Vespers

Vespers is a luminous hardback book showcasing the vast new collection of 559 watercolour poppies by British painter and architectural artist Brian Clarke, featuring a preface by the artist and an introduction by renowned writer and art critic Robert Storr. Taking its title from the Greek hespera meaning "evening," the book presents a series of evening devotions created between the artist's home and his studio in London in the sombre midst of the unprecedented epidemic the world has come to endure. Clarke adorns each canvas with the intimacy of a prayer and the varying intensity of vermilion petals. He draws on the pleasure he finds in looking at the way flowers behave, and the poppies he paints are not botanical works but rather studies and experiments in the nature of paint itself. "First and foremost," writes Robert Storr, "that liquidity affords the artist an opportunity to display his deft command of gestural brushwork." Each artwork makes its own impression on the viewer; some sway radiantly upon tender stems, others huddle in playful gatherings of incandescent hues. The refrain of poppies occurs to the artist like phosphene behind closed eyes that elicits the compulsion to paint, and Vespers captures the artist's moods from curious to romantic, elated to sanguine in an exalting collection from a doyen of contemporary visual art.