Today, we needed a little more spring. Images here are from 'Brian Clarke: Vespers,' published by @heni As the coronavirus persisted into the spring and summer of 2020, British painter and architectural artist Brian Clarke (born 1953) began to spend long evenings in his garden at home in London. Though the global mood was one of solemnity, Clarke found that the poppies in his garden remained as bright as ever. Taking its title from hespera, the Greek word for evening, 'Vespers' is a collection of over 500 watercolors of poppies painted by Clarke during those long evenings spent in solitude among the flowers. Robert Storr writes: "At times… the poppies resemble butterflies swarming, alighting, lifting off again, and wending their own way, lending each sheet a unique kinetic effect. This fluttering, spitting, chromatically vibrating kinesis is amplified by looking at these drawings-that-are-really-paintings as an ensemble composed of the surprise encounters of living graphic organisms belonging to the same delicate but declarative species. Gathered into book form, they are 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, according to Gerhard Richter, it has been wounded. All of which brings us back to the poppy as a symbol of youth cut down in its prime and of the impossible, evanescent loveliness of a pipe dream. We do not need to look to the past to verify these associations, and neither does Brian Clarke have to self-consciously evoke or footnote their iconographic or stylistic precedents. They are implicit in his subject and rendered explicit by his treatment of it, as indeed is the case with all real and imagined entities brought to life in the shadow of a plague.” Read more via linkinbio. @brian.clarke_ #brianclarke #poppies #flowers #gardens #spring https://www.instagram.com/p/Cb2hLFWuJJe/?utm_medium=tumblr
