Angus’s Stretch was created by Brian Clarke for photographer and gallery owner Angus Stokes. The work is divided into four vertical sections and adopts the gridded background Clarke had previously employed in paintings for the Queen’s Medical Centre Chapel. Across the top portion of the work, two linear elements span all four divisions: the white one traces the rout of a road near Stokes’s home, while the blue one references the course of the nearby River Wye.

This work reflects Clarke’s long-standing interest in Japanese art and screen paintings, traditional Japanese artworks on connected, folding panels.

In interview in 1985, Clarke said:

“I have always been a great admirer of Japanese and Chinese calligraphic painting and I have always been interested in those Western artists who have adopted that kind of imagery or technique. For example, Julius Bissier who became a master calligrapher, or Johannes Schreiter. As a young man, probably when I was 19, 20 or 21 I made several copies of Japanese screen paintings. So there has always been a deep admiration for that kind of work.”