Evans is a place on Earth: I'm Beginning To See The Light:Brian Clarke @ the Newport Street Gallery.

It's nice to see art that has a profound and emotionally involving concept attached to it, it's good to visit exhibitions where the careers of great artists are shown in depth, and it's good to see shows that make you look, and think, about art in a completely different way.

But it's also nice, sometimes, to just look at some pretty pictures and Brian Clarke's A Great Light, a free exhibition at the Newport Street Gallery in London, is just that. Lots of pretty pictures. Made using stained glass. Which I don't imagine to be a medium that many artists are using in 2023 so perhaps it's no surprise that the Oldham born Clarke, now seventy years old, is seen as a leading light in the field!

Ardath (2023)

Yes, light! You can see what I did there. The thing about stained glass is that it lets the light in and diffuses it. The light becomes a movable part of the art and today was a very sunny day so what with the Newport Street Gallery being impressively spacious and airy there was a lot of light in there. If not many people. Probably more invigilators than visitors to be fair.

Clarke's been working as an artist for over fifty years but much of what was on show at A Great Light was made in the last couple of years (he's very productive) and even the oldest works on show only went back to 2022. Some of his work would have been far too big to even fit it into this large gallery. An architectural fan, he's made work that's up to 2000 metres squared in size and many of them have been added to buildings in locations from Leeds to Jerusalem.

Ardath, the first work you see in the first room, is a mere forty-two metres squared and it makes great use of the light streaming in from the window behind it. It's all flowery and it seems to go very well with the Sigur Ros album I'm listening to as I type this. It seems to me to be inspired by paintings like Monet's Water Lilies but it also reminds me of some of the recent immersive work David Hockney has made.

Stroud Ossuary (2023)

Stroud Ossuary (detail) (2023)

HENI the Eighth (2023)

Stroud Ossuary was intended for a sixteenth century yeoman's house in Gloucestershire and we can only assume the owner of that house, or whoever lived there, liked skulls because that's a lot of skulls. Don't have nightmares.

HENI the Eighth is one of the more traditional looking pieces of stained glass on show and is inspired by Clarke's teenage visits to the cathedrals of York and Canterbury. There's a lad who know how to have fun.The heraldic symbols used, however, have been appropriated from a building less celebrated, Rochdale Town Hall. Check it out, it's an impressive Gothic Revival edifice.

Lead Night Orchid IV/V/VI/II/I/III (2015)

Shopping List (2008)

Shopping List (detail) (2008)

Don't Forget The Lamb (2008)

Things get a bit strange in the next room. There's some, comparatively, unremarkable if pleasant abstract daubs all either untitled or given the title Late Night Orchid followed by a Roman numeral and then there's some hands holding a book open and what almost looks like a map but doesn't quite fit the shape of any country I can think of. The latter has the legend "don't forget the lamb" and the former, as the title implies, has a shopping list attached.

Potatoes, onions, sprouts, tomatoes, lettuce, red pepper, cucumber, and various bits of dead animals. Buy why? The only clue is that he made these works following the death of his mother Lilian and my guess, and I think/hope it's a good one, is that he wanted to preserve her hand-writing in posterity and this seemed a good way of doing it. Often when people are gone it is the very small reminders of their absence that can be the most potent and once you understand that as regards this work it's not so strange after all. It's rather touching.

Study for Caryatids (2002)

Though I'm not totally sure I understand what's going on with Study for Caryatids except Clarke showing off that he can use stained glass to make fairly realistic looking portraits. I'm a big fan of caryatids, and the sitter is a fine figure of a man for sure, but I'm not quite sure what the idea behind these works actually is. Maybe they just look nice. I'm sure they do to lots of people.

The Studies in Grisaille, which share a room with the caryatids, are taken from photographs of American warships off the coast of Thailand. They're very, intentionally, out of focus and if you walk up close to them you see a load of coloured dots - like when, as a kid, you used to put your eyes right up next to the television, but they're strangely moving and a little ominous.

Study in Grisaille I (2002)

Study in Grisaille II (2002)

Though, from there on in, everything else in the show is the proverbial riot of colour. Be it folding screen works or smaller more intimate pieces. Even if some of the works depict what look like mushroom clouds (judging by the name, Manhattan, they are) or potentially poisonous jellyfish (there's something of the Warhol with those ones) and it's a pleasure just to walk though the rooms containing these pieces.

So that's what I did. It wasn't art that was demanding either of my time or of my intellect (ha!) but it was art that was rather pleasing and that - and a Maltesers ice cream, sometimes, is enough.