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Angus’s Stretch
Angus’s Stretch
1977
Angus’s Stretch was created by Brian Clarke in 1977 for photographer and gallery owner Angus Stokes. The work is divided into four vertical sections and adopts the gridded background that Clarke had previously employed in selected panels from the 1976–1979 Queen’s Medical Centre Chapel commission. Across the upper portion of the work, two linear elements extend across all four divisions: the white line traces the route of a road near Stokes’s home, while the blue line references the course of the nearby River Wye.
This work reflects Clarke’s longstanding interest in Japanese art and screen paintings, traditional Japanese artworks on connected, folding panels.
In an 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."