Vespers

Vespers is a series of 559 works on paper by Brian Clarke. Principally paintings in watercolour on Velin Arches, the works also employ homemade cochineal dye, acrylic paint, cyanotype ink, as well as mixed media collage of surgical facemasks, newsprint, and painted cut-outs. Ranging in size from a set of 25 miniatures to three monumental triptychs laid on canvas, they were created between May 2019 in Seville and the end of the first period of Covid-19 lockdown in London in mid-2020.

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Vespers is a series of 559 works on paper by Brian Clarke. Principally paintings in watercolour on Velin Arches, the works also employ homemade cochineal dye, acrylic paint, cyanotype ink, as well as mixed media collage of surgical facemasks, newsprint, and painted cut-outs. Ranging in size from a set of 25 miniatures to three monumental triptychs laid on canvas, they were created between May 2019 in Seville and the end of the first period of Covid-19 lockdown in London in mid-2020.

In the preface for the monograph Brian Clarke: Vespers (2021) Clarke explains:

‘On the surface of it, they’re paintings of poppies, but they’re a bit more urgent than poppies are generally — aggressive, some of them. I wouldn’t want to spend the night with some, but others I’ve fallen in love with. They are devotions, a repeated action of putting down the best of yourself to share....’

In his essay ‘Scarlet Sprays for the Winter of Our Discontent’ for the monograph, Robert Storr writes of the group as ‘an explosive bouquet of natural beauty at its most ephemeral, given that all truly natural things are inherently ephemeral and that beauty assumes its greatest pitch and poignancy when it has been wounded.’

These works were displayed in the Vespers exhibition at Phillips, London, in 2021. Clarke developed ‘Vespers’ further in his 'Kabinettscheiben' autonomous stained glass panels.

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