Marks on a Blue Field

Brian Clarke produced his ‘Marks on a Blue Field’ series of paintings intermittently between 1993 and 1996. He describes them in his essay ‘Drawing on Architecture’, produced in the monograph Brian Clarke: Architectural Artist (1994):

Brian Clarke produced his ‘Marks on a Blue Field’ series of paintings intermittently between 1993 and 1996. He describes them in his essay ‘Drawing on Architecture’, produced in the monograph Brian Clarke: Architectural Artist (1994):

‘At the time of writing, my paintings tend to be produced in a strict pattern. They begin by covering the stark white canvas with thin washes of burnt sienna oil colour. These washes remove from the picture plane the paralysing virginity of the white rectangle, taking away the sense of terror that accompanies the first mark; the different levels of wash create an illusion of depth of field and imply a foreground, a middle distance and a dark spatial continuum. The spatial quality of these watery brush-strokes I find comforting and ancient. It is odd, therefore, that the next step in the current process, as soon as drying is complete, is to paint over the whole of this swirling panorama with thick, dark, unthinned oil paint. Usually a deep ultramarine or permanent blue. At first sight this impasto colour appears so dark that it looks black. Only as the eyes adjust to the 40-50mm brush strokes does the warm hue of the deep ultramarine become visible.’

Discussing the role of architecture in his paintings, Clarke continues:

‘Any attempt to come close to an appreciation of the language of my paintings necessitates some appreciation of architecture. In one sense it is true to say that my paintings exist in independent isolation of my architectural activities, but it would create a false impression to leave it at that. All articulate artists develop a vocabulary and language of their own. It is formed out of aesthetic sense (taste) and out of the shuddering chaos of personal experience. It is a language given its poetic value by loss and by victory, by affection and by the death of those we love. Its syntax and structure are formed out of sensitivity to the external material world. Interior suffering and epiphany made coherent through the aegis of exterior physical sensibility. This language is nearly always characterised by particular obsessions. It takes very little time to identify that my particular obsessions are largely architectural.’