction as a given. He has always been a symbolist.
Calligraphic drawings
on sheet lead.
An idiom of sheet lead,
with stained glass, relief drawing, attachments and sgraffito-style
mark making.
The artist has through
the leaded works revealed how the physical becomes the metaphysical,
by turning lead – a pragmatic material in the stained glass
process, a necessary physical component of the discipline – into
poetic expression, into imagery saturated with universal and personal
iconography.
All art is
phenomenological, every aspect of the celebration that is art comes
out of this encounter between two physical actualities, the material
of art and the body of the spectator. Everything else – the poetry,
ideas, emotions – emerges from this basic fact. The touchable
physical stuff, the glass and lead that impacts our senses, our
bodies.
Night Orchids
Embodying the idea of
metamorphosis , the process whereby the human and the natural fuse
together.
The orchid also has a
twilight feeling of hanging between life and death, between beauty
and decay, and as such it reflects a central theme in much of
Clarke's recent work; mortality.
The orchid itself has
been dissected and disassembled, but it is still has the unsettling,
heady ability to simulate human sexuality.
There is another kind
of fragility to many of these images, or should I say to many of
these flower. They appear to have been wounded, bruised. Indeed, they
would seem to be bruises blossoming before one's eyes – Fleurs du
mal of an intensely physical kind.
Robert Storr.
Francis Bacon
The Logic of Sensation
Gilles Deleuze
Memento Mori
The inevitability of
things.
The banality to evil,
and of beauty in destiny.
Not to constantly
remind oneself of mortality is to reduce the intensity and urgency of
the living moment. It is essential part of the human condition.
Brian Clarke, 2018.
Memory as a tool in the
processes of the imagination. One can look at Clarke's work and be
moved by it without knowing the stories buried in it, but the
narratives are a vital cerebral tool for the artist; they drive him
along and affect his formal decision -making, contributing to the
atmosphere of finished pieces. His use of memory, in fact, directly
connects him back to the intellectual formation of modern art.
The use of memory as a
conceptual tool.
'Every instant has a
thousand memories'. Henri Bergson.
Bergson is implying
that we constantly carry our past experience around with us, that it
impacts every aspect of our normative experience, everything we look
at, touch, hear or taste. Our memories interpenetrate the fabric of
our consciousness in support of this notion, Marc Auge has recently
suggested that 'the past is never wholly occluded either on the
individual or the collective level'.
Memory is a means by
which the artist's subjective consciousness can be harnessed and used
to impact, inflect and transform the objective formal processes of
artistic creation. It is a principal tool with which the artist can
explore the nature of the human.
Bergson pointed out
that one could take a million photographs of a room, from every
conceivable angle and level of detail, but these photographs could
never capture the experience one has of entering the room. In other
words, there are aspects of human experience we cannot capture
photographically; we must find other means of describing the world.
Objective and
subjective visions of life - and death – come together in this
fusion of history and memory. Ultimately, it is up to us to make
connections and develop themes.
Metaphysical Poets,
John Donne, 1572-1631.
A Valediction of
Weeping.
Christopher Walmarth,
Sculpture, using metal and glass through the minimalist idiom with
poetical content.
Liminality
Numinous
Spiritual
Transendental
A poem about the
absolutely human trait of finding a way to move through tragedy
towards hope and the ongoing nature of love; a determination not to
forget the euphoria of life in the midst of suffering and
desperation.
Explorations on
temporality, loss and mourning.
Objects and words come
to stand for many things and the personal becomes the universal.
The simultaneity of
meaning , that easy shift that carries us from the personal, everyday
life to spiritual values of universal themes.
I don't want to do
anything that isn't at least an attempt to explore what it is to be a
human being.
Brian Clarke, 2018.
UEA Brian Clarke in
conversation with Paul Greenhalgh, 2018.
Dangerous Visions,
slashed canvas Clarke acknowledges the work of Fontana.
Visual and visionary
poet interested in images of deadly beauty, conception and death.
The Faures, colour and
grids/grissaille as a membranous veil, a spiritual body.
Erotics of the screened
body, dominatrix, ways of sensing the body.
Lilies for Linda
stained glass envisioned as a portal/an in-between, an existentialism
from the living to the dead.
Trans-Illumination,
glass as a kinetic material activated by the movement of light and
that of the viewer.
Alchemy and the urban
fabric of the medieval mind. ( the leaded skulls beyond the tradition
of the medium)
Beginning with a visual
idea, a collage of feeling affect, and the honest collision of
experiences.
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