Studies in Grisaille
2002
Studies in Grisaille is a series of stained glass works created by Brian Clarke in 2002. It includes three vast sheets of representational glass measuring 210 × 380 cm, reproducing photographic seascapes featuring a US Navy ship. Executed without lead, their production process constituted a technological breakthrough in the medium of stained glass at the time. Triple-laminated sheets of glass are overlaid with Ben Day dots, its superimposition generating the photographic image.
Martin Harrison describes the works in his 2013 essay ‘Brian Clarke: Silence and Tumult’:
"In both Study in Grisaille II and Study in Grisaille III the ship (based on Clarke’s digital photograph of a fog-bound vessel on the South Andaman Sea) dissolves into a haze, veiled in a ghostly synaesthetic calm. It hovers, motionless, in a borderless glass screen executed in triple laminated float glass, within which the layers of blue, yellow and black vitreous paint translate the dot screen – like Ben Day dots – into a kind of stained glass pointillism. Clarke originally developed this technique in response to specific requirements of the client for the soaring glass walls of Foster & Partners’ Al-Faisaliah Complex, Riyadh (2000), which called for figural imagery on a huge scale."
In the biographical vitrine for the 2020–2021 exhibition Brian Clarke: The Art of Light at the Museum of Arts and Design, Clarke wrote:
"When I made them John Edwards was, by that time, nearing the end of his life, in hospital 3 days a week… One day when I was with him while he was sat there, looking out over the sea, there was a US Navy ship, a frigate I think, in the bay. And it was coming and going in the mist, and it seemed an entirely natural thing to compare the two, and record it. I took the source photos on a digital camera. I wanted to do something of John, draw a portrait of him, but I couldn’t, it just would have been wrong. So I did the Battleships, which were a portrait of John kind of coming and fading in and out, like the ship as the mist took it and brought it back…"
