Colouring Light: Brian Clarke - An Artist Apart


Colouring Light: Brian Clarke - An Artist Apart

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This programme contains some strong language.

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When you have had a moment

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that brings what mystics might call a beatitude,

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when you are suddenly

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and unexpectedly given access

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to an experience that alters your view of the world,

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it gives you a taste of freedom,

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of freedom of thought.

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I had such a moment as a child in York Minster.

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I had a moment where I felt the combination

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of architecture

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and light

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and art

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could give you a glimpse into paradise.

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They're not frequent, such experiences,

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but by constantly producing art day after day in a routine,

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you are always trying to get close...

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..to that experience again.

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Brian Clarke is a Renaissance man.

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His interests range far and wide.

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Steeped in tradition, he's also passionate about seeking new ways of making art.

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He draws, paints and designs spectacular stained glass.

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His work can be seen all over the world

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in churches, mosques and synagogues,

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private homes, hospitals and corporate headquarters.

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He has continued over the years to reinvent a medium he has made wholly his own.

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APPLAUSE

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My interests are undoubtedly architectural, but I am an artist.

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I'm not an architect. I don't aspire to being an architect.

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I remember Cedric Price introducing me

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as "a person who colours in the holes that architects leave in their walls".

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He's about right. That's more or less what I do.

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What motivates me is the big idea behind architecture.

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It's really architecture as a cradle for

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and trigger for artistic experience, poetic experience that I'm about.

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This is actually the Victoria Quarter in Leeds,

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an urban city street

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designed by that great Edwardian, theatrical architect Frank Matcham.

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My commission actually was to design the stained-glass window

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for this lower thing here at each end of the street.

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And I suggested they cover the street with glazing

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and I put a skin of colour across it.

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If I am doing a big project, I take in all the clues

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that the architect would take in about the location.

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You think about the movement of people and the passage of light through it,

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about the function of the building, the time of day it will be used, how many people will be using it

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and essentially, in a public experience,

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you want to provide a sensation that uplifts the spirits.

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And I feel naturally inclined to optimism when I'm working in public buildings.

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Some of his great works are those great arcades.

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They're wonderful things, brilliant use of the space,

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and he's sensitive to the historical context,

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yet being modern and uncompromising in his way.

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There always is this duality between order and chaos in Brian's work.

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The grid and the free line, the geometry of the grid

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and the free and maybe nervous line...

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There's a nervous kind of energy and enthusiasm and it's an absolute reflection of him as a person.

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It's his life in a way.

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This is the Shard going up in London. I think it's going to be the tallest building in Europe.

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I've been asked to do something between the two buildings of this development by Renzo Piano

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and that's the entrance to London Bridge station,

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so there'll be huge pedestrian traffic crossing this space all day long,

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and it's got to be something I felt that kept the language of the Shard.

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So I thought of the idea...

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At first it seemed like a silly idea, perhaps rather banal,

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but I've grown rather fond of the concept

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and that is the idea that just some shards of glass from the top of the structure,

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as if they had fallen down and just penetrated the, uh...ground level.

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I'll take this guy from here and put him here.

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Actually, it's Mr Gandhi. I don't know what he's doing there.

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As Mahatma makes his way through this space,

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by day, you'll get this kind of sunlight passing through it,

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and by night, lit from within,

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it will glow and be visible from all the viewing corridors

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as you approach London Bridge station.

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It will be like a cathedral of colour.

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Clarke's considerable earnings from large-scale commissions have supported his work

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as a painter and cutting-edge stained glass artist

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and allowed him to remain a fiercely independent artist.

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I realised very early on in the game that...

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..however beguiling and beautiful and transcendentally enriching to one's life stained glass is,

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without the nourishment of...

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and discipline of painting and drawing,

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it became purely decorative.

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He does really beautiful drawings

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and not many people have that incredible control of the hand.

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I've always liked his glasswork

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and they could be quite abstract, they're very varied,

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but the quality of the hand is always there and it's stunning.

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It's always been so important for him to never have stopped painting.

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Even at his most successful, busy, whichever way you want to put it,

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his time as a stained glass artist when he was involved with huge projects on a pretty constant basis,

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he was still always painting.

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He... And this has confounded many of his critics, I think.

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He's been always almost equally a painter and a stained glass artist.

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He never would have put stained glass on a lower level than painting

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and vice-versa, of course.

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What's the name of the place we're going to?

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Clarksfield Road and I know it's that way.

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My mum and dad were married at this church.

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Yeah, this is the house I lived in where these people are.

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That was my old house - number 103.

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Hello. Sorry to disturb you.

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I used to live here when I was a little boy.

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Oh, yeah, I think I put those tiles up.

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-You didn't?

-I think I did.

-LAUGHTER

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There was a wall here and we used to kill mice with the handle of a screwdriver.

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There was a range here.

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-Everything's changed here now.

-Yeah, yeah.

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-I used to live here when I was your age.

-No?

-Yeah, I did.

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My mum was born in 1919 and she was one of eight sisters,

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two of whom survive her,

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and they all worked in the cotton mills in Lancashire. One brother.

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My dad was particularly good at marquetry.

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I suppose it's a little bit like stained glass.

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You split tonally up the colours by using veneers of different woods.

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It's like making a collage

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and I very much enjoyed doing those things with him.

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And it's the first memory I have of the creative process.

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He died...very young.

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You know, the emphysema from coal mining

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and...60 or 80 Woodbines a day

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didn't help him with longevity.

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I was young when he died. I was with him.

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And it had a deep impact on me.

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I hadn't realised really how close I was to him.

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I came out of what sociologists would call an extended matriarchal, working-class family.

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Doris, Mary and Anne remained unmarried and so they lived together with my grandmother.

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And so I was fussed around by a lot of aunties and females.

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And thoroughly enjoyed it.

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-What was he like as a lad?

-Pardon?

-What was Brian like as a lad?

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-What was he like?

-Yes.

-Well, he was always joking,

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acting the fool, you know.

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When he were 14, we took him away on holiday, me and our Doris, to Majorca.

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That's me and our Brian in Majorca.

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We came back to the hotel and there was a lady behind the bar and he went to the bar.

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We didn't know what he'd gone for. Then she came back to us. She said,

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"Do you know he's ordered a bottle of champagne for you?

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"But I don't know what to do." He were only 14.

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I said, "If he's ordered it, he'll pay for it. It'll be all right."

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He did, he ordered it. Because we took him, he were buying us champagne as a thank you.

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It were lovely, that.

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Every time we went anywhere with taxis

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and he wanted to tip the driver, he wanted to pay...

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He wanted to pay, so he could tip the driver.

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-You always wanted to be the big man, didn't you?

-Yeah.

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We've all been very close, all the family, and we've all loved each other and been kind to each other.

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That's as it should be, isn't it?

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-We've always been close, Brian.

-What, us?

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LAUGHTER

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My grandmother was a medium

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and spiritualism was the background to my childhood.

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And I rather liked this magical, alchemical, weird thing

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that she brought in to my humdrum life.

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You know, she claimed to be able to see into the future.

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I was deeply excited by the idea of life after death.

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And so the whole spiritualism thing took a hold of me.

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I was trained as a teenager in spiritualism,

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but a point came when I had to make a choice -

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do I continue this interest in spiritualism

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or do I go for the really high level game of mediumship which is being an artist?

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I had already committed myself as a child of ten to wanting to be an artist.

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I had a romantic idea that art happened in Paris, that Picasso equated to art

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and I would do whatever I could to get there.

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At the age of 12, that included robbing a gas meter

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and using the shillings to buy a ticket to Paris at Oldham West railway station.

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The ticket collector smelling a rat, seeing all these shilling coins, called the police,

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I never got to Paris, but I did later on get to Oldham Art School.

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Clarke was something of a prodigy.

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He was able to concentrate on art from the age of 12

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as he'd won a scholarship to the Oldham School of Arts and Crafts,

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one of a number of specialist schools that had been set up by philanthropists in northern England.

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This half of the building was the School of Art.

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And this is the room...

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This was kind of our classroom, I suppose.

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And that's where we drew.

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I had a really great education in the arts.

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I learned how to draw analytically, heraldry, book-binding,

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calligraphy, sign-writing, pigment mixing.

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It was a very broad and old-fashioned arts and crafts education.

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There used to be an old guy sitting here.

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I think he was called Alf.

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I couldn't get enough. I used to sleep in the art school.

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I used to hide and sleep in the school, so that I could work at night.

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Look, here it is. "Devoted to the moral and intellectual culture of the inhabitants of Oldham."

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The architect was Pennington. "School of Science and Art."

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Living in Oldham was undeniably grim.

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But it had something that transcended industrial Lancashire

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and that was the architecture of the cotton mills. They were majestic.

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You see, in any direction, you could look out and see those mills.

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The town centre is on a hill

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and you could look out and see these great, horizontal red buildings

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with masses of windows,

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then they usually had a rather smart or swanky tower with the mill name on it

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and then a tall chimney.

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The art school education I got in Oldham

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prepared me for life as an artist

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and prepared me for an understanding

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that there is a great deal more to life than...

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..materialistic issues

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and that there can be poetry come out of even the darkest, grimmest mill town.

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From Oldham, Clarke moved to Burnley School of Art.

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It was here that he met Liz Finch.

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She was soon to become an essential influence on his development as an artist.

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When I first met him, I think I must have been 17

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because I think he lied to get into college about his age, and he was 15, I think.

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He was really serious and quiet

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and he didn't sort of hang out or go to pubs and things,

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but he used to do a lot of work.

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It was the late '60s, so art students always had long hair and he had short hair.

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And he wore a shirt and tie.

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Then he did grow long hair eventually.

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Liz's father was a vicar with a particular enthusiasm for stained glass.

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He had a stained-glass window installed in his church

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by an artist from York called Harry Harvey.

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And whilst it wasn't... my cup of tea,

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I realised through that

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that the medium might have a place

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in my world,

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in my dual interests - art and architecture.

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Clarke and Liz Finch enrolled on the Stained Glass course at North Devon College in Bideford.

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They married in 1972.

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Later, they moved to Preston where Clarke started to work as a stained glass artist,

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making his early work with his own hands

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and receiving commissions from local churches and private clients.

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His first major breakthrough, at the age of 19, came at a church in Lancashire.

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Longridge was a whole series of windows on the upper gallery of the church

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that had particularly good light

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because there was nothing interrupting the light

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on either the north or the south walls of the church.

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And it was the first time anybody had asked me to do a suite of windows,

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rather than an individual thing.

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There wasn't any stained glass in those days that used such big sheets of colour.

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I'd based the thing on the kind of green and blue of those wonderful hills and reservoirs

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that exist around that part of Lancashire.

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It was really just a very youthful, joyous...

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..celebration of the medium in a building.

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I think that was the first time

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I really knew

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that I wanted to alter the building,

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I wanted to make a contribution to the building as a whole.

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I got a few other opportunities in Lancashire

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and by the time I'd done three projects where I'd done all the windows,

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my hunger for architectural experience and scale

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knew no limits.

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At the age of 20, Clarke won a prestigious Churchill Fellowship

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that allowed him to travel in Europe and the USA.

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This time broadened his sense of what an artist could bring to stained glass.

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Matisse did something that was really quite unique.

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He created the illusion

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that there are three layers of activity going on -

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a base field, a secondary layer of ornament

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and then another layer of ornament on top of that.

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But I would place Schreiter as the greatest designer

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of stained glass in the 20th century.

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He was for me the man who most consequentially and compellingly

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liberated lead from being the structural means of holding pieces of glass together

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to being in itself an independent means of expression.

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I used to love it.

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I used to so love it here.

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This vicarage became vacant.

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And I went to see the local diocesan authorities.

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I kind of told them that it was essential that they support me

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because the stained glass was about to evaporate

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and I was its only hope.

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And, uh...they bought it.

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That was my studio and that's where I painted.

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And Liz's studio was the room with all the ivy round it there.

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It was a very strange time.

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It was only four years, but you always used to feel that time had stood still,

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so when you went out, it was a bit sort of scary

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like you were in a huge dome of time or something.

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I was once having a meeting in that room with a bishop from Nottingham

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and three other leading clergymen.

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And Liz thought it was far too formal.

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She had a doll and she tied a rope to its foot

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and swung it in front of the window, just out of the window above.

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The clergymen didn't actually say anything,

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but you could see that they had just seen a baby swinging by its leg...pass the window.

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Liz kind of ruled it here really with her freaky stuff.

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Liz was then and is now without any guile or affectation

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absolutely an artist.

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If you're exposed to that at an intense level, it rubs off.

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And I think Liz gave me tremendous confidence to be who I am

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because that was who she was and I loved who she was.

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He was and still is in total admiration of her very strange and wonderful mind.

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He's always seen her as a kind of natural piece of Dada art,

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as a Dadaist sort of incarnate as a human being.

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If she thought Brian was getting big for his boots,

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she could pierce pretentiousness better than anyone.

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During his years in the Peak District, Clarke painted and continued to design stained glass.

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Birchover may have been very remote,

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but Clarke's ambitions ranged further afield.

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Driven by an unstoppable sense of his own destiny

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and an instinct for the right openings, he began making contacts in London and beyond,

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carefully laying the ground for an attack on the art world.

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His reputation grew remarkably fast.

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MUSIC: "Anarchy In The UK" - Sex Pistols

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# Right now... #

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In 1976, punk rock happened and he very much identified with all of that.

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# I am an anti-Christ

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# And I am an anarchist

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# Don't know what I want, but I know how to get it

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# I wanna destroy the passer-by

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# Cos I wanna be

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# Anarchy

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# No dogsbody... #

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Brian Clarke's meteoric rise, fuelled by punk energy, took London by storm.

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He worked with trendy dealer Robert Fraser

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who introduced him to art lovers from the world of rock'n'roll.

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He also walked into the offices of the BBC

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and sweet-talked them into making a film about the super-charged launch of his brilliant career.

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His supreme confidence was a striking characteristic

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and he had detractors precisely because of that.

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I remember we did an exhibition of stained glass in London in 1978

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and he gave a talk to a large and quite sort of distinguished audience in that

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and he was a bit more like a rock star giving it.

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But what he said was still very articulate.

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He adapted very well to the social thing.

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It was like he'd found his element really.

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He did hang out with a lot of celebrities.

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I think that there is a thing among celebrities,

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an insecurity that they like to hang out with each other.

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He was certainly a bad boy,

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irreverent, let's say.

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I think he managed to shock the clergy more than once.

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He did two wonderful designs for Derby Cathedral.

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You can imagine for someone of 22, 23,

0:27:590:28:01

two huge windows in a classical cathedral by the architect James Gibbs

0:28:010:28:06

of whom Brian was and still is a huge admirer...

0:28:060:28:10

He put everything into it, then the cathedral's advisory committee intervened.

0:28:100:28:16

They expressed great admiration for his designs, but wanted him to modify his colours.

0:28:160:28:21

His rather terse reply to them, it was two words, effectively ended his relationship with the church.

0:28:210:28:28

-Words that I can guess?

-The words you can guess.

0:28:280:28:32

I saw the postcard, so I know it's true.

0:28:330:28:36

I lose more commissions than I do.

0:28:370:28:40

I mean, for every one I do, there are two that I don't do.

0:28:400:28:45

I'm often told by people that I ought to compromise,

0:28:450:28:48

that these days, you can't afford to refuse commissions, you can't afford to upset people.

0:28:480:28:54

I think that you can't afford to compromise.

0:28:540:28:58

If you're making a statement artistically,

0:28:580:29:02

when you're making that statement, as far as you're concerned, it's an absolute.

0:29:020:29:08

And any variation

0:29:080:29:11

or dilution

0:29:110:29:13

or subtraction from an absolute

0:29:130:29:17

makes it less than absolute and therefore makes it untrue and, by definition, a lie.

0:29:170:29:23

And I am not a perpetrator of visual lies.

0:29:230:29:27

It became very clear quite early on in the game

0:29:270:29:31

that, on the one hand,

0:29:310:29:35

the church was the traditional cradle of the medium,

0:29:360:29:41

but on the other hand we were becoming increasingly a secular society.

0:29:410:29:48

And if stained glass had any hope of continuance,

0:29:490:29:53

and I had any hope of continuing using the medium and responding to its challenges,

0:29:530:30:00

then I had to focus my activities

0:30:000:30:04

on secular buildings.

0:30:040:30:06

Over the next 20 or so years, Brian Clarke took on a series

0:30:070:30:12

of increasingly ambitious stained glass commissions in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Brazil and the USA.

0:30:120:30:18

I began to work with a whole group of very interesting architects

0:30:250:30:30

and here's a project Arata Isozaki and I did in Tokyo -

0:30:300:30:34

the Lake Sagami building, which is, essentially, in the plan, like a Gothic church

0:30:340:30:40

with a considerable nave and choir

0:30:400:30:44

and what would have been a central bell tower. We turned this tower

0:30:440:30:49

into something that could glow at night.

0:30:490:30:53

This is the headquarters of Pfizer in New York.

0:30:540:30:59

As Pfizer are a pharmaceutical firm, I included

0:30:590:31:03

all kinds of things from microscopic explorations into the nature of health.

0:31:030:31:09

When it was installed, the Chief Executive and Chairman and board came to their first viewing

0:31:100:31:18

and were very happy with the sheer decorative beauty of these forms,

0:31:180:31:23

made in a medieval way, etched glass, very complex,

0:31:230:31:26

made in exactly the same way as glass at Chartres or Canterbury.

0:31:260:31:31

I think it took them slightly aback when I explained that they are all HIV cells from healthy cells,

0:31:310:31:37

and as you walk from the lobby into the main hall, you move from HIV to terminal cancer.

0:31:370:31:44

LAUGHTER

0:31:440:31:46

'There are certain people that I would not work for.'

0:31:470:31:52

Quite often, I see clients as the enemy. I think a lot of architects do

0:31:520:31:57

and a lot of artists do. It's not uncommon because it's a battle to get...

0:31:570:32:03

You would think that they would want the best quality they could get,

0:32:040:32:08

but what they usually want is something median, something average, something banal

0:32:080:32:14

something they've seen before.

0:32:140:32:17

This is where stained glass started to influence the painting instead of the other way round.

0:32:170:32:23

My paintings took the lead from discoveries made in the glass.

0:32:230:32:27

The lines of white being negative version of a black lead line.

0:32:270:32:32

And, of course, the window, the cross contained within a square,

0:32:320:32:36

a simple sash window frame, becoming a symbol for what I think art is about.

0:32:360:32:42

It's my suggestion that art opens a window onto an alternative reality.

0:32:420:32:49

And I think that so long as artists stand as the alternative,

0:32:490:32:54

no matter what that means and costs, we have a role and a function to fulfil.

0:32:540:32:59

The stained glass, the drawing and the painting, there is no distinction to be made.

0:33:260:33:32

It's a symbiotic thing. They're all mutually beneficial. They do inform one another entirely.

0:33:320:33:38

And the one partly depends on the other, grows from the other.

0:33:380:33:43

The seemingly random linear element, the line that wanders through and breaks,

0:33:430:33:49

that certainly appears in his paintings, but I suspect

0:33:490:33:53

because it came from the language originally of the lead line in stained glass,

0:33:530:33:59

I suspect it originated there.

0:33:590:34:01

I'm sorry. I've lost my fucking glasses again. Can you try in my jacket pocket upstairs?

0:35:230:35:30

-Not there.

-No?

0:35:320:35:35

Downstairs in the plan chest room?

0:35:350:35:38

I despair at my memory.

0:35:400:35:43

Amanda bought me a string to put round my neck, but I felt like Marje Proops.

0:35:430:35:49

-I'm going to have to be dealt with. Know what we should do with them?

-Destroy them.

-No, I want new lenses.

0:35:490:35:56

-But I am buggered if I don't have a pair of specs.

-You mean these?

-Ohhh!

0:35:570:36:03

You know what you're going to get for that?

0:36:030:36:07

Ahhh!

0:36:080:36:10

This is going all terribly wrong.

0:36:160:36:18

This always happens with the Christmas cards. It is sent to be my annual torment.

0:36:190:36:25

You can't say Lord Richard Rogers. It's Lord Rogers or Richard Rogers.

0:36:250:36:29

That's like what an American would say.

0:36:290:36:33

Can you get my pen? I think I took it back downstairs.

0:36:330:36:36

Thank you. ..Larry Inginor.

0:36:370:36:41

The McCartneys are legion! They go on forever, don't they?

0:36:410:36:46

Has Dennis got two Ns in it?

0:36:460:36:49

# Nightclubbing

0:36:490:36:51

# We're nightclubbing

0:36:510:36:55

-# We're what's happening... #

-Listen, these people are all very nice,

0:36:550:37:01

-but...

-You want me to sign them?

-That's what I'm doing.

0:37:010:37:04

You have to make sure these go in the right ones. I've written, "Sod off!" to Andy.

0:37:040:37:10

It wouldn't be very nice if that went to...

0:37:100:37:13

# New people They're something to see... #

0:37:130:37:18

Oh, I feel like Saint Sebastian.

0:37:200:37:23

There was certainly a period of...20 years

0:37:250:37:30

when I never even responded to an inquiry to do something in a church.

0:37:300:37:37

But I did do a huge mosque in Saudi Arabia and a number of synagogues, but not any churches.

0:37:370:37:44

And then the one at Romont came up.

0:37:440:37:48

TRANSLATED FROM GERMAN:

0:37:560:38:00

When I went to visit it,

0:38:430:38:46

I went really, to be honest, with the intention of politely getting out of it.

0:38:460:38:52

At that time I'd been spending a lot of time with art dealers in New York

0:38:540:39:00

and...they're not a savoury bunch, particularly.

0:39:000:39:04

And...

0:39:040:39:06

..when I was with the nuns,

0:39:060:39:10

the dignity

0:39:120:39:14

of those people

0:39:150:39:18

and the dignity that resonated in this 1,000-year-old abbey

0:39:190:39:26

touched me.

0:39:280:39:30

It wasn't intellectual, it wasn't, "Oh, this is interesting. I can do this. I can do that."

0:39:300:39:37

I was moved.

0:39:370:39:39

READS IN FRENCH

0:39:390:39:41

TRANSLATED FROM FRENCH:

0:40:050:40:08

During the past 20 or so years, most of Clarke's stained glass has been manufactured in collaboration

0:41:430:41:50

with Mayers of Munich, a family firm that goes back for four generations,

0:41:500:41:54

who have supported Clarke in his move from traditional mouth-blown glass to radically new techniques.

0:41:540:42:01

I would cite as one of the proofs of Brian's real eminence in this medium

0:42:020:42:08

that he's constantly trying to redefine what this medium is and what it can do.

0:42:080:42:14

He's stripped it right down and started to make stained glass without any lead.

0:42:140:42:21

This is a project in Saudi Arabia with Norman Foster in the Al Faisaliyah Center in Riyadh.

0:42:220:42:29

And this is, I think, the largest stained glass window in the world.

0:42:290:42:34

I've forgotten how many thousands of square metres. I was working on a new kind of stained glass,

0:42:340:42:40

a kind that excluded lead.

0:42:400:42:43

We were printing in circles a dot matrix of transparent ceramic glazes

0:42:430:42:49

onto the surface of the glass

0:42:490:42:52

that could form in the kind of photographic pixelated way a photographic image.

0:42:520:42:58

We put it onto a three-layer laminate of glazing

0:42:580:43:03

so that the yellow dots were on the front, the blue dots on the middle layer and the black,

0:43:030:43:10

which gave form, on the back. It looked like dots floating in air.

0:43:100:43:15

It gives the impression that you can put your hand into it through the distance of the material.

0:43:150:43:21

What's great about it is the dots are so big

0:43:210:43:25

that when you are at distance from it, you can read it.

0:43:250:43:30

The closer you get to it, the more difficult it becomes. It was almost like a mirage.

0:43:300:43:36

The same technique is developed here in my project Lamina for the Gagosian Gallery in London

0:44:060:44:14

and here for the first time I took the piece in the gallery around the gallery

0:44:140:44:20

and penetrated the wall out onto the pavement and back into the gallery again.

0:44:200:44:26

But the whole time it's kind of a floating, now you see it, now you don't experience.

0:44:260:44:33

This technique had its most dramatic expression

0:44:340:44:39

in the Pyramid of Peace in Kazakhstan.

0:44:390:44:44

The apex of this pyramid is entirely surrounded by a flock of doves

0:44:440:44:50

that look like they've been disturbed and move in a spiral up to the apex,

0:44:500:44:55

but you can see right through them. If the camera lens here was focused on the city beyond,

0:44:550:45:01

you would see Astana.

0:45:010:45:04

The transmission of colour into the central security chamber, which houses 250 delegates below,

0:45:040:45:10

bathes the whole thing in a kind of extraordinary, soft, rather delicate light.

0:45:100:45:16

Clarke's mother, with whom he'd remained very close, died in 2006.

0:45:200:45:25

The experience inspired new directions in his work as well as a number of creative breakthroughs.

0:45:250:45:31

TRANSLATED FROM GERMAN:

0:45:430:45:46

His medium was lead upon lead. Lead lines soldered onto lead,

0:46:180:46:23

with little... sometimes you'd have small passages of stained glass in those,

0:46:230:46:29

just to remind us it's a stained glass window.

0:46:290:46:33

Then he even had panels of lead on lead. So he'd done the absolute light transmission

0:46:330:46:40

to absolute opacity.

0:46:400:46:43

When my mum was in hospital, shortly before...the end,

0:46:440:46:50

I did quite a few photographs of her hands.

0:46:500:46:54

And one of those pictures happens to be her making one of her famous lists.

0:46:540:47:00

She made lists for everything.

0:47:000:47:02

There's one.

0:47:030:47:05

It's a birthday party of mine that she came to. She's wanting to report to her sisters who was there.

0:47:100:47:17

She didn't want to forget Lulu.

0:47:170:47:20

I rather like this one.

0:47:200:47:22

She has...

0:47:220:47:24

When these lists are expressed in lead on lead,

0:47:240:47:28

and they become a permanent solid thing

0:47:300:47:34

rather than a transitory moment in a passing day,

0:47:340:47:38

you have to look at them in a slightly different way.

0:47:380:47:42

And the kind of delicacy of existence,

0:47:420:47:46

the vulnerability of existence,

0:47:460:47:49

becomes much more intense.

0:47:490:47:52

It had a moment of importance when she wrote it,

0:47:520:47:57

and then that moment of importance passed with the next day,

0:47:570:48:00

but now she's gone

0:48:000:48:03

it becomes a window

0:48:030:48:06

through which you can re-access her a little bit.

0:48:060:48:11

He can really draw.

0:48:390:48:42

A lot of thinking goes into drawing. If a line goes that way or that way.

0:48:420:48:47

You can tell the difference between that and a flash drawer who can draw a dog that's like a dog.

0:48:470:48:54

They're almost not thinking. It's just like a camera, really.

0:48:540:48:59

Whereas the person who decides to exclude things from a drawing,

0:48:590:49:03

a person who decides that only two lines are necessary or decides that 53 lines must be necessary,

0:49:030:49:10

there's a lot of consideration that goes into that.

0:49:100:49:15

The making of art is...

0:49:190:49:23

an intimate process.

0:49:230:49:25

And whilst it involves collaboration in many instances,

0:49:250:49:30

it is fundamentally a solitary and...

0:49:300:49:34

and internal experience.

0:49:340:49:38

You can sketch and you can draw and you can work out ideas on paper or on canvas

0:49:390:49:45

or whatever way you do,

0:49:450:49:47

but where the real drawing takes place is

0:49:480:49:52

in the mind.

0:49:520:49:54

Very masculine hands, my mum had.

0:50:220:50:24

You know, work. Work.

0:50:260:50:29

She worked in a cotton mill most of her life.

0:50:290:50:33

She used to say, "My calluses have got calluses."

0:50:330:50:37

I've always liked drawing hands, but I particularly don't want these hands to be slick.

0:50:390:50:45

I don't want them to be clever drawings, you know?

0:50:450:50:50

There's a Brian ring. He did it for my birthday.

0:51:210:51:26

It's like a kind of a... a freehand sketch, made in gold. Like a gold sketch.

0:51:270:51:34

I draw very straight lines

0:51:340:51:37

and they... his are slightly crinkled.

0:51:370:51:41

It's almost like a drawing in space.

0:51:410:51:44

I haven't seen the recent stuff, but it should be done like that, as if drawing not on a canvas

0:51:460:51:52

but in a volume.

0:51:520:51:54

Clarke's lifelong exploration of the line in drawing, painting and stained glass

0:52:180:52:23

has naturally led him into sculpture.

0:52:230:52:27

What I'm trying to achieve here is what I've been doing with the paintings and drawings

0:52:270:52:33

for a very long time and that is to use

0:52:330:52:37

the figurative idea - the tube of paint, the fleur-de-lis or the cross before that.

0:52:370:52:44

It doesn't really matter, but it provides you with some kind of curious road map

0:52:440:52:50

and then you use that as the springboard from which to leap into the air with your line.

0:52:500:52:56

Having made that springboard,

0:53:060:53:08

and I feel we're getting near to a place now where we can allow the line

0:53:080:53:14

to take its own route.

0:53:140:53:17

You can see where that kind of idea might work very effectively.

0:53:190:53:24

Yeah.

0:53:240:53:25

-That's fantastic.

-Norman Foster has created this marvellous new plaza -

0:53:260:53:32

especially for me, I have no doubt!

0:53:330:53:36

Now he's more secure. I think when you get older you are more at peace with yourself.

0:53:480:53:55

He's not completely at peace with himself, but more approaching it.

0:53:550:53:59

It's actually also anxiety that makes him seem arrogant,

0:54:010:54:05

I think. Cos I think underneath it is still that quiet, shy person, really.

0:54:050:54:12

I think he has his vulnerabilities and his sensitivities, anxieties.

0:54:190:54:25

There has been many things that he has done which are wonderful and which have not received

0:54:250:54:31

very much recognition at all. And I've seen him, understandably, become despondent about that.

0:54:310:54:37

I think he's a really great artist and he should be recognised,

0:54:390:54:43

but I don't think fame is really a criteria for quality.

0:54:440:54:50

I just hope whatever he does he's happy with it within himself.

0:54:500:54:55

Because I don't think anybody else can convince him that it's great stuff.

0:54:550:55:01

He has to...he has to believe that

0:55:020:55:05

and...and his time will come.

0:55:050:55:09

It's great to see you all here, but I just want to take this special opportunity to say something

0:55:100:55:16

that I've not really said in public before, which is that I really love Liz, my ex-wife...

0:55:160:55:22

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

0:55:220:55:24

..and...

0:55:290:55:30

..and if it were not for her, and the possible exception of Zaha, who's here somewhere,

0:55:310:55:38

-I would be conventional, orthodox and a pain in the arse.

-LAUGHTER

0:55:380:55:43

And it's using them as standards by which to judge myself that I constantly try to move on.

0:55:430:55:50

But Liz is here tonight and our son, Dan, is here and I'm really proud of both of them.

0:55:500:55:56

-So...

-CHEERING

0:55:560:55:58

'I think artists mostly today are businessmen pretending to be inspired.

0:56:200:56:26

'And they work in such tandem with art dealers

0:56:260:56:31

'and museums

0:56:310:56:33

'and collectors

0:56:330:56:35

'that it becomes... an entirely bland

0:56:350:56:41

'and colourless business mechanism,

0:56:410:56:45

'designed to fulfil a market need

0:56:450:56:48

'at the expense of innovation, originality and honesty.'

0:56:480:56:53

And I think that I exist in a kind of parallel world to the art world,

0:56:560:57:01

not necessarily outside, but...

0:57:010:57:04

perhaps parallel.

0:57:040:57:06

'My role is to get as close to being me as I possible can

0:57:080:57:15

'in the picture. And in the work.

0:57:150:57:18

'So long as I remember'

0:57:200:57:23

the power of liberating oneself through imagination

0:57:230:57:27

and through the subjective interpretation of the world,

0:57:270:57:32

I feel I can go anywhere.

0:57:330:57:35

Subtitles by Subtext for Red Bee Media Ltd - 2011

0:58:100:58:14

Email [email protected]

0:58:150:58:17

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