Vespers2021

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....