Brian Clarke :: Interview with Doris Lockhart Saatchi

16 September 2008

Brian Clarke painting & stained glass works on view and for sale through October 1, 2008.
Phillips de Pury & Company
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A CONVERSATION WITH THE ARTIST

Doris Lockhart Saatchi: What and when was your first public exhibition?
Brian Clark: My first exhibition must have been in ‘74 at the Mid Pennine Arts Association. I had a truck dump thousands of pieces of broken glass into the open window of the gallery, then closed the window.

DLS: Why glass?
BC: When I was 12 I went to York Minster on a school day trip and remember being fascinated by the light and the way it played on the stone through the stained glass. There was plainchant and the scent of incense and all my senses were triggered in that liturgical, theatrical way. I thought my reaction meant I ought to be a priest or a monk and didn’t realise until I was about 15 that it was the power of art that I was drawn to, not the priesthood.
Then while I was at art school, a stained glass window by an artist from York made a powerful impression on me and drew my attention to the possibilities of stained glass as a medium and its potential to be worked in a modern way. I felt somehow that my desire to be an artist and my love of buildings could be married through the medium.

An Optimist, 2007. Lead and Stained Glass

DLS: Do you think that the appreciation of modern stained glass work suffers from the perception that it is merely a craft?
BC: Yes, undoubtedly. The problem with works of stained glass is that they have too often been left in the hands of craftsmen who don’t think like artists about how to enlarge the possibilities of the medium.

DLS: Is it possibly too closely linked to history and religion?
BC: Throughout my work with glass which is now about 40 years, I’ve tried all kinds of new phrases to describe it such as glass art, glass painting, glass installations, transillumination, in order to remove that ecclesiastical, historicist connection. In the end, I decided that it’s not a semantic issue, but will only be seen as a modern form when people have been sufficiently exposed to it.

DLS: Do you ever feel lonely working in the medium?
BC: There have been only two artists to whom I’ve really felt close. One was John Piper because he knew how to work with a building and the other is a German, Johannes Schreiter. But what really makes me feel isolated is that I don’t know any artists today who truly understand what makes good architecture. I used to be on juries at the Architectural Association School of Architecture with the great Cedric Price in the ‘70’s and ‘80’s, and he introduced me to the students as ‘the one who colours in the bits we leave out.’ That’s a simplistic description and sounds patronising, but Cedric was right. Where I can give my best in working with an architect is in engaging with a pattern or rhythm established by the design of the building and adding what the architect can’t do.

DLS: The relationship is a confusing but interesting one, I think, because your work doesn’t take up any space. It’s a membrane.
BC: Right. But I have to respond to the architectural imperative as it exists. On a few occasions I’ve been tempted to engage in the architecture itself. But what I really get excited about is being given a series of apertures, a roof, a floor, or a wall and, having picked up the idea of the building, I can then fill in the ‘missing bits.’

An Ordinary Man, 2007.
A Convicted Man, 2008. Lead & Stained Glass

DLS: When did it occur to you that you could put a frame around what you were doing and make it totally independent of any context?
BC: Well, I started doing that way back at the beginning because there are certain things you can say with stained glass that you cannot say with painting.

DLS: Such as-
BC: You see stained glass by virtue of the passage of light through it, whereas you see a painting by the light reflected off it. So, in contrast to the static condition of a painting, a stained glass window is in a constant state of change as the day progresses, the clouds move, traffic or people pass by behind it.

DLS: You’ve just used an architectural term, to describe works in this exhibition that you’re hanging on a wall.
BC: True, I never originally imagined hanging these works on a light box. But that’s changed now. You see, medieval stained glass, generally speaking, had a very thin coat of matt white fired onto it so that the light didn’t come thundering through it but was diffused. Achieving the possibility of stained glass that hangs on a wall instead of against natural light is fraught with obstacles and problems because once you put a diffusing screen behind something you’re a meant to see through, it deadens it. In the past, I’ve been dissatisfied with the result, as it looks flat, like the oxygen has been sucked out of it, because a characteristic of stained glass is the bubbles and striations that it contains.

DLS: Which might be described as flaws?
BC: Yes, they’re what give the medium its richness. Once you put a diffusing panel behind it, that richness is gone. Then I saw some small fragments of medieval stained glass at a gallery exhibition in London and I realised that you can capture some of that quality even without natural backlight. So that prompted me to work with stained glass for ‘wall art.’

DLS: And the process?
BC: The black lead outlines emphasise the colour. The minute you put a black line next to a colour the colour is intensified by a factor of three to four times. So when you look at a Gothic stained glass window you’re not really looking at a depiction of a biblical story, you’re looking at an abstract explosion of colour. One of the greatest moments of 15th century art in the world are the Creation and Genesis windows at York Minster. Well, unless you’re actually up on scaffolding, you have no idea of what the images portray. There’s only an impression of brilliant colour.
The lead itself is malleable so you can bend it around a piece of glass and it will hold the glass for a 1000 years. When they repaired the 12th century Rose Window at York Minster, they found that at the core of the lead was a willow twig so that, when those great driving winds came in off the Yorkshire Moors, the windows would give and the glass didn’t break.

Don't Forget the Lamb, 2008. Lead, Stained Glass, and 'Oil on Canvas' on Lead

DLS: How did you come to use lead as the ground of the work rather than to distinguish the bits of colour and hold them together?
BC: Up until the ‘60’s and ‘70’s lead was solely a structural element that held the pieces of glass together. It’s formed as an H-section and, because glass was so valuable a commodity, if a piece broke in putting the window together, that piece was then held together by tiny spider leads. This practical device intrigued me. I realised that lead had a potential outside of its structural function. I’ve always drawn and realised that I could use the medium of lead without the line being hitched to its historical role.
In the piece called Don’t Forget the Lamb, which is one of several ‘portraits’ of my mother, I’ve used lead, canvas and stained glass for images appropriated from elsewhere. The quatrefoil motive comes from Sainte-Chapelle and the flag is stolen from a Frank Brangwyn painting called The Buccaneers, that hangs in my studio at home. The skeleton is sand blasted onto the lead, which seems to me to provide the comfort of a shield against destruction and decay. The title of the work refers to the image of one of the lists my mother was always making when she went to do the shopping. It appealed to me because the lamb also represents innocence and youth, and the canvas I’ve inserted shows me as a 24 year old. But it’s all the same nature of effort whether it’s stained glass, painting, appropriation or collage.

DLS: This seems to me a very complicated process.
BC: Oh, its immensely complicated, it takes months to make some of these works.

Study in Lead for a Portrait of Berthold Lubetkin, 2008.
Study in Lead for a Portrait of an Engineer, 2002. Lead on Lead

DLS: Would it be correct to call these lead-based works drawings?
BC: Yes, absolutely. When, after the death of my mother and someone else close to me, I started doing these lead works, particularly the skulls, colour had been sucked out of life for me briefly, and I didn’t feel that I could authentically engage with optimistic colour for a while. As I worked on the skulls, colour began to show up bit by bit and with each work I put my foot back into the world a little deeper. But when you see, as TS Eliot says in his poem, Whispers of immortality, ‘the skull beneath the skin’, you realise that in the midst of living, death is with us, and I wanted to stay with the skulls.

Studies for a Portrait of a Parisian, 2008. Oil on Canvas

DLS: Are the skull portraits anatomically accurate?
BC: No, they’re intuitive. Generally speaking, what happens is that I have an idea about a line, a ‘route map’ independent of any set image. For example, the Henry Moore portrait happened very quickly because I remember what a massive head he had and I’ve always loved the image of his enormous sculpture installed at Perry Green with the sheep walking through the opening. For me, as I’ve grown older, imagined truth is just as valid as factual accuracy. Most of the big portraits I’ve done - Piper, Moore, Nicholson, Price, Pevsner, Clark -are from the period just before and after World War ll. I haven’t yet tackled Bacon. It just has to ‘happen’.

DLS: When you remove the eye from the eye socket and reduce the flesh of the face to a skull, the skull becomes a totally anonymous representation of a human being. Then you sometimes take away that anonymity with colour. What are you doing when you do one thing or the other?
BC: Well, as a vehicle for line, the skull is wonderfully accommodating. But it’s more than that for me. I get so captivated by the way paint works that I sometimes worry about losing the skull. If I leave the eye sockets dark, I don’t lose the skull, so that’s a formal reason. But if the darkness is penetrated you’re drawn into it. And then, in an odd sort of way, rather than looking in, you’re looking out.

DLS: It’s inevitable that your skull paintings and drawings will be compared with Warhol, Basquiat, Hirst and their preoccupation with the skull.
BC: A lot of people are interested in skulls, but not nearly as much today as in the past. The skull is not only a memory of who we were but also an image of what we will be. I think it will probably engage artists as a subject for as long as art exists.