Brian Clarke : Properties of Matter and Imagination (Working Text)

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 20^th 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.