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Brian Clarke
The Art of Light/Paul Greenhalgh, 2018. Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts
Properties of Matter and Imagination
FUSION OF PHYSICAL/METAPHYSICAL
WORK : An Inquiry with 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 Modem 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 specialization - 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.
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