Studies in Grisaille

Brian Clarke's 'Studies in Grisaille' are compositions in stained glass, undertaken without lead. Vast sheets of representational glass, spanning 210 cm by 380 cm, their technology represented a breakthrough in the medium.

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Brian Clarke's 'Studies in Grisaille' are compositions in stained glass, undertaken without lead. Vast sheets of representational glass, spanning 210 cm by 380 cm, their technology represented a breakthrough in the medium.

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 writes:

‘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…'

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