brian clarke was born in oldham, lancashire, to edward ord clarke, a coal miner, and lilian clarke (née whitehead), a cotton spinner. raised in a family familiar with spiritualism, his maternal grandmother a notable local medium, clarke attended a spiritualist lyceum through his childhood. growing up in an environment where the non-material world was considered to be naturally present and able to interact with the material, he was considered a ‘sensitive’ and gained a reputation locally as a 'boy medium'. in 1965, aged 12, he applied for a place as the last intake of an education scheme existing in the north of england to enable artistically promising children to leave their secondary school and become full-time art students, and was awarded a scholarship to the oldham school of arts and crafts. in place of a standard curriculum, he principally studied the arts and design, learning drawing, heraldry, pictorial composition, colour theory, pigment mixing and calligraphy among other subjects. considered a prodigy, by the age of 16 clarke had mastered the orthodoxies of academic life drawing. in 1968 he and his family moved to burnley and, too young at 15 to gain entrance to burnley college of art, he lied about his age and was accepted on the strength of his previous work.