Brian Clarke

Brian Clarke FRIBA FRSA CF (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 at 13, Clarke came to prominence in the late 1970s as a painter and figure of the Punk movement and designer of ecclesiastical stained glass, and by the early 1980s had become a major figure in international contemporary art, the subject of several television documentaries and a café society regular 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, including the creation of stained glass without lead and the subsequent pioneering of a 'dramatically enhanced Pointillism', and 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 artform to its zero-point in each direction: absolute transparency, and, conversely, 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 7-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.


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 a notable local medium, Clarke attended a Spiritualist Lyceum through his childhood and, considered a 'sensitive', gained a reputation locally as a 'boy medium'. In 1965, aged 12, he applied for a place as 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, from which he graduated two years later with a first class distinction in their Diploma in Design. In 1971, aged 17, he received his first commission, for a series of windows in the Grade II* listed Southcott Barton, a 17th-century residential home, and the following year received his first ecclesiastical commission, for a memorial window in Preston Minster. In August 1972, he married his fellow art student Liz Finch, the daughter of a local vicar, opened a stained glass studio in Preston, and began to take on work including painting restoring, designing lamps, repairing damaged ecclesiastical glass, as well as working independently as a painter. This was followed by a commission for a new window for Coppull Church, Lancashire, in 1973, and further secular stained glass commissions, for which he painted, fired, leaded, assembled and installed the windows and panels himself, transporting them on a local bus. Further local ecclesiastical commissions followed.

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