Brian Clarke: Spitfires

Brian Clarke: Spitfires, featuring 130 illustrations, brings together the full series of stained glass works, the ‘Summer Solstice Spitfires’, with Brian Clarke’s drawings, watercolours, collages and oil paintings, exploring the Spitfire. These works are supplemented by an introduction by Clarke which traces his engagement with the Spitfire from childhood memory to recent architectural installations.

Brian Clarke: Spitfires, featuring 130 illustrations, brings together the full series of stained glass works, the ‘Summer Solstice Spitfires’, with Brian Clarke’s drawings, watercolours, collages and oil paintings, exploring the Spitfire. These works are supplemented by an introduction by Clarke which traces his engagement with the Spitfire from childhood memory to recent architectural installations.

Clarke writes:

‘My first Spitfires experiments began as white outline drawings that expectorate in urgent and unruly contempt for order, lines shooting off from propellers and fins like electronic orgasms. The Spitfire form lends the line authority and purpose, while the line frees the Spitfire from the conventions of narrative, transcending orthodox interpretation as it becomes ornament. When the shape is repeated at regular intervals it generated a wholly heraldic pattern that yet, somehow, manages to hold on to the deep throaty growl of history.’