Brian Clarke (speedway)

Brian Clarke (born 2 July 1953) is a British painter, architectural artist and printmaker, known for his large-scale stained glass and mosaic projects, symbolist paintings, set designs, and collaborations with major figures in Modern and contemporary architecture.

Born to a working-class family in the north of England, and a full-time art student on scholarship by age 13, Clarke came to prominence in the late 1970s as a painter and figure of the Punk movement and designer of stained glass. By the early 1980s he had become a major figure in international contemporary art, the subject of several television documentaries and a café society regular. He is known for his architectonic art, prolific output in various media, friendships with key cultural figures, and polemical lectures and interviews.

His practice in architectural and autonomous stained glass, often on a monumental scale, has led to successive innovation and invention in the development of the medium. This includes the creation of stained glass without lead and the subsequent pioneering of a 'dramatically enhanced Pointillism' in glass, as well as the creation of sculptural stained glass works, analogous to collage, made primarily or entirely of lead. The latter two advances are described as having taken stained glass as an art form to its zero-point in each direction: absolute transparency and complete opacity.

A lifelong exponent of the integration of art and architecture, his architectural collaborations include work with Zaha Hadid, Norman Foster, Arata Isozaki, Oscar Niemeyer, I. M. Pei, César Pelli, and Renzo Piano. He served a seven-year term as chairman of The Architecture Foundation and served on the Design Review Committee of the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment. His artistic collaborations have included work with David Bailey, Hugh Hudson, Malcolm McLaren, and with Linda McCartney and Paul McCartney.

Early life and education

Brian Clarke was born in Oldham, Lancashire, to Edward Ord Clarke, a coal miner, and Lilian Clarke (née Whitehead), a cotton spinner. Raised in a family familiar with Spiritualism – his maternal grandmother was a notable local medium – Clarke attended a Spiritualist Lyceum throughout his childhood and was considered a 'sensitive', gaining a reputation locally as a 'boy medium'.

Aged 12, he applied for a place in the last intake of an education scheme existing in the north of England to enable artistically promising children to leave their secondary school and become full-time art students, and was awarded a scholarship to the Oldham School of Arts and Crafts. In place of a standard curriculum, he principally studied the arts and design, learning drawing, heraldry, pictorial composition, colour theory, pigment mixing and calligraphy, among other subjects. Considered a prodigy, by the age of 16 Clarke had mastered the orthodoxies of academic life drawing. In 1968, he and his family moved to Burnley and, too young at 15 to gain entrance to Burnley College of Art, he lied about his age and was accepted on the strength of his previous work.

In 1970, Clarke enrolled in the Architectural Stained Glass course at North Devon College of Art and Design, graduating from the Diploma in Design with a first class distinction. In 1974, he was awarded a Winston Churchill Memorial Travelling Fellowship to study religious art in Italy, France, and West Germany. He was inspired by the post-war German school of stained glass artists, and in particular the artist Johannes Schreiter. In 1976, Clarke received the Churchill Extension Fellowship to study art in architecture and contemporary painting in the United States, where he connected with the art of, and later befriended, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and Andy Warhol.

Work

In his career, Clarke has advanced new approaches across a range of mediums including stained glass, mosaic, collage, painting and drawing. He is recognised as being instrumental in bringing critical attention to the medium of stained glass and revealing its relevance to the present day through both his practice of the medium and through exhibitions and writings on the subject.

From the beginning of his career, Clarke has had an architectural vision for stained glass. Always responsive to the building and surrounding context, this vision came to fruition in his later collaborations with world-renowned architects.

1970s

Clarke received his first commission for a stained glass at age 17. However, his suite of 20 windows for the Church of St Lawrence, Longridge (1975) is considered his first mature work. Here, the use of transparent glass has a Pop Art sensibility; the 'see through’ panes embrace the everyday by letting the real world in. In 1976, Clarke received a large-scale commission from the University of Nottingham to produce 45 paintings, vestments, and a series of stained glass windows for a multi-faith chapel in the Queen's Medical Centre. One of the largest public art commissions of the decade, the process of design and installation was filmed by the BBC as material for a documentary.

In the early years of his career, most of Clarke's work was for religious buildings. However, by 1978 his relationship with the Church had become untenable, as his designs were constantly being modified. The ending of this relationship freed Clarke to create stained glass for secular contexts and advance the medium as social art. Throughout this period, Clarke was active in bringing attention to stained glass and promoting it as a modern medium. In 1975, he organised the travelling exhibition ''Glass Art One'', which featured secular, autonomous stained glass panels inspired in part by Japanese-landscape painting. Later, he co-curated ''GLASS/LIGHT,'' an extensive survey of twentieth-century stained glass, with British war artist John Piper and art historian Martin Harrison, in collaboration with the artist Marc Chagall as part of the 1978 Festival of the City of London. Clarke also produced the book ''Architectural Stained Glass,''a polemical collection of essays.

In his painting, Clarke developed a strictly abstract Constructivist language of geometric signs; often his work had an underlying grid structure made from repetitions and variations on the cross. In later years, he would disrupt the grid with free-flowing amorphic forms. In 1977 Punk hit the UK, which had a deep impact on Clarke. He connected with Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren and later collaborated as a designer on their aborted zine ''Chicken'', whose creation was funded by EMI and filmed by BBC
...