Brian Clarke Quotes (1953-2025)

“It's not that painting is the medium with which I identify the most. Painting is the medium through which I am able to identify with anything external.”

“The Spitfire and the Porsche and the battleship have something of perfection in their design. They are anonymous in their beauty, like the fleur-de-lys, and compelling, like heraldic ciphers of the 20th century.”

“Black has the power to astonish. It absorbs and reflects colour stealing much from the prevailing chromatic landscape. It makes blue bluer and light lighter. There are as many variations of black as there are of green.”

“Art is reimbued with its genuine power and profundity in the architectural realm. Its real power lies in the cathedral, the shopping center, the hospital. Not in the studios of Soho and Chelsea or the galleries of Madison Avenue or Bond Street.”

“When I am designing a stained glass window I am painting; when I am drawing a drawing, I am painting; when I am making the cartoon for a tapestry, I am painting; and when I am listening to music I am painting. It is the centre of everything that I do.”

“I used to think that I somehow existed apart from making art and thus my work itself existed outside prevailing realities, uninfluenced by circumstance. I was wrong and that's clear to me now. Biography and art intertwine, strangling and oxygenating simultaneously.”

“It is through painting that I understand how to view architecture, appreciate the rhythm of a poem, 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.”

“Fallen petals on the grass or scattered flowers across a field do unexpected things when you examine them – Primroses seem to  cluster  together in a shape that recalls a single flower; Bluebells become entirely anonymous in a hovering mist; Daffodils group together into crowns of thorns and barbed wire.”

“I am working class artist. I am very happy if my work pleases or engages intellectuals or professional people, but my art is an art for the mass: I want to communicate this idea of intimacy and poetic transcendence to as many people as possible, and the idea that it is confined to one social demographic is abhorrent to me.”

“Moving with frequency between the polarities of my experience is a fertile source of ideas. Somewhere between anguish and joy lies a region taut with further contradictions. If art speaks truth to power then in my view both compelling forces need to be addressed. The desolate truth carried in profundity is made even more striking when matched by the sublime energy of the decorative.”

“There is a world that can be seen only through stained glass. It is like no other. The medium is thought to have been at its zenith in the Middle Ages – though the medievals had the advantage of Gothic architecture to respond to. I want to surpass the Middle Ages, not equal them. Surpass them with the new and irresistible: volumetric, spatial colour, transporting post-industrial godless man to the edge of ecstasy.”

“The self-inflicted isolation of the contemporary artist and the mistrust levelled against the architect are both important contributing factors in the current situation of architectural art. The painter is anxious to keep intact the historical image of artist as loner, the intense sensitive, the genius and “maestro”; while the architect, feeling the watchful eye of his client constantly over his shoulder, approaches any extra-to-budget expense, such as art, with considerable trepidation, guarding jealously any intrusion into his building by potential glory-thieves. – Clarke in the essay 'Towards a New Constructivism', from his 1979 book Architectural Stained Glass.”