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26th August 2025
We recently watched Colouring Light — Brian Clarke: An Artist Apart, a 2011 documentary following the late stained glass artist and painter, someone about whom I’m sad to say I had never heard and knew nothing. We came for the novelty of seeing how big stained glass projects get made, but we stayed for something much more impactful than that.
Early on, Clarke goes back to Oldham where he was born and raised, and where he attended art school in the 1960s. His story has a lot to say about where you’ve come from and how you become the person you want to become, and it certainly touched a few nerves with me and my chippy, conflicted feelings about my own background and journey.
In Clarke’s case, it seems, you get there through a combination of occasionally bending the truth — he fibbed about his age so as to get into Burnley College of Art — showing aptitude as a spiritualist medium, presenting yourself as the solution to people’s problems, cultivating influential allies, and lots and lots of hard work. It also seems to help if you can get some really well-paying commissions which buy you freedom to do what you want to do without having to worry about the market most of the time…
The programme includes an excerpt from the 1979 BBC documentary Brian Clarke — The Story So Far, where a 25-year-old Clarke addresses his own particular version of saying no to something in order to say yes to something else:
“I lose more commissions than I do. I mean, for every one I do, there are two that I don’t do. And I’m often being told by people that I ought to compromise, that these days you can’t afford to refuse commissions, you can’t afford to upset people. I think that you can’t afford to compromise.
If you’re making a statement, artistically, then when you’re making that statement, as far as you’re concerned, it’s an absolute. And any variation or dilution or subtraction from an absolute makes it less than absolute, and therefore makes it untrue, and therefore by definition a lie. And I am not a perpetrator of visual lies.”
It put me in mind of something in Peter Hall’s Diaries (Sunday 9th April 1972), where he makes this observation:
“A comment on acting. Humphrey Bogart talking about Spencer Tracy. ‘Spencer does it, that’s all. Feels it. Says it. Talks. Listens. He means what he says when he says it, and if you think that’s easy, try it.'”
The contexts are subtly different, I would say. Clarke’s work expressed his own absolute truths (and we owe it to him to take him at his word, to trust that he meant what he said when he said it). Tracy’s acting, by contrast, is more likely to be his interpretation of what a particular character he was playing held to be their absolute truth, without it necessarily needing to be true for Tracy himself. But the principle at stake is very much the same, I think.
Bogart was dead right when he said this kind of art-making isn’t easy. It isn’t.
It’s far easier to churn out something insincere, something feigned, something performative. (Never was there a better application for that last word.) This arms-length approach certainly makes it easier to leave work at work, and to be stricter about only doing the amount of hours you’re being paid for. It demands less emotional energy, for sure — but by the same token, it can be a total chore to deliver. The work produced is often noticeably lacking in either heart or soul as a consequence. It shows. It really does.
At the risk of sounding uncharitable, this way of working is rife in the subsidised sector, where professional indifference routinely masquerades as genuine interest or investment. Countless artists chase the money and get involved with projects whose subjects or values they don’t really care that much about.
You know these people. We all do. Maybe you are one of those people.
I am adult enough to admit that I have been one of them, at points in my career when I was desperate for money, or desperate to convince myself that if I took on a project I didn’t care about and wasn’t well-suited for, it would eventually lead to opportunities that I really did want. I can’t honestly say it did lead to that, though. It just meant those not-quite-my-cup-of-tea projects were all that certain people, certain organisations, were ever prepared to offer me.
I don’t know where I heard it, but I love the cynical slogan: “I can talk passionate, as long as there’s cash in it.” I’ve done that. And I’ve done it very convincingly. Not always saying what I meant. Not always meaning what I said. I’ve also got more comfortable living with the discomfort of that self-awareness.
But I can also proudly say that I haven't done much of what Brian Clarke would have called "less than absolute" work in recent years. (In fact, I said no to one such project within the last week.) My bank balance and my professional prospects have certainly felt the pinch, mind you.
At the risk of sounding all Oliver Burkeman, there’s a downside to everything. You just have to choose which downside you’re more prepared to live with. I’ve chosen mine. It’d just be nice if being principled didn’t come with such poor remuneration.