Brian Clarke, one of the world’s leading practitioners of the centuries-old art of stained glass, who pushed the form’s boundaries from religious to secular settings, died at his home in London on July 1, one day before his 72nd birthday.
The cause was cancer, according to HENI, an art services business that represents Mr. Clarke.
“When I started working in the medium of stained glass, it was a dying art,” he told the British newspaper The Independent in 2010. “I knew from a very early age that the future of the medium would only be assured if it had an application in public buildings and was not limited to ecclesiastical architecture.”
While Mr. Clarke did create stained-glass windows in religious locations, his work was also found in places like Pfizer’s headquarters in Manhattan; Victoria Leeds, a shopping district in England; and the Lake Sagami Country Club in Yamanashi, Japan. He worked on projects with the architects Norman Foster, Arata Isozaki and Zaha Hadid.
This year he completed “Concordia,” a colossal wall of 127 vibrantly colored stained-glass panels installed at Bahrain International Airport that depicts, among other things, jasmine flowers, dragonflies and hawks; incorporates Islamic geometric patterns; and makes reference to medieval European tapestries and illuminated manuscripts from the Book of Hours.
At 112 feet wide and nearly 56 feet tall — and weighing more than 30 tons — it is one of the largest stained-glass installations in the world.
“I have always had a dream of making a composition in a building on a great rectangular scale that is like a view through to another world,” Mr. Clarke said in an interview for the HENI website. “It’s something that in some ways would unite the two parts of the world, the one that I come from and this region.”
He added: “The whole thing is a crescendo. And this is something on a huge architectural scale that will glow.”
On a much smaller scale, Mr. Clarke created a stained-glass triptych in 2010 for the Papal Chapel of the Apostolic Nunciature to Britain, the Holy See’s diplomatic office in London, to commemorate Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to Britain and the beatification of the cardinal and theologian John Henry Newman. The window shows three burning candles in the foreground, with texts in the background written by three historically significant Roman Catholics: Newman, St. Thomas More and St. John Fisher.
“When the light passes through the transparent window,” The Independent wrote, “it creates shafts of ever-changing color which fall within the space — and when it hits the text, the whole window oscillates with a shimmer.”
Brian Clarke was born on July 2, 1953, in Oldham, Lancashire, England. His father, Edward, was a coal miner, and his mother, Lilian (Whitehead) Clarke, was a cotton spinner at a local mill. His maternal grandmother was a medium.
While in primary school, Brian went on a day trip to York Minster, a medieval cathedral, where he encountered the stained-glass window, which was completed in the 15th century, at the church’s east end. He had some sort of epiphany.
On the HENI website, he recalled that a choir was rehearsing: “I ceased to be aware of my friends. I even ceased to be aware of location because something beyond location replaced it. And that was the feeling of being immersed entirely in art.”
And, he said, light “transilluminated through the window.”
Feeling overwhelmed, he passed out.
After attending the Oldham School of Arts and Crafts, he studied at the Burnley College of Art; he graduated from the architectural stained-glass course at North Devon College of Art and Design (now part of Petroc College) in the early 1970s. While at North Devon, he met Liz Finch, another artist, whom he married in 1972. Her father, a vicar, suggested that Brian focus on stained glass for churches.
Mr. Clarke’s wife survives him, as do his son, Daniel, and brother, Barry.
Mr. Clarke’s early ecclesiastical work included 10 pairs of stained-glass windows for St. Lawrence’s Church in Longridge, England, and windows and paintings for a multi-faith chapel at the Queen’s Medical Center in Nottingham.
After moving to London in the late 1970s, he became part of the punk scene there, befriending Vivienne Westwood, the fashion designer who defined the punk look. In that period, Mr. Clarke also produced a series of paintings in which he slashed the canvases, which he said was inspired by punk’s nihilism.
But his rising reputation as a stained-glass artist led the BBC to follow him for a year for a 1979 documentary, which portrayed him as rebellious and confident. Granada TV produced its own documentary about Mr. Clarke a year later.
Mr. Clarke proved to be not only a prolific artist but also an innovative one. He helped create stained glass without lead (which generally supports pieces of painted glass); used pointillism to make dotted finishes to some of his works; and created stand-alone stained glass screens.
When T: The New York Times Style Magazine declared in 2019 that stained glass was having a breakout moment, it described Mr. Clarke as an “artist who over four decades has more or less been the lone voice of stained glass in the art world.”
Mr. Clarke also worked extensively in other media, including paint, collage, lead, mosaic and sculpture.
“They were not separate; they were connected,” Joe Hage, the founder of HENI, said in an interview. “Collages were a way of his planning and preparing for stained glass. So were paintings and watercolors.”
Mr. Clarke befriended Paul and Linda McCartney in the 1970s and collaborated with them on several projects. Mr. Clarke designed the set — hand-painted on canvas and acoustically-transparent scrims — for Mr. McCartney’s 1989-90 world tour; created the cover art for Mr. McCartney’s albums “Tug of War” (1982) and “Flowers in the Dirt” (1989) and five “Tug of War” stained-glass panels, as well as three series of stained-glass artworks that combined mouth-blown glass with Linda McCartney’s black-and-white photos.
Mr. Clarke also created a large eight-panel stained-glass work, “The Glass Wall (Dedicated to Linda McCartney),” which on his website he called a “membrane of fluid forms and liquid color” that had its origins in his love of heraldry.
Reviewing “The Glass Wall” for The New York Times in 1998, Grace Glueck wrote, “Though its subject matter is entirely secular, it conveys a feeling of great cathedral spaces.”
Early in the 21st century, Mr. Clarke began what could be called his skull period, creating a body of work centered on skulls; in 2023, his skull motif reached its apotheosis with his haunting stained-glass “Stroud Ossuary,” a commission from the artist and gallery owner Damien Hirst, which features hundreds of etched skulls posed in various ways. The work, which was first exhibited at Mr. Hirst’s Newport Street Gallery in London in 2023, rises some 30 feet high.
“A lot of the things that have inspired my art and even the most optimistic of it and the most joyous of it have been unexpectedly melancholic or miserable or sad,” Mr. Clarke told Mr. Hirst in a video interview on the HENI website. “Almost everything I do has got some link to death and to our, you know, our impermanence, our mortality.”
Richard Sandomir, an obituaries reporter, has been writing for The Times for more than three decades.
The post Brian Clarke, Stained-Glass Innovator, Is Dead at 71 appeared first on New York Times.
