Brian Clarke’s Early Cross Paintings were created between 1978 and 1979. The series represents one of Clarke's earliest explorations of a motif that would recur throughout his entire career: the cross. The large-scale canvases in this series feature compositions of repeated crosses distributed across surfaces of either unprimed or painted canvas, variably interrupted by other symbols or marked by accents of colour. In Blue Cross, a single enlarged cross occupies the left-hand side of the composition.

In 2019, Clarke reflected on the origins of the cross motif and its enduring appeal in his work:

"The cross is the last word in structure. You’re naturally drawn towards that if you have an architectonic sense in your art: it’s irresistible. Once you’ve understood it, and the orthogonal geometries of structure just become part of your second nature, you can really move on, embrace the fluid and the spatial. But for me, the kind of artist I am, I needed that structure, and of course when I used to do life drawing as a student... you’d set down your reference points, and you’d make little crosses where your horizontal and vertical measures meet, and those crosses, of course, get ingrained into you, those little marks. And so, the cross has been a great part of my work."