Brian clarke heni

Prolific stained glass and set designer, using a rich palette to produce abstract and figurative works, born in Oldham, Lancashire.

His childhood, the son of a miner and mill worker, was hard. From 1965 began full-time art education at Oldham School of Arts and Crafts under a junior scholarship, involved in such aspects as heraldry, gilding and pigment-making.

An interest in art and architecture was inspired by trips to York Minster, Lancashire Priory and Fountains Abbey and by the mid-1960s film of Michelangelo’s life The Agony and the Ecstasy, starring Charlton Heston. Attended Burnley School of Art, 1968; won a first-class distinction in his diploma at North Devon College of Art & Design, attended from 1970; gaining the Winston Churchill Memorial Travelling Fellowship to study art and architecture in Rome, Paris and Germany, 1974, with a second part in 1975 which covered contemporary painting in New York and Los Angeles.