In later life, the artist Brian Clarke, who has died aged 71 of cancer, liked to recall an epiphany. As a child, on a school trip from his native Oldham to York Minster, and being shown its Great East Window, he had, he said, “ceased to be aware of his friends, even of location, because something beyond location had replaced it”. He passed out cold.
This experience, which he described on the online arts platform Heni in 2023, attached him to what he called the “unbroken line to a glorious, complex and majestic past” represented by stained glass.
