Brian Clarke no relation Vivienne Westwood
Brian Clarke  (born 2 July 1953) is a British painter, architectural artist and printmaker, known for his large-scale stained glass and mosaic projects, symbolist paintings, set designs, and collaborations with major figures in Modern and contemporary architecture.
Born to a working-class family in the north of England, and a full-time art student on scholarship by age 13, Clarke came to prominence in the late 1970s as a painter and figure of the Punk movement and designer of stained glass. By the early 1980s he had become a major figure in international contemporary art, the subject of several television documentaries and a café society regular. He is known for his architectonic art, prolific output in various media, friendships with key cultural figures, and polemical lectures and interviews.
His practice in architectural and autonomous stained glass, often on a monumental scale, has led to successive innovation and invention in the development of the medium. This includes the creation of stained glass without lead and the subsequent pioneering of a 'dramatically enhanced Pointillism' in glass, as well as the creation of sculptural stained glass works, analogous to collage, made primarily or entirely of lead. The latter two advances are described as having taken stained glass as an art form to its zero-point in each direction: absolute transparency and complete opacity.A lifelong exponent of the integration of art and architecture, his architectural collaborations include work with Zaha Hadid, Norman Foster, Arata Isozaki, Oscar Niemeyer, I. M. Pei, César Pelli, and Renzo Piano. He served a seven-year term as chairman of The Architecture Foundation and served on the Design Review Committee of the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment. His artistic collaborations have included work with David Bailey, Hugh Hudson, Malcolm McLaren, and with Linda McCartney and Paul McCartney.Work
In his career, Clarke has advanced new approaches across a range of mediums including stained glass, mosaic, collage, painting and drawing. He is recognised as being instrumental in bringing critical attention to the medium of stained glass and revealing its relevance to the present day through both his practice of the medium and through exhibitions and writings on the subject.
From the beginning of his career, Clarke has had an architectural vision for stained glass. Always responsive to the building and surrounding context, this vision came to fruition in his later collaborations with world-renowned architects.1970s
Clarke received his first commission for a stained glass at age 17. However, his suite of 20 windows for the Church of St Lawrence, Longridge (1975) is considered his first mature work. Here, the use of transparent glass has a Pop Art sensibility; the 'see through’ panes embrace the everyday by letting the real world in. In 1976, Clarke received a large-scale commission from the University of Nottingham to produce 45 paintings, vestments, and a series of stained glass windows for a multi-faith chapel in the Queen's Medical Centre. One of the largest public art commissions of the decade, the process of design and installation was filmed by the BBC as material for a documentary.In the early years of his career, most of Clarke's work was for religious buildings. However, by 1978 his relationship with the Church had become untenable, as his designs were constantly being modified. The ending of this relationship freed Clarke to create stained glass for secular contexts and advance the medium as social art. Throughout this period, Clarke was active in bringing attention to stained glass and promoting it as a modern medium. In 1975, he organised the travelling exhibition Glass Art One, which featured secular, autonomous stained glass panels inspired in part by Japanese-landscape painting. Later, he co-curated GLASS/LIGHT, an extensive survey of twentieth-century stained glass, with British war artist John Piper and art historian Martin Harrison, in collaboration with the artist Marc Chagall as part of the 1978 Festival of the City of London. Clarke also produced the book Architectural Stained Glass,a polemical collection of essays. 
In his painting, Clarke developed a strictly abstract Constructivist language of geometric signs; often his work had an underlying grid structure made from repetitions and variations on the cross. In later years, he would disrupt the grid with free-flowing amorphic forms. In 1977 Punk hit the UK, which had a deep impact on Clarke. He connected with Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren and later collaborated as a designer on their aborted zine Chicken, whose creation was funded by EMI and filmed by BBC's Arena. He also expressed Punk's nihilistic energy in the 1977 series of paintings, ‘Dangerous Visions’ (1977). Around the same time, Clarke became friends with the physical chemist Lord Snow. After Snow's death, he made a tributary portfolio of screenprints; their title, The Two Cultures referenced Snow's influential 1959 Rede Lecture on the perceived gulf between the humanities and sciences. In 1983 the Tate acquired an edition of The Two Cultures.Between 1978 and 1979, the BBC filmed Clarke's studio practice and life for an hour-long BBC Omnibus documentary, Brian Clarke: The Story So Far. Millions watched the documentary in the UK, and the BBC recorded multiple viewer complaints. The programme and subsequent press coverage, including Clarke's appearance on the cover of Vogue, photographed by Robert Mapplethorpe, brought him to broader public attention. Later in 1979, Clarke became a presenter on the BBC2 arts programme Mainstream and the BBC Radio 4 programme Kaleidescope, conducting interviews with figures including Brassaï, Andy Warhol, John Lennon, and Elisabeth Lutyens. He also gave Sheffield band The Human League their first television appearance.
no relation