Clive Hicks-Jenkins' Artlog:

The Gainsayers

Featured

Posted on July 12, 2026 by Clive Hicks-Jenkins

I spent nearly three years preparing for and then illustrating the Folio Society double-edition of Emily Wilson’s translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey. I studied, made a list of characters that would have to be included and a longer one of characters I’d like to include. I annotated my hardback copies and began to keep huge sketchbooks of ideas . I made articulated maquettes of heroes, villains, immortals and monsters and built three-dimensional models of the Greek palisade, Troy and the Trojan Horse. I made thousands of sketches and a good number of fully worked studies.

In my studio on the Welsh Marches I put in gruelling hours to complete the work to schedule. I requested and was granted an extension of a month and for the last intense drive I was in the studio for eight weeks solid with no days off, 4am – 8pm. On the last day of the extension, as agreed, the digital photography department of National Library Wales delivered the scans of my original artwork to my editor and the Folio teams. Hands got busy, proofs and dummies of the fold-out boxes paved the way and then when everything was practised and secure, at print studios and binding workshops across the country the work of manufacture began. I was delighted to discover that the books were to be printed at Gomer, here in Wales.

When the Iliad/Odyssey special-edition launched in November 2024, it sold out before close of business that day.

Unexpectedly my editor at Folio Society had given me permission to show work on the books in progress at my social media pages. I have a custom of sharing what’s going on in my studio not because I seek affirmation – though that’s obviously appreciated on the occasions it comes – but because I attempt to strip away the perceived mysteries of making art. At Instagram and Facebook the comments as the images evolved were enthusiastic. However one day I followed prompts to an online forum in the U.S., and found myself taken aback by negative responses to what I was producing. Emily Wilson was at the receiving end, too – and had been since her translations had first appeared – so I was in good company. There were those who were determined to dismiss the book on the grounds of both her translation and my art. The same is happening now ahead of the release of Christopher Nolan’s film of The Odyssey, with racists and misanthropes ranting about colour-blind casting as though they believe the Ancient World was a place of Aryan supremacy.

I confess to some lost sleep when I discovered the levels of hostility. I got over it, but I wondered why anyone would go to such lengths to criticise something they had no intention of purchasing. And when the books were out and selling well, the hostility transferred to criticism of their construction/manufacture, which as a lifelong bibliophile I found astonishing as these editions of The Iliad and The Odyssey are immaculately produced.

The comments were all anonymous (see below) so I have no idea who ‘Les Miserables’ is, but he, she or they certainly chose a name which suits. I should say I had my defenders as well as detractors at this site, and I shall post some of their comments in a forthcoming post, for balance. But to the people who wrote what they did to undermine the books ahead of publication, I would say this.

Do you intend the hurt you inflict on those who strive with every ounce of their creativity for excellence? What’s the gain to you? Does it make you feel important, throwing your weight around on that forum? Let me tell you, we don’t set out to make books that disappoint. We’re not snake-oil salesmen. All of us absolutely love what we make with a driving passion. For my own part I lived, breathed and dreamed The Iliad/The Odyssey for the three years I worked on the project, as did the teams of makers who turned ideas into reality. I know, as you cannot, that I never for a moment short-changed the readership with less than my best. So your criticisms just come across for what they are: mean-spirited, ill-informed and ugly. I don’t know what it is in the world that you make, if anything, but on the principle that there are those who can, and those who wish they could, I’ll put you in the latter category because were you a creative person you’d not write so slightingly of other people’s work. Luckily despite your best efforts the negative opinions you were so free with had little impact because many came with the enthusiasm to buy. Both the sold-out special and the still available standards have been successful in ways I imagine must irritate the hell out of you. Reaping what you sowed.

The Comments:

Les Miserables

Folio appear to be hell bent on commissioning illustrations equivalent to ‘modern art’. Indeed, just having looked further into the background of the illustrator, he appears to be imbued in that style. I mean look at this stuff, it’s absurd.

JanPospisilCZ

Glad to see the art is unpopular – so I might be able to get one.

cwl

This looks remarkably like some of the art gcse coursework I’ve seen, which goes on to get a B.

Les Miserable

Garbage. FS have lost the plot.

stubedoo

I don’t like C H-Js reliance on text to make his illustrations clear. Same with his Beowulf – I think the illustration should be meaningful without need for text. I don’t hate his stuff by any means, but I do feel it could be better, certainly in this regard.

I guess there is a question as to whether the illustrations add much. I’d personally feel that they don’t. For my eyes, they just aren’t nice enough to look at on their own merit.

cwl

It does look as though he’s attempted a quasi-Attic black ceramic style, which often explicitly labels the figures. The execution doesn’t work for me, but I appreciate the idea, assuming that’s what this is. If it’s very similar to his other work (I’m not familiar with it at all), then it wouldn’t work on the intellectual level, either. It’s not so bad as to be laughable, but it’s distinctly average and, as mentioned above, adds nothing.

Les Miserables

After commenting, I came across the words put far more elegantly than I ever could, which encapsulates what I mean not just by this ‘art’ but all that follows in that vein.

“Modernia does not see itself as indebted to what came before, nor does it seek to preserve, refine, or even reform the foundations laid by previous generations. It exists in opposition to them, treating the past as a burden to be discarded rather than a foundation upon which to build.”

SF-72

Let’s just say that this illustrator has stopped me from buying three editions so far. Good for my wallet, probably not what the publishers were aiming for since I’m clearly not alone in this. Still, I wish enjoyment to those who like this style.

Gwrach/Witch Exhibition at Oriel Myrddin in Carmarthen: 22nd Nov – 14th March

Featured

Posted on November 20, 2025 by Clive Hicks-Jenkins

On the beginning of an obsession:

“As a child I had a Toby Twirl annual. There was a story of a witch who captured Toby and imprisoned him. The pictures of her terrified and enthralled me. She stuck like a burr in my imagination and she’s been there ever since. When in an idle moment some years ago I felt the need to be drawing a witch, I chose Hansel & Gretel as the vehicle simply because a witch was central to the plot. I painted the characters onto a set of enamelware plates for a bit of fun, for no other purpose than for use at home. And in so doing, I laid the foundations for the larger project, though I didn’t know it at the time.”

A brief history:

“In 2016 Random Spectacular published a picture-book of my dark re-working of the fairy tale Hansel & Gretel. There was no text, save what I hand-lettered into the illustrations. The copy shown here was hand-bound specially for me by Christopher Shaw.”

”The following year Benjamin Pollock’s Toyshop in Covent Garden commissioned a toy theatre kit from me, based on the book.”

”In response to the picture-book and toy theatre, Goldfield Productions engaged me to direct and design a stage production. Hansel & Gretel: a Nightmare in Eight Scenes with a libretto by Simon Armitage set to music by Matthew Kaner, was created for a chamber consort, a narrator/singer and two puppeteers, and it premiered at the 2018 Cheltenham Music Festival followed by a five month tour. A matinee at the Barbican was recorded and broadcast by BBC Radio 3 Christmas week 2018.”

”The following year Design for Today published a hardback edition of Simon Armitage’s libretto that I illustrated, and in 2020 it won me the V&A Illustrated Book Award.“

On the use of vintage toys in the stage production:

“A toy,” Clive says, “can open your heart and make you remember what wonder feels like.” However his adoption of these tokens from the past is not an indulgence in nostalgia. “I’m not such a fool as to believe that yesterday was better. I was there and it wasn’t! My explorations are all about objects being repositories of histories. They’re like radio dials, and if you twiddle them you ‘hear’ the past. That past can be anything, from sweet to despairing. It’s the focus that’s all important, and what the focus opens in the mind and heart.”

On collaborators for the 2018 stage production:

”Several collaborators were assembled to realise the project. The composer Matt Kaner came to it by recommendation of the producer. Clive invited artist Peter Lloyd to produce shadow puppets for the production, Pete Telfer to film animations to be projected onto the stage and his regular collaborator and assistant, artist Phil Cooper, to be in charge of the model sets and painted backgrounds.”

”Hansel and Gretel were ‘ tabletop’ puppets designed by Clive and made by Jan Zalud, and their performances were captured and live-streamed to a large screen so that audiences could see everything in close-up. “I needed the puppets to be fully up to the emotional requirements of Simon Armitage’s text,” Clive says, and his designs evolved from research on the experiences of children in transit camps.”

” This approach was not initially welcomed by the producer and her assistant who remarked that his drawings made them think of children in concentration camps. “I stuck to my guns,” he remembers, “because I knew the direction was the right one.”

”In time the producer changed her mind and began to understand the artist’s and the poet’s vision for the piece. Puppeteer Di Ford came to the project at Clive’s invitation having previously worked with him on the stage production of The Mare’s Tale, and then puppeteer Lizzie Wort was invited to join the company. Costumier Oonagh Creighton Griffiths was brought in to dress the puppets.”

On reimagining a classic fairytale:

“Everything in the stage version of Hansel & Gretel is as seen/imagined by the children. They use the contents of their toy-box to act out and reinvent a chaotic world into one they can better understand and control. While the children are carved wooden puppets operated by puppeteers in full view, the baker-mother, woodcutter-father and forest-dwelling Witch are pre-filmed animated silhouettes projected onto the stage. From the moment I read Simon Armitage’s script I knew that the parents needed initially to be as unfathomable to an audience as they clearly are to their children. Gretel in particular constantly mis-hears both eavesdropped conversations and what’s said directly to her, and I wonder whether she may be a little deaf. This results in the children misconstruing their parents concern for the family’s safety in a war-zone, into a more sinister plot to be rid of them. But an even more significant episode of misunderstanding happens in the lead-up to the Witch’s death, during which Gretel entirely misunderstands everything said to her.“

On Illustration Part Two: The Process.

Featured

Posted on March 8, 2025 by Clive Hicks-Jenkins

I have learned to choose my projects carefully, not just in terms of the authors and titles, but taking account of how the images will be printed/presented. From the start of my career as an artist publishers sought permissions to reproduce my paintings on book covers, with mixed results. For the most part in those early days I didn’t like the way the images were cropped, overlaid with text or reproduced. So when the chances came, I began to create artworks specifically with publication in mind, adjusting my painterly techniques to a graphic style I felt better served books, whether paperbacked or jacketed. I sometimes produced images as screen prints, as with the 2018 fully illustrated edition of Simon Armitage’s Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

My more usual technique for illustration is to paint in gouache overlaid with pencil, and I always have the works reproduced on uncoated paper as I intensely dislike the sheen of coated ‘art-paper’. (Printing on uncoated paper slightly darkens the tone, but I take account of that when making the original works.)

I begin all major illustration projects by reading the text. I only once permitted myself to be persuaded to illustrate a cover based on the editor’s account of the text, and I will never do it again. That takes away all the creativity. For me everything lies in the text. All my inspiration may be found in the writer’s craft, and I want to experience it without intervention or interpretation by someone else. (I’m happy to discuss, but I don’t want to be left out of the direct process of working with the words.) I need to have a text embedded in my head before I can produce my best work, rather the way an actor has to memorise the lines before being able to convincingly inhabit a role.

I like to put myself in the spaces between the sentences, and to inhabit the places the writer has left unexplored. I play every role, in my head. I make vast numbers of sketches, mostly rough and ready, freely improvising on themes. My project books are comprehensive. I made two for the Homer, and sometimes fantasised that were I to die before completing the project, Folio could publish the text illustrated by all my roughs, and it would be a different though entirely enjoyable edition.

I research, of course. I make models of buildings and props and light them expressively and take photographs. I ‘play’ with shape, modelling and tone. I build flat, painted, articulated maquettes of characters and arrange them in different positions, photographing them and then making many compositional drawings, balancing positive and negative shapes, finding the best way to present ideas to readers in unexpected ways.

Below: Maquette of Grendel’s mother for Beowulf, and the illustration made using it as the guide.

I’m obsessed by patterning, and like to use areas of diapering, so there can be passages where the eye can find visual reward without too much thinking.

I assemble rough drawings of every illustration for discussions with the editorial team, and once I’ve got to the stage of sign-off, the rendering can begin. Techniques vary according to the demands of the images, but I largely rely on gouache overworked in pencil, though I love to use oil pastel when given the chance. Collage is always present, sometimes obvious and sometimes so subtly applied as to be invisible. I frequently use etching techniques to reverse dark lines on pale ground to pale lines on dark.

Everything is analogue, made with brushes, paints, ink, pens and etching needles. However for my last book, an anthology for Suntup Editions of weird and science fiction tales by the great Richard Matheson, I worked with my friend and often collaborator David W. Slack, who made the animated trailers for the Folio Beowulf. The image above is an illustration made for the book. The drawing was produced in black pencil on paper, using an etching needle to create the light on dark elements. David then created digital separations of a high-res scan of the drawing, before colourising it. Born of Man and Woman will be out later this year.

Clive Hicks-JenkinsMarch 2025, Porth-Y-Widdan

On Illustration Part One: How it Happened

Featured

Posted on March 6, 2025 by Clive Hicks-Jenkins

First and foremost I am an easel artist. I never set out to be an illustrator, though I understand why some people may now see me that way, because I have a fairly hefty portfolio of publications behind me. I’m quite sure that I don’t have the skills to make my living as a commercial illustrator. Illustrators have to be able to turn their hands to whatever subject matters may come along, whereas I’m able to choose from the projects I know will be a good fit for me. In this way I can balance studio painting for exhibitions, against working on the titles and authors that interest me. I can also, most significantly, illustrate in my own known style as an artist, which for me is the only way to work. I have also been able to turn book projects to exhibition advantage. Later this year mine will be the inaugral exhibition to open the newly enlarged and refurbished Oriel Myrddin in Carmarthen. Titled Gwrach/Witch, it will feature multi-media works by me and several artist collaborators who have accompanied me as I’ve produced books, objects and stage designs exploring the theme of Hansel & Gretel. The guest curators are Simon Costin and Meriel Hunt.

Right at the beginning of my career as a painter I was commissioned by the fine press publisher, Old Stile Press, to produce images for a letterpress edition of a sixteenth century poem, The Lamentation of the Affectionate Shepherd Sick for Love by Richard Barnfield. I believe the project came my way because I was known from my gallery work to have a facility for depicting the human form, and the publisher Nicolas McDowall wanted the homoerotic sensuality of the poem to be evident in the images. Nicolas guided me through technical processes new to me, and in due course the book was published and well received.

My friend Catriona Urquhart was writing a poetic accompaniment to my exhibition The Mare’s Tale, and when Nicolas read sheets of her text lying on my kitchen table, he offered to publish it. I illustrated the book and it was printed and hardback-bound in record time to be available for the exhibition.

The Barnfield Sonnets followed at Old Stile, and then an illustrated edition of Peter Shaffer’s iconic play, Equus.

These titles suited me well because I have always loved poetry, and though the Shaffer play is not a poem, it is poetic in its character and expression. Later I was commissioned, at Shaffer’s recommendation, to make the cover for the Penguin Classics edition of the play. (Still in print.)

For a long period after that there were no illustration commissions. But round about 2009 I became friends through correspondence with the American poet Marly Youmans, and in 2011 she travelled to the UK to attend my 60th birthday retrospective in the great Gregynog Gallery at the National Library of Wales. Marly suggested I make a cover for her next book of poetry, an unusual request because authors aren’t usually permitted to choose their illustrators.

Marly was different, and so well regarded that her several publishers over the years have taken me on her recommendation.

It was touch and go at the start because I didn’t have enough of a portfolio to convince anyone that I would make a good job of cover illustration, and so her word had to suffice. And because Marly and I loved each others work, we wanted to continue together, and have done so ever since.

I’ve often said that I rode the coat-tails of her success, and that without her belief in me and capacity to be persuasive with publishers, I wouldn’t have got a foot through the door.

I’ve travelled with her since that first book, working for various publishers, sometimes making just a cover though more frequently producing chapter headings, vignettes and sometimes full-blown illustrations for her volumes of poetry and novels. We’ve done, I think to date, eight books.

Simon Armitage was another poet who took me to his publisher, Faber, where I worked on an illustrated edition of his acclaimed translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight using screen prints produced in collaboration with Dan Bugg at Penfold Press. It was published in 2018 and is still in print. (The screen prints were already underway at Penfold before the Faber commission, and Simon saw them and approached me with the suggestion they be used for a new edition of his translation.)

After Sir Gawain, while directing a music theatre production of a work set to a libretto/poem by Simon Armitage, he asked me to recommend someone who might produce an illustrated edition of the libretto. I took him to the one-man publisher, Joe Pearson of Design for Today, who then published Hansel & Gretel: a Nightmare in Eight Scenes.

The book, meticulously designed by Joe and Laurence Beck and illustrated by me, won the 2020 V&A Illustrated Book Award.

In 2023 it was published in an edition by Faber, in a different cover but using Joe’s and Laurence’s layout.

At Faber I also illustrated Simon’s translation of the medieval poem, The Owl and the Nightingale.

My close working collaboration with Joe has resulted in several publications. In Lockdown I produced illustrations for a tiny-pamphlet picture-book, The Bird House.

As a follow-up to Simon’s re-working of Hansel & Gretel, I invited poet Olivia McCannon to work with me at Design for Today on a new version of Beauty and the Beast.

There is also a cut-out-and-assemble toy theatre version of Beauty & Beast published by Design for Today, again with a text by Olivia McCannon. For the toy theatre I worked in collaboration with artist David W. Slack who designed the model.

For Penguin/Vintage I’ve made covers for The Shakespeare Sonnets and most recently for Under Milk Wood.

Two writers I’ve made covers for here in Wales are Mary-Ann Constantine and Damian Walford Davies. For Damian, a poet, I’ve produced several covers, and for Mary-Ann, a writer of short stories and a novel, just the one.

I accepted the offer to make the UK edition of Loot by Tania James, based on the history of Tipu’s Tiger.

Since my childhood I’ve had a taste for horror and weird fiction, so it was an unexpected pleasure when I was artist-in-residence at English Heritage for a year to be asked to illustrate an anthology titled These Our Monsters.

In preparation now, a new edition of the late Richard Matheson’s first anthology, Born of Man and Woman, due out from Suntup in the U.S., illustrated by me with regular collaborator David W. Slack working as my colourist.

At Folio Society I was invited to illustrate Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf. I have never before worked on such a lavish edition. Bound in yellow leather stamped in dark blue foil, I produced images referencing shadow-puppets abstract-patterned in the cloisonné of Anglo-Saxon enamelled jewellery. Rendered in ink, the images were digitally inverted and printed in a deep blue and black.

In 2023 Folio Society offered me a double-volume edition of Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey in translations by Emily Wilson. Working this time in gouache overworked in pencil, I produced twenty double-page illustrations and the artwork for the two covers and an elaborate box/case. The edition will be out later this year.

This Summer the new Adam Nicholson book, Bird School will be published. Nicholson sought me out through his art director at Harper Collins, but because I was so buried under deadlines for Folio Society, between the three of us we chose a detail of an existing painting for his cover.

Hardback and jacketed or paperbacked and affordable, well-made and mid-priced or opulent and expensively produced, I have always loved books, in all their forms. Illustration, for me, has been a meandering journey of creativity, almost entirely founded on collaborations with a private press (Old Stile), a small publishing house (Design for Today), larger publishers such as Faber, Penguin and Harper Collins and connections with writers who have suggested I work with them. I have no-one seeking illustration commissions on my behalf and I am not with an illustration agency, nor do I want such an arrangement. I drift from project to project, heading wherever the wind takes me. I’ve fulfilled much of the notional wish-list I once had of titles I’d like to illustrate, which included Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Beowulf and Beauty and the Beast. I have a few outstanding authors, past and present, I’d love to work with. But whether that happens or not, I count myself already a lucky man to be a painter who occasionally gets to make books.

Clive Hicks-JenkinsMarch 2025, Porth-Y-Widdan

The Iliad and The Odyssey

Featured

Posted on March 2, 2025 by Clive Hicks-Jenkins

The invitation from Folio Society to illustrate an edition of Homer came in the Summer of 2023.

To begin with I didn’t know whether I was to work on The Iliad or The Odyssey, and I’d completed reading my shelf-copy of The Iliad (see above) when news came that it was to be a double-edition of both titles in the critically acclaimed translations by Emily Wilson. Months of reading followed and my copies of the texts grew fatter with Post-It notes marking passages I thought promising in terms of illustration. I made a cast-list which was a tad daunting because I wanted to include far more of the characters than I knew I’d be able to fit in.

In all the excitement the contractual arrangements weren’t discussed until the following year, at which point we had to agree how many illustrations and how the book would be presented. The consensus was for two quarter-bound volumes (leather spines and cloth-covered boards) housed in a simple sleeve-case. The case would entail much less work than my previous book at Folio Society, Beowolf, which had been housed in a clam-shell box. We agreed eight double-page illustrations per book, plus endpapers that would extend the illustration potential by being narratively themed rather than patterned. Essentially there would be ten illustrations per book, plus cover artwork, title page and limitation page. With this framework in place, in October 2023 we had a team Zoom to discuss the ‘style’ of the edition. The illustrations for Beowulf had been made in ink and printed in just two colours, blue and black. For the Homer project I favoured working in paints, and decided an example of how the illustrations might look would make a more convincing case than any description I could offer. I presented the artwork Startled Peacocks as a guide, made in 2017 in a limited palette for the Musica Segura Festival in Andalusia where it was projected onto a building. Everyone on the team was enthusiastic about the look for the two books, and the agreement was made that The Iliad and The Odyssey would proceed with Startled Peacocks as the ‘style guide’.

In the Summer of 2024 I had an exhibition of illustration work at The Table, Hay-on-Wye, coinciding with an appearance at the Festival in conversation with Simon Armitage discussing the three books we’d made together at Faber & Faber. With agreement from Folio Society, I decided to make a ‘teaser’ image for The Odyssey to show in the exhibition. Not a work that would appear in the book, but it would give some feel for the style. I’d made a start on the project by exploring ways to illustrate the sequence of Odysseus and the Sirens, and working in the palette of Startled Peacocks, made this:

As a stand-alone it’s a strong image, but though dramatically visceral I thought the image a little clotted and busy for what I wanted in the book. (Better as an artwork on the wall, than an illustration in a book.) For the book I’d smooth things out and create more space. I wanted to see some air between the various elements. Space in illustration, for me is as important as draughtsmanship.)

In the end the siren episode became the cover for The Odyssey, and I’ll jump ahead here to show the finished wrap-around artwork for the boards. It needed to work in a way that even when divided by the leather spine, the image had continuity

Revisions were made to the specifications for the edition, and it was decided not to present the books in a sleeve-case, but in an elaborate box that would sit upright on a shelf, with an unfolding spine revealing the leather spines with the titles on them. While there was an agreed palette for the contents of both books, I felt we might consider using different colours for the leathers of the quarter-bindings. A warm russet/tan would suit The Iliad, and a soft, greyish marine blue for The Odyssey. I mixed sample colours for Folio Society Production Director, Kate Grimwade, and within days the samples were prepared and came back for approval.

At Folio Society, because of the time it takes to manufacture books and their protective cases – for which dummies have to be designed and produced – artworks for covers and boxes have to be delivered ahead of the deadlines for the page illustrations, which adds pressure because the artist and publisher have to commit to images made before anything else has been properly started. But because we had all agreed on the style of the Homer illustrations, producing artwork for the covers felt relatively secure.

On July 4th 2024, Peter and I completed the sale of our home of eighteen years in the Ystwyth Valley inland of Aberystwyth, and moved temporarily to the small coastal town of Aberporth while we searched for a new house. Selling up and moving delayed me from making a start on the Homer ‘roughs’ until mid July. I’d produce two project books, one filled with suggested compositions for The Odyssey and another for The Iliad. But my workplace was no longer the light and spacious environment I’d been accustomed to, and I had to manage as best I could on an oval dining-table in a picturesque but rather small room. All my reference books were stacked in boxes under the table that I had to constantly rummage through, and on the tabletop there was so little space that items were constantly getting knocked to the floor. Pencils rolled off and vanished under the dresser and loose sketches disappeared under tottering piles of ‘stuff’! Most frustrating were the vanishing erasers, because once they hit the floor they’d bounce into dark corners and under furniture never to be found again. There were some paint spillages too, to which the rug under the table is forever going to bear witness.

There followed several months of drawing, filling the ‘project books’ with all the material I’d need to build the illustrations. Everything had to be invented.

The human characters – how they’d appear and what they’d wear – the gods, animals and monsters and the locations where the action would be set.

Drawings of armour, weapons, chariots, buildings – everything had to be figured out and fitted into the particular world I’d create for the two volumes. I made maquettes and models. The wooden Horse of Troy is absent from The Iliad, but gets a passing reference in The Odyssey.

I produced a clutch of drawings for the proposed unfolding box:

And once signed off by the editor, the finished ink renders:

There’s always a balance for me between the historic research of surviving visual references – in the case of Ancient Greece, painted vases, statues and artefacts – and what I can make work as images on the page. I do the homework, but then on the basis of the research, I invent. Invention is elastic, but no matter how I push colour and form, I want the results to be at a basic level, plausible. They need to be believable.

The illustration roughs for both books were delivered to the Folio Society Head of Editorial James Rose in October 2024, and were swiftly signed off without major changes requested. Thereafter the deadline for the box, cover artwork and title pages was successfully met.

However by the time we moved to our new home in Monmouthshire on December 22nd, though I’d laid out all the underdrawings of The Odyssey ready to render, not a single page illustration for either of the books had been completed.

In my studio in the grounds of our new home, I set to work on December 26th, knowing I was going to be late with the delivery. Peter’s Christmas gift to me was a large drafting-table with room for sketch-books, references, paints and artwork-in-process.

James at Folio Society was understanding and agreed to grant me some wriggle-room on the deadline. Instead of all twenty illustrations for the two books by January 9th, I’d have until the end of January for the ten illustrations of The Odyssey, and until the end of February for the ten of The Iliad.

I made a flow-chart of what it would take, and discovered I’d have to work at the rate of a completed illustration every two days, with a bit of space for the occasional three-day-render for the more complex compositions. But there was no room for error. To set my mind on the goal, at the start I booked in the non-existing artworks with Michael Jones for scanning at the Digital Photography Department of The National Library of Wales. From there the scans would be forwarded to the team at Folio Society. Each evening I made a ceremony of crossing off the day’s goal from the flow-chart. If on any day I missed my goal, I’d get up even earlier the following day, to catch up.

The Odyssey was delivered to Folio Society on January 31st and The Iliad on February 28th, as promised.

I have never worked so fast or so relentlessly. I surprised myself with my capacity to endure long hours in the studio, from 5.30 am – 7 pm – with short breaks for dog-walking and meals – every day, seven days a week through January/February. The new studio is lovely, with a panoramic view across our own woodland. While the hours were exhausting, the experience of watching days break over that landscape was a privilege.

The Folio team were completely supportive throughout: James the Editor, Kate the Production Director and Scarlett the Studio Manager who carried out design work on the covers and pages and made digital tweaks to ensure my artwork always looked its best. I regularly sent updates to the team and always the responses were swift and enthusiastic. I have to say that this is not the way with all publishing companies. One in particular last year had me tearing my hair out with frustration at the editorial team’s micro-management of the cover artwork I’d been commissioned to make, to the point where I felt I had nothing to contribute because no-one was listening. But at Folio, management match artists to authors/titles with considerable insight, and then support them throughout the process.

I recall back in 2023 that the publication date for the Homer edition was summer this year, but I’ll post a notification when I have specific details. Despite the circumstances of moving twice while working on the project, I’ve loved this experience. My fear was always that the strain of working while being peripatetic was going to impact the artworks I was able to produce, but looking at digital images of them now on my computer, I can see no evidence of that. I can’t quite believe I’ve finished. I still wake at 5pm ready to start work.

Home Again

Featured

Posted on January 13, 2025 by Clive Hicks-Jenkins

After eighteen years in Ceredigion, three weeks ago we moved to Llangattock Lingoed, about eight miles from Abergavenny. It’s a return to my home county because I was born in Monmouthshire. Ty Isaf was beautiful in so many ways and we loved being in an historic house with a literary connection, it having been the home in the first years of the twentieth century of the writer Rose Macaulay, later the author of The Towers of Trebizond.

However a move had been on the cards for a good eight years, and after much soul searching and trying to figure out where we might go, we set events in motion. It was time to have a new adventure.

It’s been three and a half years since we had work done on Ty Isaf in order to present its best face to potential buyers. We marketed it while beginning to rationalise our belongings and downsize, and sold to the first people who made an offer. We cleared the house, said our goodbyes and moved temporarily down the coast to Aberporth, where we stayed while looking for a property to purchase.

We loved The Old Inn from the first viewing, though didn’t get our hopes up because there’s so much that can go wrong when it comes to purchasing properties. There were many questions to be asked and hurdles to be overcome. Several times along the way everything faltered until we could resolve the problems. A house in Brecon was also being investigated because we needed to have a back-up plan, but that went off the radar when some Americans stepped in and offered over the asking price, and we took that as a sign it was not to be,

We’ve been here three weeks now, and it feels as though we’ve been settled for six months. The vendors left the house in superb order, so we were able to start unpacking straight away. Given we moved in on December 22nd we’d have been perfectly happy with cheese-on-toast eaten from a packing-case as a table. However three days later the sitting-room, kitchen, bedroom and garden-room were all organised and functioning in time for Christmas, and we managed both Christmas lunch and a Christmas tree.

I greet every morning thankful that we found this house and community. The Old Inn is utterly beautiful. Peacefulness was a high priority, and we have that here. Our direct neighbours have been wonderfully welcoming and we’ve had many cards dropped in our postbox from local people wishing us well. Although the properties are scattered, there’s a warm sense of neighbourliness. On Christmas morning we walked to The Hunter’s Moon for the annual Christmas tradition of a glass for the locals plus a wheel of port-fed-stilton served with biscuits. More welcomes and much seasonal cheer.

So many times in the day the views around the house stop me in my tracks. We’ve had frost, mist, snow, rain and winter sun.

Rudi loves it!

Throughout January and to the end of February my attention will be entirely focussed on the Folio Society editions of The Iliad and The Odyssey. Each morning I wake before light, wrap up warmly to cross the lane to the studio where I’m hard at work by 6am at the latest. With pauses for food and dog walking, I continue until 7pm, seven days a week with no days off. Moving house is tough and Peter and I have done it twice in six months, all while continuing with our work. My new studio is very comfortable, so it’s no trial to spend so much time in there, When I arrive before dawn it looks like this:

When I take a break for breakfast, it’s daylight::

The sitting-room gets a beautiful morning light from the low Winter sun.

Paradise.

The Romano-Egyptian Vase

Featured

Posted on January 3, 2025 by Clive Hicks-Jenkins

We deeply loved our friend and neighbour in Cardiff, Frances Mannsaker. When she moved to Lincoln to be Pro-Vice-Chancellor of the University, the friendship continued, and when Peter and I moved to west Wales, Frances regularly came to visit us there, sometimes at Christmas and sometimes at Easter. In 2015 we spent Christmas with her, taking our dog Jack with us. Here he is after a Christmas Eve walk, standing at her door.

Frances was a collector of my work. Amongst what she’d acquired over the years was The Romano-Egyptian Vase, the subject being an alabaster cosmetic jar that I’d purchased from an antiquities dealer many years earlier. (I was poor and could ill-afford it, but it ‘called to me’.) Frances loved the painting and I was happy it was going to a good home.

That last Christmas we spent together was magical. Frances was a meticulously organised host, and although Christmas was not the special day she celebrated – she preferred Twelfth Night for her parties – she made an exception that year and together we produced a Christmas dinner supervised by Frances (of course), enjoying it in the company of her close friend Professor Brian Winston. Here we all are, Christmas-puddinged out and into the dessert-wine.

Frances died in 2018. We visited her in hospital shortly before she returned home to be palliatively cared for by a dedicated nurse. I spoke to her on the phone a few days before she left us, set up in a bed in her beautiful sitting-room, sharing a glass of Prosecco with a close friend, surrounded by beloved touchstones of her life: family photographs, silverware and artworks, including The Romano-Egyptian Vase.

Two days ago I heard from a woman not known to me, with the news that she owned the The Romano-Egyptian Vase. I was so thrilled to know where it was that I wrote back with a full account of its making and how Frances came to have it. I’d wondered for six years about where The Romano-Egyptian Vase had gone, not contacting Frances family to ask because I didn’t want to embarrass myself or them with questions they might well think were none of my business. I was now discovering that the house and its contents had been sold in entirety to the mother of the woman Insta-messaging me. She’d given several artworks to her children, and The Romano-Egyptian Vase had been among them. So here we were, with the owner writing to say she had the painting, and asking whether I was the artist of two additional works (drawings) she thought might be by me. I wasn’t, though I recognised them as having been in Frances’ collection.

I replied with the entire story of the painting’s history, happy to know it was safe and appreciated. Alas, her next message gave the lie to that. Rather sheepishly she explained that she’d decided to sell it, and that it was going under the hammer the following day. She hadn’t known who the artist was until the auction house had told her. (The painting was legibly signed, and unless it had been removed I’m certain would have had a label on the back.) I felt a fool for having assumed she’d contacted me to learn about a painting she was keeping. She was clearly embarrassed and said she’d try to withdraw the painting from auction so that it could be returned to me. I suggested that if she withdrew it and still wanted to sell, I’d pay her the reserve. Shortly afterward she reported the auction house had declined to withdraw the painting. I told her I’d bid for it, but then she wrote to say she’d increased the reserve to discourage a sale. I thought that a bad idea as I would have preferred to take my chances and bid. However because she didn’t reveal what the reserve was, I decided not to bid, not feeling I could do so when I might effectively be bidding against myself.

Her raising of the reserve didn’t dissuade a purchaser. I discovered yesterday that the painting sold at auction. After all these years of yearning to find it, I did so on the eve of it being lost to me, most likely now forever. I didn’t want the painting because it was mine, but because it had been Frances’ painting. With her to the end, and by her when she died. In a world where terrible things are happening every day, this is a very minor thing, and I must put it behind me. I think of Frances a lot. I loved her and miss her, and I wanted the painting because of its associations with her, and with my own history.

Here are Frances, Peter and Jack, taking a winter walk when we were staying with her.

Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf at Folio Society

Featured

Posted on October 3, 2024 by Clive Hicks-Jenkins

A year on from publication, a retrospective view of Beowulf.

Animated promotional film by David W. Slack.

Customer reviews from the Folio Society website.

It’s Wonderful. *****
Review by Alan Stanton on 6th July 2024
A perfect volume in a beautiful solander. *****
Review by Martin Jarrold on 30th April 2024
The book is a spare no expense printing of this famous classic of British literature… The binding is top notch, the choice of leather same… Art work is unique and very period in a modern sort of way. Worth the money, as an heirloom collectable.
Review by Sam Samaha on 27th April 2024******
Heroic volume for a heroic tale! I could smell the vellum the moment I opened the beautiful cloth-covered box. Wonderful. The book’s cover and the marvelous illustrations are reminiscent of Sutton Hoo without being exact copies. The thick, high quality paper is a joy to handle. The new introduction is interesting. This is a volume to treasure. Really not too pricey considering it’s very high quality the greatness of the tale, and the beauty of the Heaney translation. *****
Review by MR JAMES BARRY on 3rd January 2024
This is a favorite book I have loved since University. I am anxious to experience the Seamus Heaney translation. Impeccable printing and illustrations. *****
Review by John Priestley II on 15th November 2023
A beautiful publication. *****
Review by LARRY GUITTARD on 18th August 2023
Extra large format book expertly produced with high quality components and materials. Not a single defect in craftsmanship. Ohh, and my favorite translation by the way! *****
Review by Francis LaMorte, MD on 9th August 2023
Outstanding edition. *****
Review by DR JONAS S JOHANSSON on 7th August 2023
A stunning book can’t fault it in any way. *****
Review by Steve Shaw-Wright on 21st July 2023
A beautiful tribute to the work of Seamus Heaney. *****
Review by James Dwyer on 20th July 2023
Simply a stunning classic which I will hold for a lifetime and pass on to be enjoyed. The design and illustrations take you into the mythology with a powerful effect.*****
Review by Customer on 18th July 2023
A lovely book well put together and unique design. *****
Review by Enrico De Santis on 13th July 2023

Production details

Limited to 750 hand-numbered copies

Bound in goatskin leather blocked in metallic blue and gold foils

Letterpress-printed limitation tip signed by Clive Hicks-Jenkins and Janina Ramirez

304 pages set in Bembo Arcadian

Printed in two colours throughout on Arena Natural paper

11 illustrations including 8 double-page spreads

Illustrated title page

Gilded page tops

Ribbon marker

Printed endpapers

Clamshell presentation box covered in blocked cloth and lined with printed paper

14˝ x 10˝

Print with presentation folder

Below: Beowulf illustrations on the artist’s desk.

Copies of Beowulf may be purchased HERE

Creating the cover of The Iliad

Featured

Posted on September 12, 2024 by Clive Hicks-Jenkins

When I’d made my list of elements for illustrating the forthcoming Folio Society editions of The Iliad and The Odyssey in the translations by Emily Wilson, I’d marked down for the cover of The Iliad, ‘The ransoming of Hector’.

To begin with I was thinking of a comprehensive image showing Achilles and the violated body of Hector. There’s a lot going on in the relevant passages of the poem, and initially I included too much material. Of course all that got quite congested, so everything had to be made at a smaller scale, and was busier in a way I really don’t like on a cover.

Here’s an early draft of Achilles – top left – the body of Hector tethered by its heels to Achilles’ chariot – bottom left – and one of the Keres – top – who are the spirit creatures drawn to the last moments of the dying at battlefields.

The section of the poem dealing with Achilles’ violation of Hector’s corpse is what most haunts me. In the aftermath of their fight there’s an explanation of Achilles threading through the dead man’s ankle tendons with leather straps to tether the body to his chariot. The account is visceral and uncomfortable. You need neither the whole body nor even Achilles to be present to know that it’s a key incident from the text. First of all I tried out this:

then reduced it further, to this:

Finally I began to simplify, so we could get a graphic clarity and an instant effect, adding the upside-down helmet fo catch the sense of the body being that of a soldier stripped off its armour after death. (Helmets have become a visual leitmotif of my work on this book.)

The drawing below is the closest of these roughs to how I think the image will work best compositionally. I like the geometry and tension of the straight and diagonal lines of the tethers:

I’d like, if permitted by the editor, to put the title on the cover. A bit like this:

The idea is to have a really strong graphic identity for both covers, linked into elements of the narratives which will be instantly recognisable to those in the know, but will also work for anyone not familiar with the stories, once they’ve read those particular passages. There’s so much violence in the Iliad narrative and I want to reference that, but not in a way that’s too much in the reader’s face.

I’ll sleep on all of this, and return to it afresh tomorrow with a clear view.

Imagining The Iliad

Featured

Posted on September 4, 2024 by Clive Hicks-Jenkins

Illustrating The Iliad in Emily Wilson’s translation, due out from Folio Society in 2025.

First there’s the reading. I pencil-annotate my copy, circling narrative elements I believe might benefit further examination. There are a lot of circles. Twice through the poem and I begin to make serious notes, and the occasional, tentative scribble on loose paper. On the third reading I open a panoramic, hard-back, clean-sheet sketchbook, which means my sleeves are about to be rolled up and the pencils sharpened. Characters and events begin to appear. Pretty fugitive at this stage. The first images are often faint. It’s as though I’m whispering them into being.

There’s a tension between keeping everything fluid while moving toward compositions which will work within the text. Later images will have to be locked down, so this is the point to get the energy flowing unfettered. (The energy released here, in the early stages, is what will carry me when I’m having to get through any dogged later work of rendering.) Even when at a point of being sent for comments, the drawings aren’t finishing points, more like signposts. There are many because later, at the points of final decisions, I like lots of choices.

I make dozens of drawings of Athena, playing with ways to portray her. There are thousands of statues and paintings on earthenware for reference, from the archaic depictions in rigid, columnar pose, to later kinetic impressions, all flying hair and spear raised to eye-level, taking aim. Items of attire associated with her are the war-helmet – which when shown with a face-guard is worn pushed to the top of her head – and the Aegis, which is a cloak/mantle edged with snakes. The Aegis is a real bonus in terms of the image I plan, because it gives her such a dramatic outline.

There’s an episode in The Iliad when Hera and Athena board a chariot to go to war among the humans, and the idea of that captivates me. I draw it over and over, adjusting my ideas in changing compositions.

Athena sends a ‘night heron’ to guide Diomedes and Odysseus, and though the moment is almost a throw-away, it really fires my imagination. Often the best points of illustration are not the ones you’d suppose at a first reading.

There are scenes too numerous to count of the deepest cruelty. The slaughter is unceasing. A good deal of the blood-letting must go into the book. But balanced against that I have to convey the supernatural strangeness, too, and the moments of tenderness. When Apollo fires arrows carrying plague into the Greek army the outcome is catastrophic, yet there’s a dark beauty to be excavated from the idea.

Every image must earn its place. As double page illustrations, each must pause the headlong forward thrust of the poem, causing the reader to either reflect – and perhaps even return to the lines harnessed by the image – or anticipate what lies ahead.

With words the imagination is free to roam. An illustration can interfere with that, particularly if over-specific. My job, as I see it, is to offer visual stimulation to the reader’s imaginative thinking. I want the illustrations to be a doorway, or even better, a launching pad.

Right now my Iliad sketchbook is close to full and I’m about to begin a second. Images I was sure about I’ve now had time to reconsider. When complete – or as close to complete as I take them – the roughs will go to the Head of Editorial at Folio Society for comment/sign-off. If approved, then I begin the final renders. Still things can change, because I like to keep the options of revision open right through the process.

This post is by way of a teaser and lead-in to what’s coming later. However once I begin the work of rendering images, this project will go under wraps until publication.

The double-edition of Emily Wilson’s translations of The Odyssey and The Iliad, with illustrations by me, will be published next year by Folio Society.

The Model Revealed

Featured

Posted on July 22, 2024 by Clive Hicks-Jenkins

Furious Embrace, based on the legend of the blind Saint Hervé and his companion wolf, was painted in my studio at Ty Isaf. It was first exhibited at MoMA Machyllenth in my 2007 exhibition Hervé and the Wolf: Saints and Their Beasts, from where it was sold.

Henry Miller Fine Art

The model for the young saint was Joe Warren, the son of our friends and neighbours John and Cathryn. Neither Joe nor his parents knew that I’d used him as the model for the painting, though I figured they must have guessed because several people at the exhibition opening remarked on the likeness, including Nicolas McDowell of Old Stile Press, who took this photograph of Joe.

Recently the painting was acquired by Henry Miller Fine Art in London, so seventeen years after it was made I thought it about time Joe and his parents knew that he’d unknowingly served as model for it. I imagine that had I asked him at the time to come to the studio, he may well have balked. To avoid that situation, I studied him quietly without appearing to do so, and then made drawings in private. Now the secret is out and Joe knows, and I hear through his parents that he’s been very happy to be identified at this late stage as the model.

Henry Miller Fine Art

Furious Embrace, 2007

Acrylic on panel. 82 x 32 cm

Enquiries to Henry Miller Fine Art

Siren Song: the inner eye

Featured

Posted on July 21, 2024 by Clive Hicks-Jenkins

Finding my way toward the Sirens for The Odyssey, forthcoming from Folio Society in the wonderful translation by Emily Wilson.

Odysseus has his crewmen bind him to the mast of the ship so that he can hear the song of the creatures, though won’t be able to throw himself into the water to swim toward them. He instructs the men to plug their ears with wax so they won’t be at risk as they sail close to the rocks where the Sirens dwell.

I want to show the Sirens, even though according to the text they remain hidden from sight. By blindfolding Odysseus I can put them in close proximity to him for the purposes of the visual drama, and yet without incorrectly implying that he can see them.

A great source of visual reference for the artist is the the iconic red and black pottery known as ‘attic ware’, produced in ancient Greece from the 6th to the 4th centuries B.C. Below, a ‘stamnos’ – a wide-mouthed jar used for mixing water and wine – shows the ship of Odysseus passing through a rocky channel on which Sirens are perched.

Ty Isaf

Featured

Posted on July 19, 2024 by Clive Hicks-Jenkins

We came to Ty Isaf eighteen years ago, brought to the Ystwyth Valley by Peter’s new job as Secretary to the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales, located in Aberystwyth. Eight years on he left the Royal Commission to be Keeper of Collections at the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff, lodging with friends Monday to Friday and returning at weekends, and I discovered that though I loved Ty Isaf, I didn’t at all enjoy spending so much time there by myself. When Peter took the plunge to be a free-lance writer and art curator we both worked from home, which I liked much better, but the time of his having been away so much had been a stark demonstration that Ty Isaf was not a place where either of us would thrive alone, and we knew that one day, all things being equal, we would leave.

In the years of the Pandemic and Lockdowns the isolation of the house protected us from Covid, and together we appreciated what we had, even as we began to make plans to one day leave. Where we would go was undecided, but the fact that we would go was undisputed. We began to prepare for changes ahead.

On July 4th – which we had no idea at the time we chose it would be Election Day – we did a final check of the property, visited the grave of our beloved terrier Jack at the top of the paddock and took a last tour of the rooms (with Rudi) before turning the key in the door for the last time. The sale of Ty Isaf was complete, and a new adventure could begin.

I’ll make a post at some point about my feelings on leaving Ty Isaf, but I need some distance before embarking on that. We had an interim arrangement already in place, so now we can take stock while continuing with our plans for the next part of the adventure, wherever it may be.

On the Eve of May Day

Featured

Posted on April 30, 2024 by Clive Hicks-Jenkins

Like the Hollywood actors of old who concealed their dates of births so as to seem forever youthful, I have a bit of a blank spot when it comes to remembering dates. I’m just not good with putting the significant incidents of my life in chronological order, which is why I get evasive whenever required to provide a conventional biography. In fact the sole thing that can place me in the general vicinity of something for which I’m attempting to recall the date, is by thinking about which dog I had at that time. I keep a ‘significant dates’ book for birthdays and anniversaries, though alas almost invariably forget to look at it. I certainly don’t hold the departure dates of loved ones in my head, save with the one exception: May Day 2005.

My friend Catriona Urquhart was a shy writer. She wrote obsessively all her life, mostly poetry, but it was a private passion that she rarely shared. Because Catriona was such an extraordinarily good story-teller in conversation, when she one day asked Peter what he’d like for his forthcoming birthday gift, he replied he’d like a short story, which was a cunning ploy because though she looked a tad uneasy at having been caught in a trap of her own making, she knew she’d have to deliver. Peter wasn’t about to let things rest until she had, and in the lead up to his birthday he regularly reminded her of her promise. On the night when Catriona and Ian arrived for dinner, as I took their coats she requested writing-paper, a glass of wine and the use of an upstairs room to work in. She hadn’t begun the promised story, but said she’d have it down in half and hour. And she did just that, reappearing with a slim sheaf of sheets which on later examination we found to be neat and perfect, written smoothly with no hesitations or corrections. She was persuaded to read Palmyra Jones to the assembled guests that evening, and although she feigned a becoming nervousness, she read it as well as anyone ever will, in her soft Glaswegian brogue, and all present were mesmerised by it.

So much so that Nicolas and Frances McDowall of Old Stile Press, present that evening, asked her permission for them to publish it in a small inkjet edition, which they did, and I made the illustrations for it. This was in 1997, and it was the first book I made with Nicolas, marking the beginning of a long collaboration with OSP.

Catriona would never put herself forward. When first I knew her she was working as a librarian in Caerleon. She wrote secretly, and it wasn’t until much later that she let slip that she’d once studied poetry under Seamus Heaney, who had been sufficiently impressed to tell her to stay in touch with him, though she never did. Whatever came over her to make the suggestion she’d write a poetic text to accompany my 2001 exhibition The Mare’s Tale, I’ll never know. It was completely out of character, perhaps fuelled by her love for my late father Trevor, and the fact that the heart of the exhibition was to be his story, about which she felt fully qualified to write because in his last years he’d opened so readily to her with his accounts of past times. Catriona stored up stories as her treasures. She was a ‘curator’ of stories, and of lives, and truthfully by the time Trevor died, she’d had more stories from him than he’d ever shared with us. She was a wonderfully appreciative audience for him, which of course his children could never be.

The original intention had been to print Catriona’s poems on information boards in the gallery, but Nicolas McDowall discovered them on A4 sheets scattered on our kitchen table when he visited, and for the second time was impressed enough to seek Catriona’s permission to print her work in a slender but beautifully produced edition.

Once again I was asked to illustrate, and again had to produce the drawings in a weekend rush in order to meet the printing deadline for the book to be available in time for the exhibition opening.

Catriona was working on a new translation of the Ramuz libretto for Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale, a project we’d planned together for Old Stile Press, when she died of cancer on May Day 2005. Peter and I were in the process of re-locating from Cardiff to Aberystwyth where he’d taken up the post of head of the Royal Commission for Ancient and Historical Monuments Wales. Right at the point when we were making a significant change in our lives, I lost the person who had most anchored me at a dark time of my life before Peter.

I thought I would never get over grieving for her. Every day in the months after her death felt like a climb out of a deep well. A year into Peter’s posting, we found Ty Isaf, purchased it and moved in. Almost the first thing we planted was a stick-in-a-pot that Catriona had given me, assuring it would one day grow into a walnut tree. This didn’t seem likely because when removed from the pot, it was discovered the little tap-root had rotted clean away. Yet thrive it did, as she’d promised, and here it is today, close on thirty feet high and coming into leaf on the eve of May Day, which anniversary tomorrow will mark the fact that Catriona left us, aged just fifty-two, nineteen years ago.

Peter delivered the eulogy at her funeral. Titled Golden Catriona, you can read it if you scroll down on the page you’ll find here. And if interested, you can read a more detailed account of her speed-writing Palmyra Jones, here.

Though I illustrated the sixteenth century poet Richard Barnfield’s The Affectionate Shepherd for Old Stile Press, Catriona was the first living poet with whom I collaborated. Had we been able to look into the future at where my career would carry me in terms of working with poetry after The Mare’s Tale, we both would have been dumfounded. After Catriona had gone I didn’t expect there to be another poet in my life. But then quite suddenly Marly Youmans in the US drifted into my world, and our friendship was instantaneous, deep, and I think unexpected for both of us. (We work together still.) With Marly the list grew: Damian Walford Davies and Callum James in the UK, and Andrea Selch, Dave Bonta and Jeffery Beam in the US, all wrote poems about my work.

Simon Armitage invited me to Faber & Faber to illustrate the 2018 revision of his extraordinarily successful translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and in 2019 his reinvention of a fairytale, Hansel & Gretel: a Nightmare in Eight Scenes had only just been published by Design for Today with illustrations by me, when he was announced as Poet Laureate. There’s been a recent cover for Vintage’s Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and a new cover for Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood. Last year Folio Society published a sumptuous edition of Beowulf in the translation by Catriona’s tutor, Seamus Heaney, illustrated by me. This year I’m illustrating a Folio Society double-volume set of Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey in translations by Emily Wilson.

Catriona began this trajectory for me. Poets are my tribe, and I began to learn the art of making images to accompany words, with her. In my head I still share my projects with Catriona, talking things over with her and trying out ideas. Still we communicate, in the strange way that the living do with the dead when imagining the conversations that might have been were they still with us. Gifts she gave us are all around, in daily use. The narrow-loom Welsh blanket that’s getting so threadbare it’ll soon be more darn than weave, and the beautiful faience plate she’d thought to be English Delft but turned out to be Dutch. There’s the French slipware jug I’d spotted in a closed antique shop in Montrose that she and Ian went back and purchased for me as a surprise gift. I painted it in 2001, titling it ‘Catriona’s Jug’. In the background the tower of Tretower Castle, where I’d worked as a relief custodian in the interim years between the theatre and painting, where books of poetry were my companions in the long winter months of few visitors. There are the pieces of furniture Catriona and Ian brought to us, and on our shelves the countless books. I still smile when I look at the huge Nick Evans painting of a Welsh sin-eater offered at auction, which I badly wanted but had been unable to persuade Peter we should have because he wanted a Nick Evans mining painting. Without a word Catriona purchased it and then came to us with the bill, airily declaring she knew we’d love it and so just went ahead and bid on our behalf. No outraged glare from Peter could dampen her gleefulness over outwitting him, and her sideways glances warned me off admitting my part in the conspiracy when she was having so much fun. It was our secret until she died, at which point I confessed. I think he’s forgiven us!

My dear, dear friend, I miss you still. Every day.

Above: Catriona’s Jug

Sandy Hamilton Bentes

Featured

Posted on March 15, 2024 by Clive Hicks-Jenkins

For those who didn’t know Sandy, she’s the one with the pre-Raphaelite hair kneeling centre in the first picture, larking about in a rickshaw with the team of dancers during rehearsals for Aladdin at the New Theatre, 1982 – 83. I was the choreographer.

Sandy was one of a small team of dancers who worked regularly for me on stage and tv, and in conference shows and product launches. We met when she attended a group audition arranged by the agency office at my old vocational school, Italia Conti, and from the moment Sandy stepped onto the rehearsal-room floor, she was mesmerising.

Throughout our years of working together I called upon her to do the strangest things, all of which she entered into with infectious mirth coupled with her fantastic precision as a dancer. In terms of dance she was creative to her fingertips. I had her vomited up by a giant plastic leech in a nightclub floorshow on the Algarve, thrown around as a Peruvian mummy while being unwrapped to Peter Gabriel’s Rhythm of the Heat on tv, and partnered by a dragon puppet, though in what I can’t remember except that it was a hokey idea that Sandy made work. That was the kind of performer she was. I was a choreographer who wanted to play with ideas, and Sandy always played wonderfully and kept all of us laughing while we explored, even when the deadlines were pressing and the producers were getting nervous! But the way I remember her most was in the small role of Bo-Peep in the New Theatre Cardiff 1983 – 84 Christmas pantomime Humpty Dumpty, stepping onto the stage like a Fragonard painting come to life, trailing satin ribbons and full of grace. (Sandy was shy of delivering lines as she never felt acting was her skill-set, but as I was writing the script for the production, I was able to persuade her.)

In the days before mobile phones it was hard in the hurly-burly of rehearsals before opening a show to get decent photographs of the experience. In my archives for Humpty Dumpty Sandy always seems to be at edge of frame or a blur of movement, but I found this one shot of the Act II opening in which she’s in the costume of a gypsy-dancer with a group of travelling players, sitting left of the platform-stage. I loved designing costumes for her as she wore them so beautifully, and this one was a riot of appliqué folk patterns on wildly extravagant skirts and petticoats that looked wonderful when she danced.

And here’s a shot of the production curtain-call, in which Sandy is on the top step, to the left of the cavalier in the middle, her hair hidden under a powdered wig. (And my thanks to David W. Slack for helping rescue a rather poor photograph.)

Of the dancers I worked with back in the days before my career change, Sandy and Kathy Blyth – Kathy is seated behind Sandy in the two photographs at the top of this post – kept in touch with me over the years, together visiting Peter and I when we lived in Cardiff, and then again in 2018 at Ty Isaf. The two will always be a double-act for me, because in their company the laughter never stopped. Back in the day they were often super-naughty, but I can see at this distance that they were at their naughtiest when I needed to laugh, and once the laughter had broken the tension, then we all put our heads down and delivered. Together they were my muses, but muses who were like mischievous monkeys.

Sandy died on February 1st, and her funeral was last week. I wasn’t able to be there. The past months have been wall-to-wall punishing deadlines. I hate it when work doesn’t allow for life. It isn’t always like it, but sometimes the deadlines coalesce and there’s no getting around them. I’d been been pushing Sandy’s death to the back of my mind so as to focus on what needed to be done, but now I’ve stopped, and it’s all hit me. Though our lives had gone in different directions for the longest time, she was a huge part of my creative world before I changed course. She comes so swiftly to mind the moment I think of her. Her laugh, her conspiratorial whispers, her dazzling smile, the sometimes serious, sideways glances I caught when she thought I didn’t see, and I fall apart at the recollections. Long after the event she and Kathy confessed that after the first night party of Humpty Dumpty, as my then boyfriend Richard and I headed for home, the two of them followed us through the streets, giggling and hiding in the shadows watching us. Richard and I never knew. Those girls would have made good spies!

Farewell my beautiful Sandy. I always felt the world was better knowing you were in it.

Celebrating Cranogwen

Featured

Posted on February 29, 2024 by Clive Hicks-Jenkins

To mark St. David’s Day (March 1st), a new design has been produced in collaboration with Sussex Lustreware to commemorate the Welsh poet, teacher and mariner, Sarah Jane Rees. (1839 -1916.)

As a teenager Sarah Jane declined the dressmaker’s apprenticeship suggested to her by her family, and instead spent two years crewing on her sea-captain father’s ketch before returning to study for her master mariner’s certificate in navigation in London.

Despite being fully-qualified there was the expected opposition to her captaining any ship, so instead she returned to Wales where she became a teacher, educating children and tutoring young men in the arts of navigation.

A celebrated poet in the Welsh language, Sarah Jane was also known by her Bardic name of Cranogwen, and those who she helped gain their master mariner certificates were known affectionately as ‘Cranogwen’s Captains’.

Studio photographs of the adult Sarah Jane show her long hair centre-parted and worn tightly arranged against the head, with the jewellery, gleaming gowns and velvet jackets of a woman of her class.

What she wore when she crewed her fathers ship is not known, and so my portrait of her is a fanciful one in the tradition of the romantically inclined depictions of sailors on nineteenth century ceramics and toy theatre character sheets.

I’ve given her the varnished and be-ribboned straw-boater of a nineteenth century sailor, with a neckerchief knotted at the collar of a shirt worn under an open jacket.

Sarah Jane Rees must have been a woman of courageous and independent spirit to have taken the path she chose. She was a lecturer in an age when public speaking by women was frowned upon, she established a women’s magazine and founded the South Wales Women’s Temperance Union in order to secure the safety of women in both their homes and within society.

Sarah didn’t marry, and there is clear evidence that her lasting relationships were with two women: Fanny Rees, who died young from tuberculosis, and Jane Thomas, the lifelong companion addressed by Sarah in her most celebrated poem, My Friend:

“I love you, my beloved Venus”.

Below: The maritime tradition of Sunderland Lustreware

Inside the collar of our jug runs the text: Sarah Jane Rees, also known as Cranogwen: Morwr (Mariner) Bard (Poet) Athrawes (Teacher)

Beowulf for Folio Society

Featured

Posted on February 8, 2024 by Clive Hicks-Jenkins

Letter sent to the Beowulf team at Folio Society, 14/11/23.

“Today the most enormous box arrived from Folio Society. Packed immaculately, it took me a while to work my way to the contents and unwrap the top copy of the three books within. I’m not sure I have the words to express what I feel, but I’ll do my best.

The edition is staggering, unarguably the most magnificent and significant creation of my career as an illustrator. My hands shook as I went through it page by page. The book design and text layouts, airily perfect. The translation from pen and ink artworks into illustrations, nothing short of a miracle. I worked on the drawings for many months, so I know what they look like in every detail because my nose was practically glued to them as I tapped away into the small hours rendering all that pointillism. But even though they’re all but tattooed on the insides of my eyelids, seeing them afresh and reinvented by the inversions and additions of colour, I’m knocked sideways. (The printing of the images is perfect in every way.) I’m so happy that the book is steeped in all the right traditions, and yet feels boldly contemporary. The binding and box are wonderful beyond all my imaginings and anticipation. Sumptuous in every way, the sensations of opening and turning the pages of the edition become visceral. Everything under the fingertips silky to the touch. The scents of the book, the leather, paper, glue and ink, all immersive and thrilling.

Sunday marked my seventy-second birthday, and Beowulf has been the best present. Not all book outcomes can be happy. I’ve made books in the past for which my hopes were high but things were not, in the end, done well. However all disappointments crumble before this edition of a text I love. Seriously, I could die happy knowing I’d made this one book.

My warmest good wishes to you all,

Clive Hicks-Jenkins”

Click here for a video review of the book.

Above: promotional animated video for Beowulf produced by David W. Slack

I had no idea just how lavish the book was to be when I first began work on it. It was only stage by stage that it began to dawn on me that the binding and clamshell box, built at the bookbinders Smith Settle in Leeds, were going to be works of art in their own right. I made all the illustrations at the size they were to be printed, so from the start I was aware that the edition was going to be on a handsome scale.

Above: Pen and ink illustrations in progress on my desk

Reviews from the Folio Society Website

Heroic volume for a heroic tale! I could smell the vellum the moment I opened the beautiful cloth-covered box. Wonderful. The book’s cover and the marvellous illustrations are reminiscent of Sutton Hoo without being exact copies. The thick, high quality paper is a joy to handle. The new Introduction is interesting. This is a volume to treasure. Really not too pricey considering its very high quality, the greatness of the tale and the beauty of the Heaney translation.

Review by Mr James Barry on 03/01/24 *****

Simply a stunning classic which I will hold for a lifetime and pass on to be enjoyed. The design and illustrations take you into the mythology with a powerful effect.

Review by a customer on 18/07/23 *****

A stunning book I can’t fault in any way.

Review by Steve Shaw-Wright on 21/07/23 *****

Extra large format book expertly produced with high quality components and materials. Not a single defect in craftsmanship. Oh, and my favourite translation by the way!

Review by Francis LaMorte, MD on 09/08/23 *****

Glassworlds

Featured

Posted on November 10, 2023 by Clive Hicks-Jenkins

I’m having the most extraordinary creative relationship with Penelope Jane Ross. We’ve never met, but the friendship that’s developed from our exchanges at Insta ‘direct messaging’ have coalesced into the most beautiful range of glass pieces, made by Jane using source drawings of mine, now emerged as a range of pieces under the name Glassworlds.

What I enjoy about this so much, is the translation required when Jane sets about adapting a drawing into a relief-model sculpted from Plasticene. The model is then cast as a plaster mould, filled with glass chips and placed in a kiln, emerging transformed as a coloured glass version of her original sculpt.

It’s one thing to realise a flat drawing made in a folk-art idiom into a free-standing, bas-relief sculpt, but an even more extraordinary one when the sculpt is transformed into coloured glass, with the flows, eddies and bubbles of its liquid form hardened into a material so distant from the graphite and paper of the origin art. Something flat and graphic turned into shimmer and gleam and transparency, the patterning becoming a sort of brocade stitched out of light.

The early pieces made were on a small scale and quite soft in their modelling so that the results, cast in aqua blues and greens, were reminiscent of sea-glass. The effect was dreamier than my crisp and graphic drawings, and had the results been placed at the bottom of a well or scattered in the stones and silt of a stream-bed, it would have been easy to mistake them as dating back a hundred years or more. Some, like the cavalryman below cast in rose pink, had opalescent depths.

First Jane made animals and items I’d drawn out of my love for vintage Erzgebirge, the region of Germany famous for its wooden toys. But quite quickly I got to thinking that maybe the cast of characters would sit well within a setting, so I made drawings of toy houses and trees for her to sculpt.

At my Insta page I began to describe the colours in terms of being edible: the rose of Turkish Delight, the citrus fruits of boiled sweets and the greens of pistachios.

Jane devised self-coloured pedestals that were added, so the flat-backed pieces could stand, ideally placed where the light could shine through them.

As the project evolved – and with a bit of technical advice from my frequent collaborator David W. Slack – Jane began making positive casts of the original Plasticene sculpts. These positive casts permitted multiple plaster negative moulds to be made from them. While the plaster moulds are always destroyed in the process of removing the cast glass figurines, there’s no longer the problem that for every plaster cast there’s a lost Plasticene sculpt. Now Jane has positive casts that can be used to generate multiple plaster moulds, and she doesn’t have to make a new Plasticene sculpt for every glass cast.

A new development has been the introduction of vibrant colours, and the recent work emerging from the kilns is as richly hued as anything you might see in the window of one of the great cathedrals. The modelling has become crisper, and as a result the decorative surfaces are more sharply defined. I love both the earlier, slightly dreamier figurines, and these fruit-drop coloured beauties, equally. Creativity needs to evolve as the artist explores all options, and the latest version is just different to the last, not a replacement.

The original drawings had been made for my friend Gloria at Sussex Lustreware for a new range of lustreware ceramic titled Summer. The goat, cavalryman on a wheeled horse and dog had already appeared on the lustreware at the time Jane was trying them out in glass form.

Soon I was producing new drawings for Jane with the express intention of them becoming elements in the Glassworlds series. The arched building and the cat below were both made for Jane, but then transmigrated to the lustreware. The traffic flows in both directions.

See more of Glassworlds at Jane’s website and shop

HERE

And you can visit the Sussex Lustreware shop by clicking

HERE

From the Forest to the Fantastical: Simon Seddon Interviews Clive Hicks-Jenkins for ‘Holding up the Queue’, a Benjamin Pollock’s Toyshop podcast recorded in 2019.

Featured

Posted on September 27, 2023 by Clive Hicks-Jenkins

From the Forest to the Fantastical

Clive Hicks-Jenkins Interviewed by Simon Seddon

I designed the Hansel & Gretel Toy Theatre for Benjamin Pollock’s Toyshop in 2016 and it was published in 2017. It’s still available at the shop, having been re-printed several times. It comes as a 6 x A4 sheet kit in an envelope, requiring a craft-scalpel, cutting mat and glue to assemble. The original commission had been to create a ‘model’ theatre with a couple of scenes and characters to display, but by the end of the project I’d created a complete toy theatre at a small scale, with instructions for building the stage, together with scenery and characters to perform the play script I adapted from the fairy tale, and even a theatre poster to advertise a performance.

During the Covid lockdowns, in solidarity with the difficulties faced by all small shopkeepers trying to run their businesses, I gave the rights of the Hansel & Gretel Toy Theatre to Benjamin Pollock’s Toyshop, so the business would no longer be obliged to pay me royalties. It was a small but I hope significant gesture of support during very hard-to-negotiate times.

Simon was a wonderful interviewer. He’d undertaken meticulous and lengthy research and was well prepared to take me back along the pathway to childhood and the roots of my love of toy theatre. We could have talked for days about our shared passions for folk art, the Erzgebirge tradition of toys and the magic of toy theatre, but in the end we had to wrap it up in just under an hour. Simon is the artist behind the wonderful shadow-boxes published by Benjamin Pollock’s Toyshop, some still available at the Pollock’s online store.

Little Red Rosalee

Pantomime Feast

Frostiana

Fortune Carousel

Peter Pan

The Little Mermaid

Alice in Wonderland

Above: detail from Simon’s Frostiana shadow box.

Dark Tales

Featured

Posted on August 29, 2023 by Clive Hicks-Jenkins

In 2019 Olivia Ahmad wrote about Clive Hicks-Jenkins’ explorations of Hansel & Gretel for Varoom magazine.

Clive Hicks-Jenkins’ retellings of classic fairy tale Hansel & Gretel have an edge. Taking in the original tale’s horrific neglect, abuse and murder, Clive has adapted the story into a picture book, toy theatre and original stage production. Olivia Ahmad looks at Clive’s startling manifestations of the familiar story.

“The boy was called Hansel, the girl was called Gretel – hence the title, Hansel & Gretel.” So the narrator opened Clive Hicks-Jenkins’ 2018 staging of his version of the European folk tale, first recorded by the Brothers Grimm in 1812. The performance had the subtitle a nightmare in eight scenes, which undermined any notion that Clive’s combination of animation and puppetry would be a saccharine adaptation of the story of the witch who tempts two lost children into her house made of gingerbread. “It’s a dark and brutal story”, he says, “the mother has been cruel and treacherous, and is dead by the time the children return home, with no explanation of what happened to her. Gretel has killed the witch in the most dreadful manner, which is not just something you can brush aside. There will be psychological scars. So the story is odd and downright nasty and has too often been glossed in endless re-tellings. It was just too good a chance to miss.”

Clive first took up the chance to envision the story for a book in 2012, inspired by a childhood memory. “I had a Toby Twirl annual,” he explains. “There was a story of a witch who captured Toby and imprisoned him. The pictures of her terrified and enthralled me. She stuck like a burr in my imagination and she’s been there ever since. When in an idle moment some years ago I felt the need to be drawing a witch, I chose Hansel & Gretel as the vehicle simply because a witch was central to the plot. I painted the characters onto a set of enamelware plates for a bit of fun, for no other purpose than for use at home. And in so doing, I laid the foundations for the larger project, though I didn’t know it at the time.”

The plate designs, produced with hand-cut stencils reminiscent of European folk art, migrated from Clive’s kitchen shelves in 2014 when he adapted them into a series of illustrations for Random Spectacular magazine. After a passing comment at social media that he would like to expand the magazine piece into a picture book, Random Spectacular agreed to publish one. Clive envisioned a dark tale, one that asked difficult questions: “What happens to children who kill? What effect will it have on them?”

The character design of the siblings was vital to telling their story: “The children that I designed right at the start were really simple. There was a touch of St Trinian’s to them: short and pod-like with skinny arms and legs and dressed in school uniforms. Though caricatured there was a tenderness and bewilderment to them that was touching. Hansel is incredibly passive throughout, a poor lost puppy. Gretel appears meek, though later manifests an awesome inner Ninja.”

Alongside the cast of characters appear occasional motifs drawn from European toys and popular design ephemera that Clive has gathered over the years. “It’s not exactly a collection”, he explains, “but a loose gathering of objects that interest, intrigue and move me. Some inherited and some sought. I find that vintage toys worm their ways into my imagination and from there into my work.” While these elements represented a personal history, moments like Hansel and Gretel making their getaway with the aid of a duck based on a 1950s Fisher Price pull-toy, make Clive’s fantasy world uncannily familiar.

For the rendering of the book Clive made separations, a technique previously unfamiliar to him. Creating a drawing for each coloured layer of an illustration, the layers of drawings were then scanned and coloured digitally according to Pantone references he selected to create a sugared almond palette.

The Random Spectacular picture book was published in 2016, and the same year Clive was commissioned for another Hansel & Gretel project by Benjamin Pollock’s Toyshop in Covent Garden, which sells historic and contemporary cut-out-and-assemble toy theatres. The commission to create the Hansel & Gretel Toy Theatre resonated with Clive’s childhood: “As a boy I’d cut out, coloured in and performed Pollock’s productions on a home-made stage constructed from a cornflakes packet, and so this was a dream come true for me.”

He initially suggested an adaptation of his Hansel & Gretel picture book, and while the Pollock’s project went on to incorporate some of the atmosphere of it, many of the more grotesque elements were considered “way too scary” for the toy theatre’s intended family audience. So Clive embarked on yet another adaptation of the story, re-fashioning it to create a meta- production in miniature, perhaps informed by his early career as a performer: The Pollock’s Hansel & Gretel Toy Theatre starts from the point where the picture book finishes. “Having survived the ordeal of the witch, the children leave home to make their way in the world. Arriving in the big city they’re picked up by a theatre impresario who promises fame and fortune if they sign a contact with him, and they duly end up starring in a pantomime version of their own story, though with most of the unpalatable bits edited out.

So no wicked mother ending up being murdered by their father, and a much tamer version of a witch who doesn’t have tentacles where her nose should be!” The performance takes place at the fictional ‘Theatre Royal, Jury Lane’, a play on word of London’s Theatre Royal in Drury Lane.

The Benjamin Pollock’s Hansel & Gretel Toy Theatre was published in 2017, and while light-hearted in tone, it retained some of the gothic horror of the picture book with its poisonous candy blues and pinks overlaid with a blanket of dark pencil hatching. The flatpack consists of a stage, proscenium arch, scenes, characters and props, along with a script and a poster to ‘advertise’ the production.

The following year, Clive’s Hansel & Gretel: a nightmare in eight scenes premiered on a life-size stage at the Cheltenham Music Festival. It subsequently toured the UK, finishing at the Barbican in London where a performance was recorded for broadcast Christmas week 2018 on BBC Radio 3.

For this his largest imagining of the story – a combination of live narration, music, animation and tabletop and shadow-screen puppetry – Clive collaborated with producer Kate Romano and the Goldfield Ensemble. The producer had originally visited Clive to discuss another project, but after seeing his Pollock’s designs suggested they make a music theatre production about the ill-fated brother and sister.

Clive recommended the producer enlist the poet Simon Armitage to write the libretto. Simon took the story in a completely different direction by placing the children into a contemporary context. “I think it was genius on Simon’s part to set the story in a conflict zone, and to rewrite the adults as loving parents fearful that their children might become casualties of war,” Clive says. “That changed everything for me in terms of how we relate to the family. They’re not dysfunctional, but find themselves in terrible circumstances.” The performance opened with animations of marching toy soldiers, which soon fall into the disarray of battle. Hansel and Gretel’s parents send their children away from this carnage in order to protect them.

However without their parents’ protection, they become enticed and ensnared by a witch. When she prepares to bathe them so they can be trafficked, Gretel fears that the hot water for the bath will be used for boiling them alive. “Everything that we see and hear is filtered through the overheated imaginations of the children who are full of fears and misunderstandings,” Clive explains.

“Everything in the production, from the predatory witch and her grubby icing-sugared cottage, to the layout of its bleak interior conjured from a doll’s house, is how they see things.”

Hansel and Gretel were puppets designed by Clive and made by Jan Zalud. “I needed the puppets to function at a different level to their picture book counterparts, and be fully up to the emotional requirements of Simon Armitage’s text, ” Clive says, and his designs evolved from research on the experiences of children in transit camps. This approach was not welcomed by the Goldfield ‘project team’, who reported his drawings made them think of children in concentration camps. “I stuck to my guns,” he remembers, “because I knew the direction was the right one.”

Only one Hansel and one Gretel puppet appeared in the production, so the design and execution created appropriately neutral expressions for the puppet’s faces onto which many thoughts could be projected by audiences. Because the streaming would see them much magnified on the screen, they’d need an innate grace of movement so the moments of tenderness and vulnerability would withstand close scrutiny.

Several collaborators were assembled and directed by Clive to realise the project. The composer Matt Kaner had come to it through Kate Romano. Clive invited Peter Lloyd to produce shadow puppets of the children’s parents and the witch, Pete Telfer, to film the animations to be projected onto the stage, and his regular collaborator and assistant Phil Cooper, to be in charge of the model sets and painted backgrounds for the puppets. Puppeteer Di Ford came to the project at Clive’s invitation having previously worked with him on the stage production of The Mare’s Tale, and after a puppeteer audition and workshop, Lizzie Wort joined the company. Costumier Oonagh Creighton Griffiths was brought in to dress the puppets.

As director of such a broad team, how did Clive retain his vision of the piece? His earlier career was in stage direction and choreography, and so he knows his choice of collaborators is vital. “I mostly work with people I know well and feel at ease with,” he says, “the team are my professional family. When we’re all pulling together there’s not really a hierarchy. Once briefed I trust them. Sometimes they bring me what I expect, and occasionally there are surprises. There need to be the possibilities that some elements may exceed my expectations or bring something entirely unanticipated.”

Clive’s own vintage toys played an important role onstage. One hundred year old German building blocks became the playthings of the children, and clockwork ‘pecking chickens’ stood in for the flock of birds that ate Hansel’s trail of breadcrumbs.

The chickens and a Russian clockwork ‘singing’ bird are also due to appear in Clive’s next iteration of the story: a richly illustrated edition of Simon Armitage’s libretto, produced by independent publisher Design for Today and due for release later this year.

“A toy,” Clive says, “can open your heart and make you remember what wonder feels like.” However his adoption of these tokens from the past is not an indulgence in nostalgia. “I’m not such a fool as to think that yesterday was better. I was there and it wasn’t! My explorations are all about objects being repositories of histories. They’re like radio dials, and if you twiddle them you ‘hear’ the past. That past can be anything, from sweet to despairing. It’s the focus that’s all important, and what the focus opens in the mind and heart.”

Olivia Ahmad, 2019.

Hansel & Gretel was published subsequent to this article and in 2020 won the V&A Illustrated Book Award. It’s still available from the publisher at THIS LINK. In October a new hardback edition is due out from Faber & Faber.

Above, the 2019 Design for Today edition of Hansel & Gretel: a Nightmare in Eight Scenes, and below, the new edition forthcoming from Faber & Faber in October 2023.

A Plunge into the Mythic Wood: a review by Seth Wright of Seren of the Wildwood

Featured

Posted on August 25, 2023 by Clive Hicks-Jenkins

This review appeared originally in Front Porch Republic.

Donemana, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland.

The deeper I get into middle-age, and the more my time is swallowed up by the just demands of family and parish ministry, the more gruesome my crimes against literature become. Here is an egregious one: until recently, it had been far too long—probably years—since I’d read a narrative poem. But recently, I read Marly Youmans’ Seren of the Wildwood.

The poem came providentially, an unlooked-for eruption of goodness into my stacks of commentaries and sermon notes. Seren of the Wildwood is a thin place, a nexus between the waking world and that hazily surreal, maddeningly concrete, constantly shifting landscape of the dream world. Youmans’ gift for creating primordial archetypal images that stir the gut and fascinate the eye of the mind places her among the best of the poets. If you’re a connoisseur, even a lapsed or dilatory one, of narrative poetry, buy Seren of the Wildwood and read it today.

To begin with, the book, a stereotypical slim volume of poetry, is gorgeous. The work of illustrator Clive Hicks-Jenkins is fantastic—in the etymological and informal senses alike—in how he translates Youmans’ copious and varied imagination into a visual lexicon. The images interspersed through the text recall (inter alia) the doodles and illuminations of Irish monks, Greco-Roman sculptures, William Blake’s illustrations, and Van Gogh’s still-life paintings. Perfect harmony exists between text and image, even on the occasions when the image doesn’t obviously function as an illustration of some particular concept from the poem.

There is also a nice congruence between the poem and the page: each stanza fits perfectly onto a single 9” x 6” page. It’s almost as if Youmans planned her formalized stanza with the volume in mind. Most spreads have two stanzas; the rest include an image on one side plus a stanza and doodle on the other. The pages feel neither too empty nor too crowded—which is good, because by golly the poem itself is crowded, but I’ll get there later.

Above: drawings for the book’s illustrations underway, with a print-out of the poem as the artist’s guide.

Seren of the Wildwood begins not with a prologue, but with a prolegomenon. The difference is significant, for a prolegomenon is not merely informative, but schematic or methodical. It provides the interpretive key for what follows. My policy as a reviewer is to avoid spoilers at all costs, which (thankfully) in this case relieves me of the burden of explaining how to interpret Seren of the Wildwood—my children often ask me about my dreams, and however powerfully I experienced them, I find it difficult to explicate their deeper meanings. Nevertheless, the prolegomenon is deeply significant both in its proleptic function (which provokes the reader’s sense of dread and hope for redemption) and in the way it raises questions that will not be answered for quite some time, if at all.

Above: drawings for the book’s illustrations underway.

Youmans tackles two big tasks in the prolegomenon. First, she introduces the primordially mystic wildwood, the wholly ambivalent landscape that dominates the poem. In Youmans’ words, “The wildwood is a tough / Terrain, yet beauty springs / Like diamonds from the rough.” The rhyme of tough/rough gropes towards the ferocity of the place; the image of the emergent diamonds testifies to the painful possibility of redemption. The prolegomenon also complicates any interpretation of the poem with its maddeningly suggestive title, “Prolegomenon, in the voice of Wren.” Who speaks “in the voice of Wren” – the poet, Wren herself, or some other entity? I reckon answering that question (even with the likely answer of “Who knows?”) is an obvious starting place for any sort of critical reading of Seren of the Wildwood.

The prolegomenon is identical in form to the other 61 stanzas: 21 lines of unrhymed iambic pentameter followed by a bob-and-wheel metrically similar to that used in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: a bob (one-foot line) rhymed into the wheel (four three-foot lines). That makes a total of 62 stanzas of 26 lines, and while my inner numerologist and medievalist are screaming about palindromic or chiastic significance, the still small voice of my inner editor exhorts me to move on. Perhaps some arcane consideration for mystic numbers impelled Youmans to end the poem where she did; I thought that it ended suddenly, and more like a motorway ending abruptly in the middle of a city than a trail coming out of a forest and halting on the edge of some precipice affording magnificent panoramic vistas of the illimitable ocean. A few more stanzas to round things off would, in my estimation, make the thing feel more like a conclusion than an ending.

That said, I suspect Youmans knew exactly what she was doing by ending Seren of the Wildwood as hastily as I felt she did. Although neatly assigning a genre to the poem may prove impossible—is it a fairy tale? a lay? a Greekish tragedy?—it certainly has strong affinities to medieval dream visions such as The Pearl or Confessio Amantis. But of course, deeply steeped in medieval poetry as Youmans is, she has recourse to a rich vein of sophisticated techniques for narrating the inner workings of the human soul. Seren of the Wildwood is nothing if not dreamlike—and not in a comforting way. The prolegomenon strikes a note of foreboding which swells perceptibly in the first stanza and dominates large portions of the poem. Reading the poem is like a feverish nightmare, in which some awful and awfully inarticulable sense of doom hangs over the reader as the scene shifts whimsically and characters flit momentarily across the periphery of vision while leaving a sharp impression, where everything seems startlingly new yet possessed of a familiarity that is simultaneously welcome and terrifying, where it feels like your feet are chained or weighted as you try to flee from whatever fell beast is pursuing you through the weirdest and most inhospitable terrain—and that terrain itself seems to be indistinguishable from all the nightmarish terror—when all of a sudden, striking through the disorientating web of dream, comes unexpectedly the blessed gift of waking to the birdsong of a bright morning of the incipient spring. Perhaps the sudden ending is Youmans’ mimesis of waking to the fragility of renewed hope.

A central component of Seren of the Wildwood’s mythical dreamworld is the ubiquity of primal archetypes. Rash words; woodside cottages; prophecies; unheeded warnings; god-kings; fertility religions; hermits; rites of purification by water; preternatural births; mountaintop gardens; dreams and visions—these are the threads with which Youmans weaves, and of which no lover of narrative poetry grows weary. What is particularly impressive about Youmans’ weaving is her ability to use such venerable archetypes freshly. Yes, I’ve met them all before, and given time I could tell you where. But meeting them in Seren of the Wildwood reminds me of the time a man I’d known for years shaved his moustache and became unrecognizable for a few shocking minutes. The effect was initially disruptive—for several seconds I knew I was failing to recognize a familiar face, a face I’d seen recently in different guise. Recognition came soon, but it was not particularly comforting to see the pale wide acreage of his upper lip. Something essential, I felt, had changed in the man’s appearance. The same with the landmarks and inhabitants of Youmans’ Wildwood; they seem hauntingly familiar yet disconcertingly strange. Her power simultaneously to defamiliarize and reenchant is enviable and deliciously enjoyable.

Even more so is Youmans’ willingness to venture into dark places—into the black heart of the Wildwood, no less—and return carrying a light. Terrible things happen to poor Seren, who becomes a sort of Job or Griselda (though without a YHWH and Satan or a Walter directing her testing in the background), yet she is neither bereft of friends nor devoid of healing. Youmans is neither sentimental nor nihilistic about suffering, but rather glimpses something of its obdurate inevitability and its redemptive capacities. The Wildwood is not just a dreamscape, it is a place where at some point in life every person wanders, torn and hungry, yearning for nothing more than to encounter the spreading horizon where the forest ends.

The poem is not perfect; only rarely does a poem of any length attain perfection, and I doubt a single poem anywhere near the length of Seren of the Wildwood avoids the odd misstep. Youmans’ vocabulary is rich and her syntax wonderfully fluid, but my feeling is that she sometimes goes too far in piling up synonyms. For example: “the shape was such / A wraith, phantasm, apparition” (pg. 42); “His fairy-story growth ferocious, fierce / Outlandish and preposterous […] It seemed satanic, manic, half insane” (pg. 45); “All the ground seemed jocund, jaunty, gladsome” (pg. 52). Such variation might delight some readers; it reminds me of P.G. Woodhouse dropping thesaurus entries into his prose for comedic effect, which rather blunts whatever edge Youmans hoped to wield. Also, a few phrases were unquestionably clunky. But Youmans’ shortcomings are few and relatively minor. After all, even Homer nods.

Distant are the days when writing excellent poems assured a poet of a place in the canon, or fame, or even public notice equivalent to the exploits of a D3 college football team. Such are our times—which is surely unfair on Youmans, who at the least deserves to be known as the creator of the Seren stanza. My first encounter with Seren of the Wildwood brought to mind dozens of my favourite poems, poems that over the millennia people have taken the trouble to read, copy, annotate, memorise, and perform. Seren of the Wildwood reminded me of them by way of family resemblance; the poem is at home among the poems that last. It is a good poem. A very good poem.

Here is what Seren of the Wildwood has done for me: it’s rekindled my love of narrative poetry. Once I have read several of my old favourites, I’ll read it again, and then I’ll move on to the rest of Youmans’ work. In the meantime, dear reader, put your order into Wiseblood Books and get to reading the instant your copy of Seren of the Wildwood arrives. If your literary tastes are vaguely similar to mine, you’ll enjoy it thoroughly.

Seth Wright 2023

My Life in a Hop, Skip and a Jump!

Featured

Posted on July 16, 2023 by Clive Hicks-Jenkins

Wales Arts Review Artist Q&A

1.         Where are you from and how does it influence your work?

I was born in Newport in Gwent. Hard to say exactly how it’s influenced my work as an artist. Countless ways, probably, if you trace all the threads back to source. I loved the place as a child, and there’s a sort of ghost version of Newport in my head, which is how it used to be. I realise at this distance how rich Newport was architecturally back in the 1950s, and how the character of the place and its topographies of streets and hills and contrasting neighbourhoods have stayed with me.

There was a fine covered market, a handsome and thriving high street with diverse businesses and many wonderful old cinemas scattered about the town.

There were the docks and the transporter bridge. In the neighbourhood of Maindee where I lived there were several small parks, a pint-sized library, a picturesque police-station complete with Dixon-of-Dock-Green blue lamp, my primary and junior school, a public baths and a cinema, all within an area you could circle on foot in thirty minutes. Later so much that was lovely was shamefully destroyed by ham-fisted planning and craven building developers. I remember my mother weeping when the bulldozers moved in on the old Lyceum Theatre at the bottom of Bridge Street.

Both my parents were from Monmouthshire and had deep attachments to its landscapes, so most weekends our family would go walking in Wentwood, the stretch of woodlands between Newport and Chepstow, having picnics and enjoying the views from the summit of Grey Hill. My dad had started his career as a land agent working for Lord Tredegar on the Tredegar Estate.

However after the war he hated the way the tenant farmers were being treated as his employer sold off the land, so he left to become a wayleaves officer with the South Wales Electricity Board. During school holidays I’d accompany him as he criss-crossed the county and beyond, negotiating easements with farmers and landowners. That informed my eye. He informed my eye. As a painter I would not have seen landscape the way I do without what he showed me.

2.             Where are you while you answer these questions, and what can you see when you look up from the page/screen?

I’m in the library/study at home. Warm grey walls, full bookshelves, art.

A wall-mounted construction by my husband’s father, Dick Wakelin, a large Ernie Zobole landscape, a Ceri Richards ‘Heron’ print, a framed articulated maquette by Philippa Robbins and a preparatory drawing of mine for a book. My dog, Rudi, asleep in the armchair next to the window.

3.             What motivates you to create?

At the heart of it, a need to make order out of chaos. (I’m talking about the universe, not the state of my sock-drawer!)

4.             What are you currently working on?

Several illustration projects for a number of publishing houses, all of them for titles I can’t at this point reveal. Next year I have an exhibition at the Table Gallery in Hay on Wye to coincide with the Festival of Literature, which will focus on my work in the field of books. There’s a currently delayed exhibition of all my work on the theme of the fairytale Hansel & Gretel planned as the inaugural event at Oriel Myrddin when the current building work has been completed.

5.             When do you work?

Every day. I like to start early when I can. But because the studio is in the house, I can work all night if it suits me or when deadlines are tight. There’s not much division between the various parts of my life at Ty Isaf. Work and maintenance of house and grounds intermingle, all flowing together.

6.             How important is collaboration to you?

As an artist I’ve frequently drawn on literary sources. Even when working with a text by a dead writer, I regard the process to be a collaboration. When I’m taking something made by another person and reacting and adjusting to it, I feel a responsibility. When illustrating a book by a living writer, such as Simon Armitage, with who I’ve made three books and directed a stage production with a libretto by him, then the collaboration is necessarily more active.

For fifteen years I’ve been designing the covers of books for the American poet and novelist Marly Youmans, and for many of those books have made black and white illustrations, too.

Our relationship is tremendously close. We’ve been collaborating for so long that we imaginatively inhabit each others territories.

7.             Who has had the biggest impact on your work?

I can’t give one answer to that. Life is not so simple. There are those whose early encouragement greatly helped me, chief among them the painter Dick Chappell who was generous with his practical advice. (Not all artists were as kind as he.) My partner – now my husband – Peter Wakelin, supported me as I became an artist. He took my work to the Kilvert Gallery, where the late Lizzie Organ gave me my first exhibition opportunities. But before all this, in my earlier days, there were the many teachers and mentors who set me on journeys I may not have taken without their encouragements, and those who gave me opportunities which changed my directions at several critical points. There are the artistic influences to be considered too. The painters and makers, anonymous and known, who taught me how to analyse and appreciate. Film-makers – cinema has played a significant role in forming me as an artist – composers, poets, novelists, historians and philosophers.

Animators and puppeteers, dancers and actors, directors and choreographers. I’ve fallen under the spell of many brilliant creators who showed me ways forward. Some I have known in person. I’ve been very fortunate in that respect.

8.             How would you describe your oeuvre?

I am a narrative artist of diverse practices.

9.             What was the first book you remember reading? I remember sitting on my father’s lap as he helped me read a Rupert Bear annual. He was good teacher and I was an apt pupil, so I could read before I got to school.

There weren’t a lot of books in the house, but such as there were I tore through. A few inherited ‘children’s’ books were on the shelves. I read a dense volume of Kipling’s short stories with not very exciting Edwardian illustrations that had been my father’s as a boy, and there was Ruskin’s The King of the Golden River in a slender edition illustrated by Fritz Kredel. My sister is six years older than me, and so I enthusiastically devoured her books because they were lying around, mostly novels about girls at boarding schools where the pupils had jolly adventures and illicit dorm tea-parties. Later when she started reading more adult fare, I got hooked on the Pan horror anthologies edited by Herbert Van Thal, read secretly by torchlight under the bedcovers because my parents wouldn’t have approved.

I was madly keen on H. Rider Haggard and Edgar Alan Poe, and the Greek myths, thanks to my mother who pointed me toward them.

I have an Oxford edition of Myths of Ancient Greece Re-Told for Young People (Oxford, 1951) by Robert Graves and illustrated by the wonderful Joan Kidell-Monroe (1951), and a later Larousse Encyclopaedia of World Mythology, both inscribed to me by my mother.

10.          What was the last book you read?

The Mabinogi, in Matthew Francis’ poetic retelling published by Faber & Faber. (I’d kill to illustrate an edition of that!)

11.          Is there a painting/sculpture you struggle to turn away from?

Hambeltonian, Rubbing Down by George Stubbs. It is the single most moving painting of a creature in extremis known to me. I’m mesmerised by the strangeness of it. I’d put it on a level with the Grünwald Christ. Stubbs homes in on the psychodrama underpinning the moment depicted. The racehorse is in a pose with both legs on one side raised, a stance not physically possible as it would just keel over. The artist knows that, but he does it anyway, because it’s right for the painting and the unease he wants to convey in this spectacle of an animal in a fearful state after a hard-won race.

The handlers are tender, but Hambletonian’s ears are laid flat, his nostrils flared, he sweats and his lips are pulled back to expose his teeth. He’s clearly in a bad way after the terrible exertion. The painting was a commission by Hambletonian’s owner, the twenty-eight year old Sir Henry-Vane Tempest, who dissatisfied with it refused to pay the agreed sum to the seventy-five year old artist, claiming to the court in the case brought against him that his reputation as a racehorse owner had been called into question by Stubbs having portrayed the horse in a state of exhaustion. Unexpectedly given the times, the Judge ruled in the artist’s favour.

12.          Who is the musical artist you know you can always return to?

Singer, Nick Drake. Composers, Philip Glass and Ravel.

13.          During the working process of your last work, in those quiet moments, who was closest to your thoughts?

I was illustrating Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf in a new edition for Folio Society, so the text was at my elbow at all times. As I was constantly referring to it, I guess it could be said that Seamus Heaney was closest to my thoughts.

14.          Do you believe in God?

No.

15.          Do you believe in the power of art to change society?

I believe in the power of art to change myself. Society I’m less confident about.

16.          Which artist working in your area, alive and working today, do you most admire and why?

If I’m candid, I’d be hard pressed to identify an artist working precisely in my area, given that I paint, illustrate, animate and direct. There can’t be that many. Also, I’m at that stage where so many of the people I most admired across the creative arts and looked to for inspiration, have died. Too many in the past few years. It broke my heart when Maurice Sendak passed, and Sondheim, too. Bowie and Glenda Jackson, gone. I can hardly believe it. These people were signposts and anchors for me.

17.          What is your relationship with social media?

I harness it as best I can for work and making connections. It’s served me well for being able to reach out to people I admire, and that’s worked in both directions. Undoubtedly many of my projects of the past decade have had their foundations in collaborations begun online. I never liked or wanted to be a part of the way artists were traditionally presented by galleries in bibliographies, their lives reduced to lists of dates and achievements. In 2011 Lund Humphries published my monograph, for which I steadfastly refused to produce a bibliography. Instead I contributed a biographical chapter in which I presented, if not the definitive account of my achievements, then something which gave a sense of the journey. Since 2009 I’ve run a blog, the Artlog, at which I write candidly about my practices, my life, people I admire, collaborations and works in progress. In so many ways social media has deconstructed the tired old clichés of how things were once done, and as a consequence given artists – or the ones who choose to engage – the chances to speak for themselves

18.          What has been/is your greatest challenge as an artist?

Getting up to speed quickly when faced with unfamiliar challenges is always a thing. But at this stage of my life I believe it’s fine when undertaking something for which I’m only partially equipped, to say “Look, I can do most of this, but these are the areas I’ll need help with.” I’ve been working for publishing houses over the past few years on several big projects, and I always kick off by saying to the art directors “You know I’m a dinosaur, right? I don’t do digital and so everything you’ll be getting will be analogue, made with hands wielding brushes, pencils and pens.” And it always is alright. I work with really skilled technicians. Laurence Beck has been my clean-up artist and colourist at Design for Today for two books, Simon Armitage’s Hansel & Gretel: a Nightmare in Eight Scenes and Olivia McCannon’s Beauty & Beast.

In the past couple of years I’ve worked very closely on publishing projects with David W. Slack, who is an artist in his own right, but has collaborated with me as a model-designer and maker, and recently worked as Animation Producer on the two films we were commissioned to create by Folio Society to promote Beowulf.

Back in 2016 I was invited by Dan Bugg at Penfold Press to work with him on my first screenprint, a process that to begin with utterly bewildered me. But Dan guided me through the processes of it all, and since then we’ve completed a phenomenal body of work, including the fourteen-print series that went on to accompany Simon Armitage’s acclaimed translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in the 2018 Faber & Faber illustrated edition.

19.          Do you have any words of advice for your younger self?

It’ll all be alright in the end.

20.          What does the future hold for you?

I have enough exciting projects to keep me gainfully occupied for several years. Every time I think that maybe my moment has passed, then someone new comes knocking with a wonderful suggestion/opportunity. (One came yesterday with a proposition so exciting I didn’t sleep all night.) I’m grateful for that. It would be a good way to end one’s days would it not – hopefully some way down the line from here I should say – with something interesting in the pipeline? I don’t think I’d last long if the days stretched emptily ahead. I don’t know whether it’s true, but they say sharks have to keep swimming in order to stay alive. I think that might apply to me.

Clive Hicks-Jenkins, Ty Isaf , Summer 2023

Collaborating with David, part 2: Beowulf

Featured

Posted on July 3, 2023 by Clive Hicks-Jenkins

Please Click on the title above to watch the videos embedded in this post.

Above: click to view the book trailer for Beowulf

Clive: David, you were undertaking trial digital work for me while I was working on the illustrations for Beowulf. I made them in black ink on white board, but had it in mind to see how they’d look when inverted to white on black. What you produced provided me with inverted images of drawings and digital colourings of them throughout all the earlier stages of the book’s creation. Although the final additions of colour were done at Folio Society, you did all the preliminary ‘tests’ that enabled me to make the decisions ready to brief the Folio team.

Above: detail of illustration from the book after image inversion and digital colouring by Folio Society.

Below: original ink artwork on mountboard with pencil trim guide, before inversion and colouring.

David: Oh it was such a joy to have a private viewing of your Beowulf drawings, and because I was messing around with them digitally, I could easily produce many different versions. It was fascinating wasn’t it, that some worked instantly as inverted images, while others were more powerful as you’d drawn them?

Above: finished ink drawings piling up on the artist’s desk.

Clive: In the end we included some drawings as made and some inverted. The combination worked well.

David: I made some red versions which were just OK, but I remember layering a deep spot-lit blue-green with the image for the first time, and it pulsed and sang immediately.

Below: trial colour images of inversions made by David.

But I think you had committed to the blue at that point, and the intensely saturated blue-on-black and black-on-blue that their production manager achieved in print for your full-bleed double-page illustrations, is way beyond anything I’ve ever seen in print. I’ve done a lot of printmaking through the years, but how they achieved that glowing deepest blue is beyond me. It pulses with some sort of other life and is just unforgettable. I know that you were blown away by the book when you saw it.

Clive: I couldn’t stop shaking when I received and opened my copy. I was anxious because I knew by this point the edition was printed, bound and boxed, and there could be no turning back. I’d seen many page proofs over the months, but between the last proof seen and the finished book the production manager had worked miracles. I was simply speechless when I saw the the quality of the printing.

Because of your contributions at preliminary stages, and because you knew the illustrations inside out, it was inevitable that at some point we’d start talking about the potential of the images to be animated into life, and that’s exactly what happened.

David: Well of course, what a gift this was! Your drawings for Beowulf were in a paper-cut style, and so ready-made for shadow theatre puppetry. I’d learned to animate a while back when we’d made an animated film to promote the Design for Today Beauty and Beast Toy Theatre. With that experience under my belt, how difficult could it be to create a three or four second animation as a test run for a potential Beowulf book-trailer? I have to say that it was BLOODY difficult. I’m pretty sure that the learning curve was so steep that at more than one point my neuron’s firing registered on Google Earth. But anyway, this idea of a moment of animation er… well, it snowballed rather didn’t it?

Above: articulated paper maquette made as a compositional aid during the early stages of planning the book.

David: Much of your preparatory-stage work for illustration is built upon the idea of the jointed maquette, so animation is a perfect fit. And of course you’ve made many frame animations in the past, for example on your stage productions of Hansel and Gretel and The Soldiers Tale. By now you and I had made many animations together, almost all set within the bounds of a toy theatre. The images of Beowulf were so exciting to imagine unshackled and animated into life. They were perfectly suited to the medium.

Clive: Because we felt some animation sequences could enhance the promotional video Folio would be sure to make to launch the book, I decided to ask them whether they might consider permitting us to submit a couple of trial animation sequences by way of introducing the team to the idea. Luckily they were open to that and you began work almost immediately.

I recall conversations we had about the ‘character’ of the animation, degrading the imagery to make it look almost like ‘found footage’ with that sense of vintage film scratchiness and fluttering. You might have different recollections to me, but among references we discussed there was the idea to animate the dragon almost as if it were some kind of nematode worm being filmed on a slide under a microscope. I think I may have mentioned the title sequence for the film Seven to you, with its sense of flickering unease. And then of course there was our shared passion for Smallfilms and the work of Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin. It’s just not possible to be in a world of Norsemen without having a conversation about Noggin the Nog.

David: Ah yes! The David Fincher/Smallfilms mash up. I loved your suggestion of a squirming dragon as a micro-organism under magnification. It adds an edge of discomfort to see inserts of a different texture, speed and animation style within the piece. I used the same concept in the jerking movements of the wolf and the tentacles whenever they appear.

Above: black original ink drawing and the digital translation to colour in the book.

David: Tonal changes are essential to my mind, especially when the piece is very dark, or heavily stylised. The most incredible imagery in a movie can actually become dull after a while, unless the viewer is shaken out of it – like a little hit of spice. I watched versions of scenes of the Beowulf animation without the degrading filters we talked about. Your drawings moving across the screen were so striking without the added optical effects that I found it tough to dull them down. Nevertheless I added scratchy inclusions of scrabbling colour to make the films glow and dull in turn, and the decision worked wonders in unifying the animations and the sequences of the book itself. One of the things I had to keep reminding myself was that this wasn’t a trailer for a movie, but for a beautiful book. (The Hitchcock in me was forever edging it to a movie trailer.)

Clive: We waited with bated breath once the sample shots had been delivered to the Folio team, but when the responses came they were wholeheartedly enthusiastic. Far from delivering a few short cuts to be edited into a promotional film, we were tasked with producing the whole shebang. After a briefing Zoom with the team at Folio we got working. There were to be 2 x 30 second films, one at a format for viewing on smart-phones, and a second for viewing on laptops and tablets.

David: Oh weren’t they wonderful? They showed such faith in us that I did feel confident about how it would turn out. Working with such carefully considered and rendered drawings I knew the results would be beautiful. Like cooking with the best ingredients. Although the brief was for 30 second films, I overshot and both edits came in at one minute and six seconds. I think just over the minute stands up very well. I would have been pushed to get the pace right in 30 second films.

Clive: I agree. 30 seconds would have been too rushed. As the films stand, each at just over a minute, they fly by when watching them.

As with all our animation projects, once we’d discussed I absented myself to concentrate on sourcing the music. You in the meantime were off like a rocket. I remember your utter confidence that you knew where to go with all this, waiting only on the music to provide the structures to the films. You were not just animator on the project working to my brief. You were now Animation Producer!

David: And a very cocky one at that, due in no small part to the confidence and enthusiasm you demonstrated in allowing me to hack up and rearrange your artworks.

While you researched the music, I got busy anatomising your Beowulf characters to assemble a cache of puppet elements. You always show an astonishing faith in me to infill the drawings when I amputate an arm, head or leg, or need to find fingers or a neck. I in turn feel safe in the knowledge that you’ll always find the perfect piece of music which will make the pace, depth and rhythm of the story appear clearly in my head. This time you found four tracks, one of which though amazing, we both thought a little too disturbing. (Maybe it’ll be right at another time for another film.) I viewed the films hundreds of times when making them, and have watched them many times since completion. I’m confident the two music pieces we settled on had just the right aesthetic, power, drive and primal drama. People report that they watch them repeatedly, and a big part of that is because the music makes them so moreish.

Above: click to view this animated book-trailer for the new Folio Society edition of Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf.

Artist: Clive Hicks-Jenkins

Animation Producer: David W. Slack

Collaborating with David, part 1: The Beauty & Beast Toy Theatre

Featured

Posted on June 18, 2023 by Clive Hicks-Jenkins

On June 27th Folio Society will be launching their ‘special edition’ of Beowulf, translated by Seamus Heaney and illustrated by me. Heralding this are two animated films to celebrate the event, produced by my regular collaborator of the past few years, David W. Slack. David is a painter in his own right, and it’s his breadth of knowledge and practice as an artist which strongly underpins what we make together. We first collaborated when I asked him to construct preliminary models for the Beauty & Beast Toy Theatre Kit I was preparing for publisher Joe Pearson at Design for Today. In this first of two recent ‘conversations’, David and I track how he went from model designer on Beauty & Beast to being appointed Animation Producer on Beowulf.

Clive: David, I first came across images of yours at Insta when you were ‘enhancing’ your copy of the Hansel & Gretel Toy Theatre I’d designed for Benjamin Pollock’s Toyshop. What first struck me was how good a model-maker you were, followed swiftly by how improved the model was by the curved stage-front you were adding to it. “Damn it!”, was my initial response. “I wish I’d thought of that.”

Above: David’s ‘improved’ Hansel & Gretel Toy Theatre, with the footlights and curved stage-front he added.

David: That model was really lovely. When it arrived I was amazed at how few sheets you’d managed to condense the entire story into, yet when cut and assembled it became a very layered and complex model. You sent me the additional scan of the stage floor so that I could print the floorboards I needed for my planned stage extension.

Clive: For the record you’re a better model-maker than I am, and I remain envious of your framed model of the adapted Hansel & Gretel Toy Theatre complete with lights and curved apron. Overworked as I was by this point, the idea of inviting you to collaborate on the Beauty & Beast Toy Theatre was already churning away in my head keeping me awake at nights.

David: I’d seen an Insta post of a beautiful architectural doorway you’d made for Beauty & Beast flanked by sinister white-eyed caryatids. Having contacted you to ask how you’d feel about my interpreting the idea into a painted wardrobe, you were extremely encouraging.

Below: preliminary work on an illustration of a garden door in Beast’s realm.

When I ventured further and wrote that a toy theatre might be fun, you admitted you were planning one, had a preliminary dummy on your desk at that very moment and were wondering whether I might help with it. After that it was just a case of me trying to jump onto the already speeding train!

Your work on the book of Beauty & Beast with writer Olivia McCannon was already well underway, and although that collaboration was quite separate to the toy theatre, the two projects were clearly intended to be viewed as a pair. From the start your advice to me was to “do less”, and it was much needed as my first response was to turn the model into the toy theatre equivalent of a big old Busby Berkeley number in a Hollywood musical. Fortunately, better understanding that a lighter touch benefits toy theatre, you stayed my hand. More sketches went back and forth to get us to the same starting point, and thereafter everything was much clearer. I outlined my understanding of my role as the facilitating designer who’d translate your evolving illustrations for the book into a working toy theatre model.

Clive: And that was a good starting point for both of us, though in fact your role quickly became much more than that of model designer. With sections of Olivia’s text for Beauty & Beast arriving daily I was up to my eyes in keeping apace with my illustration schedule, so it was a relief that you were able to efficiently keep me up to speed with what you needed for the model and when. You’d effectively become the project manager.

David: Once bedded in I began to lobby for an increase to the six construction sheets you’d advised were the maximum we could afford for the model. I hope I wasn’t too pushy.

Clive: I saw it more as a case of your enthusiasm for what we were making. However while excited by what was emerging from your desk, I was growing slightly anxious about the implications for the budget. It was time to explain to Joe the publisher that I’d gained a collaborator, and to sound him out regarding expanding the project from six to ten sheets. By now you were producing prototypes like a man on a mission, and with the tangible evidence of what we were achieving, Joe agreed to the new proposal.

David: SO many prototypes, yes. How my printer didn’t explode I will never know. I was desperate to get the maximum-sized model into the smallest space, so there was a lot of jiggery pokery.

That in the end we fitted so many scene changes alongside puppets and props onto just ten sheets still amazes me, because the toy theatre alone took four. More than anything else I wanted to include the scene of the disembodied candelabra-bearing arms in the entrance to the castle, and I was at the point of offering to personally underwrite any added expense for them when you came back with the news that Joe had agreed to the extra sheets. We were up and away.

Clive: It was quite a roller-coaster we were all on. This was new territory in nearly every respect. The project was complex and we were all aware of how it needed to fit with the main book, while also being separate and stand-alone. Already it was apparent there needed to be considerable adaptation from what I was creating for the book, to what would work for a toy theatre.

Always there’s the line to be walked between being prudent with the budget, yet open to where a bit of extra funding will give real added value. Joe kept everything under close scrutiny as we progressed, and his was the suggestion to present the ten sheets in a folder with pockets, instead of being bound into a book. The script and instructions could then be produced as a small pamphlet, which in the end worked beautifully and saved costs.

David: I was amazed at how quickly everything progressed. It was only later I realised what a frenzy you were in trying to keep up with me, all while I was feeling the need to go faster to keep up with you! But we steadied our nerves and in the end the toy theatre was made at an incredible lick, and it looked wonderful.

In the next post we move on to Beowulf and how David took on the role of Animation Producer for the two Folio Society films he was asked to create to promote the new book.

Deep Water and Pollen Bombs

Featured

Posted on June 4, 2023 by Clive Hicks-Jenkins

With the weather blazingly hot in the Ystwyth Valley this morning, I set off while it was still relatively cool to walk Rudi through our field to the red bridge over the stream to our neighbours’ property, and from there across the cycle-path and down to the river, where he likes to retrieve his ball and swim.

Our field was lushly green a week ago, starred with wild flowers and thrumming with insects. It probably hasn’t been fertilised for the best of a century, and this is the first time in several years it hasn’t been grazed – at least in part – by horses throughout the Spring. Rudi vanishes in the chest-high grasses when chasing his ball, and I have to be up-hill of him to trace his trajectory by the parting track like the speeding Velociraptors of Jurassic Park. He emerges sneezing with nether-parts and face butter-yellow with the pollen, reminding me of the little man with a golden beard in Ruskin’s The King of the Golden River. Through the gate and into the steep, wooded valley where the red bridge is cool in dappled shade, rimmed with huge clumps of glossy hart’s-tongue ferns, the bluebells having long gone. (We have the native bluebell in the wood, though the ones in the garden planted before we arrived are the bigger, showier Spanish variety.) Below the bridge our stream continues to run, though the flow is now desultory and the rock pools under the two waterfalls are a lot more shallow than they were a month ago. A quarter of a mile on the river will still be running deep enough for Rudi to swim, so we press on.

A few weeks ago the track down to the the river cut through deep beds of wild garlic. Now the path has transformed with seed-heads dropped from the trees, and it’s as though we’re walking on lamb’s-fleece. As Rudi bounds ahead flashing through shafts of sunlight, little bombs of grass-pollen go off like soft firework displays in his wake. At the river a flotilla of Canada geese watch from the water, regally still at a distance of about a hundred yards downstream, as Rudi doggy-paddles loudly about in pursuit of his ball. It’s lovely to watch him from above, the water clear and the far-below pebbles rippling as his shadow passes over them. When first he came to us a year ago he was circumspect at the river’s edge, only willing to retrieve his ball if it floated within range without him plunging in. Now he cannons in with a splash and swims like a champion, riding high in the water with tail up and ball clenched between jaws held above the surface. (Jack on shorter legs used to ride low in the water, and his river-intake when carrying his ball was prodigious as a result.)

This afternoon, because he asked, I took Rudi for a ball-throwing circuit of the grounds, and halfway across the field in the full blast of the day, wished I hadn’t. Even in my straw hat the heat beat down like a hammer on the top of my head. Rudi vanished for minutes on end, lying flat in whatever shade of grass he could find. The vibrant greens and purples of last week’s grass have now scorched to shades of pale green/straw, and though that’s the way it always goes, this year the transformation has been a lot faster. Right now everything looks beautiful, but we need rain. A week more of this will see a big difference in the landscape.

The Trajectory of a Visual Theme

Featured

Posted on May 11, 2023 by Clive Hicks-Jenkins

In the print series Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, made in collaboration with Penfold Press, the image of the Green Knight hoisting aloft his decapitated head, had in its background his horse, decked out in a caparison of embroidered foliage, oak leaves, eyes and peacocks.

Above: gouache and pencil study for *The Green Knight’s Head Lives*

The peacocks in flight, together with the flying oak leaves, subsequently found their ways into a painting commissioned by the Musica en Segura festival in Andalusia, in which alongside several other commissioned images, it was projected to accompany a performance of Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time. I made the painting, titled Startled Peacocks, while listening to the music in my studio, the work evolving into a visual meditation of the triumph of brutality over reason and order. I was interested in making an image that was beautiful to look at, whilst not flinching from the idea of unthinking violence.

Startled Peacocks then became the foundation of a key illustration in Beauty & Beast, a collaboration with poet Olivia McCannon on an homage to artist/director Jean Cocteau’s film adaptation of the fairy tale La Belle et la Bête. In the illustration the peacocks have gone, but the leonine Beast has assumed the pose of the attacking lion in the previous work. Beauty and Beast was published by Design for Today in 2022.

The peacocks and oak leaves from the Gawain prints and the Messiaen concert re-emerged when I collaborated last year with Tinsmiths of Ledbury to create a textile design. In the first image a drawing is in progress on my desk, and in the second, as it appeared when printed onto linen. The design is being made in a variety of colour combinations.

The Tinsmiths textiles are due to be launched this summer.

Mares’ Tails

Featured

Posted on May 1, 2023 by Clive Hicks-Jenkins

In her poem Mares’ Tails Catriona Urquhart recalls the narrator’s unease at the sight of linen bed-sheets on his mother’s washing-line. In this and all but two of the titles in the poetry collection, the poet ventriloquises her subject, my father, Trevor. Catriona was a great gatherer of stories, and in her years of friendship with my father, she collected and stored many of his. She winkled out of him far more than he’d ever shared with his family. I think he was unguarded with her, and recalled his life with real pleasure.

Mares’ Tails

I lie

and coax the clouds down

from the sky

and grab the mares’ tails

and fly

far up

into the blue

and gazing down see

all my landscape

small and strange and new.

The church tower squat and square,

the lilac shadows of the vicar’s yews,

the brook, a silver eel

that snakes around the patient cows,

mere dots of brown.

Ed Hockey, bicycling from the town

seems not to move.

My mother’s washing line

is pegged with people:

Joan and Hetty billow out

but Herb hangs limp

and Vince is twisted at the end.

The linen sheets

that pinion me at night

encasing me in wild dreams,

terror, nightmare,

are waving free

so innocently.

You could not think

they meant to choke and smother.

Catriona Urquhart (1953 – 2005)

It was so very easy to share with Catriona, because when she loved a person she bestowed her full attention and appreciation. Trevor revelled in that. They used to go off on little adventures together, him whisking her away to his favourite country pubs and beauty spots around Monmouthshire, or his regular Italian cafe for lunch in Newport’s docklands, where Maria always had his place set for him. These were his late years and Catriona, who was reeling from the loss of her father, found comfort in mine. Trevor loved this late-blooming friendship, unlikely though it was. He twinkled in her company. They both twinkled.

Trevor didn’t make it into the new millennium. He died at age eighty-six in 1999. He’d been eighty-four when he’d opened up and shared with us the strange event of his childhood that had shaped his life, so there had been just two years for us – for me and Catriona – to gather what facts we could of the occasion when the midwinter mummers had called at his home and Trevor, who was just a toddler, believed the Devil had come for him. It was unlikely that in the hurly-burly of excitement anyone present saw or recognised the effect of the child’s encounter with a ‘Mari Lwyd’. (Grey Mare) Thereafter Trevor believed with the simple certainty of a child, that if ever he spoke of what he’d witnessed, then the Devil would return to carry him away. And because he never told another soul, the memory stuck. He didn’t recognise it for what it was – a celebratory folk tradition – because in imagination it had grown into something private and terrifying, an atavistic horror carried with him into adulthood and hidden away from sight. He simply had no idea that the Devil was a decorated horse’s skull on a stick, with the capering operator hidden beneath a shroud-like draped bedsheet.

All his life Trevor was terrified of entangling sheets, whether too tight on beds or cracking in winds on washing-lines. He never read a ghost story, not a single one, but had he laid eyes on M. R. James Oh Whistle and I’ll come to You My Lad, he wouldn’t have got into a bed again, ever. In hospital, at the end, with his dreams resurrecting old fears, he fought with sheets tucked tight by caring nurses to prevent him falling out of bed. I loosened him and murmured soothingly, stroked his forehead and told him everything would be fine. And then at the end, it was, and he was still.

Catriona died on May Day in 2005. She was a mere fifty-two. She’d been drifting on a tide of Morphine, surfacing infrequently, briefly and peacefully in those last weeks, cared for by those who loved her and the wonderful Macmillan nurses, tending and vanquishing her pain. It’s said she chose her time, May Day having always been significant for her, so perhaps at some deep level she knew the calendar date and took her leave on the day she loved.

The Mare’s Tale was the sole volume of Catriona’s poems published in her lifetime. The poems were originally intended as the text for my 2001 exhibition of the same title, but when Nicolas McDowall of Old Stile Press came to our house and found her manuscript on our kitchen table, he decided the collection must be suitably honoured in a beautiful edition. And so it was, illustrated by me, printed by Nicolas at Catchmays Court in the Wye Valley, bound in super-fast time by The Fine Bindery and published by Old Stile Press. Launched at the opening of the exhibition at Newport Museum and Gallery, it was the only collection of poems published in Catriona’s lifetime. She destroyed all her earlier work, a fact discovered only after her death. She was always hardest on herself, and had clearly taken in hand what she chose to be remembered by. The Mare’s Tale is a small masterpiece and we are lucky to have it. She was a wordsmith down to her bootlaces.

Clive Hicks-Jenkins, May Day 2023

The Dark Art of the Toy Theatre: Beauty and Beast

Featured

Posted on April 27, 2023 by Clive Hicks-Jenkins

When I was working on the recently published Beauty & Beast, written by Olivia McCannon and published by Design for Today, I thought it might be a lovely idea to additionally make a toy theatre version of the book. It would be sold separately as an item in its own right, with a script by Olivia. However I knew it couldn’t be a simple matter of recreating the illustrations reduced and trimmed to fit a toy stage. It would require a complete translation into a new language, the language of the toy theatre. In this I was aided and abetted by Olivia, who absolutely understood the nature of translation and transformation, and was able to brilliantly magic her ravishingly beautiful and heartrending text for Beauty & Beast, into a clever, funny, galloping romp of a pantomime for the toy theatre. Artist David W. Slack, too, came aboard, and began translating my illustrations into what would work on a toy theatre stage. We three took one thing and turned it into another. I cannot tell you how we did it. The process defies analysis and certainly defeats the retelling. I found at all stages I was working intuitively. I think we all were. But here, by way of explanation, I’ve illustrated this piece with images of the toy theatre, set against the illustrations which inspired them.

Even the name of the art form is deceptive: Toy Theatre. The word ‘Toy’ makes it sound juvenile, a thing of the nursery, and in fact the toy theatre was born in the eighteenth century and reached the dizzying heights of its invention in the nineteenth as a plaything of young people. (Though I suspect that a lot of those who played most were not children at all.) It sprang out of a desire of theatre-goers to have souvenirs of the productions they’d enjoyed, and sensing the commercial potential of this, the printmakers of the day began first to offer portrait sheets of actors in their roles, and later, ‘toy’ stages on which small, cut-out paper actors could strut and gesture through melodramas, romances and pantomimes. (Toy theatre makers were only able to thrive where there was a lively theatre industry on which they could draw for inspiration and their market, which is why the English tradition of toy theatres developed in and around London’s theatre-land.) Though modern toys would eventually displace toy theatres, the tradition persisted culturally if marginally in Britain, largely because the last printer/seller of toy theatres, Benjamin Pollock, managed to scratch a living into the twentieth century.

After Benjamin Pollock, the faded memories of toy theatre clung on in the small and privately owned Pollock’s Toy Museum in Scala Street, which this year closed its doors for the last time (though there are plans to one day open it in a new premises), and in Benjamin Pollock’s Toyshop in Covent Garden, which is a modern business bearing an old name selling mainly modern toys, but also a range of reproduction antique toy theatres and toy theatres by contemporary designers, myself included.

Below: illustration from Beauty & Beast of Beast carrying Beauty to her chamber, and the set design of Beauty’s room from the toy theatre adaptation:

I was given a set of yellowing toy theatre sheets to cut-out and play with when I was a child, a gift of the actor/author Bill Meilen. Some bore the name Benjamin Pollock. I made my own toy stage to hold them. When I left Wales to attend school in London, I discovered the Pollock’s Toy Museum and the die was cast. At weekends and with time my own, I haunted the place. Toy Theatre got a grip on my young heart and has held it fast for a lifetime.

But how does it work? How may a production made for a real stage shrink to what works on a toy stage? (Or in this case, how does a wide-format illustration made for a book shrink to the square aperture of a toy stage?) It’s not simply a matter of scaling down, though that can be done too, and often is, and with mainly poor results. By some alchemy when the stage shrinks, then new rules apply, and new ways of creating and seeing have to be devised.

The toy theatre may imitate the backdrops, wings, headers and cut-cloths of nineteenth century stages, but there has to be a translation to the reduced form. Think of it this way. If you took a delicious sweet from its wrapper and popped it into your mouth, it would be delightful because the small size suits the intensity of flavour. There would not be a better eating experience were it to be enlarged to a giant size. It exists, at its best, at the scale intended. So it is with the toy theatre, only the other way around.

When you take something devised as life-sized, it is not better for being successfully shrunk to small. It becomes too cluttered, too visually indigestible, too busy. No, the toy theatre has to be a new thing. It has to be tailored to its constraints, though as is so often the way with creativity, the limitations can be made to work to advantage. It is not the real world, but an absolutely unique one, with different rules and languages. At its best it can be a doorway to another country, the way past the coat-hangers into Narnia or down the rabbit-hole into Wonderland. I’ve been tumbling down the rabbit-hole of toy theatre all my life, and I’m tumbling still.

Beauty & Beast, a retelling of an old tale with text by Olivia McCannon and illustrations by Clive Hicks-Jenkins, may be purchased direct from the publisher, as can the Beauty & Beast Toy Theatre:

CLICK HERE

The Picasso Jug

Featured

Posted on April 21, 2023 by Clive Hicks-Jenkins

The Picasso Jug. 1998. Acrylic ink on paper. 24 x 43 cms. Private Collection.

I love the bleak uplands above Merthyr Tydfil. As a child I knew them through the eyes of my father, a wayleaves officer with the South Wales Electricity Board who often took me with him on his work journeys across the country. It’s a windblown, restless landscape of scrub and sky. Few trees, but sweeping vistas of land scoured and shaped by the weather and punctuated, back in his day, by the verticals of wire-looped telegraph poles and the glittering, alien giants of electricity pylons striding the hills. There were no abandoned and burned out vehicles then, vehicles in the 1950s being harder to come by and rarely abandoned when there was still mileage to be had out of them. But what thrilled me most were the parched grasslands of the late summers rippling across the curves of landscape, as though we were perched on the back of some great beast with a bleached pelt streaming in the wind.

Alas, I don’t have a Picasso Jug, and this one from a museum collection was relocated by me into the landscape I love. I felt that jug and landscape were a good fit.

Christ Writes in the Dust: Clive Hicks-Jenkins in Conversation with Rebecca Gibbs

Featured

Posted on March 26, 2023 by Clive Hicks-Jenkins

On Tuesday, 28th March at 19.30 BMT, I’ll be ‘In Conversation’ with Rebecca Gibbs as a part of a programme of events organised with the Ecumenical ‘Lent Conversations’ team in association with Articles of Faith and Victoria Methodist Church, Bristol. There’s an exhibition of works from the Methodist Collection of Art, open from 6pm on the evening of the event, at which my painting, Christ Writes in the Dust, commissioned by the trustees of the collection, will be on view. Booking is free on Eventbrite.

Click HERE to book a place.

The event is taking place at Victoria Methodist Church, 1A Whiteladies Rd, BS8 1NU. There will be a Zoom facility for those unable to attend in person, and details of that may also be found at the link above.

Below: chiaroscuro study for Christ Writes in the Dust.

Thoughts on the occasion of World Book Day

Featured

Posted on March 2, 2023 by Clive Hicks-Jenkins

Looking at my shelves I realise how fortunate I’ve been as an artist to have collaborated on a good many interesting book projects. At the start of my career as a painter, Nicolas and Frances McDowall of Old Stile Press gave me multiple opportunities with their invitations to collaborate on volumes of poetry, plus the covers of two bibliographies. For them I made two volumes of works by the sixteenth century poet Richard Barnfield, The Affectionate Shepherd and the Barnfield Sonnets, plus The Mare’s Tale by Catriona Urquhart, an anthology of poems which memorialised the life of her late friend – and my father – Trevor.

At Old Stile I produced an illustrated edition of Peter Shaffer’s iconic play, Equus, which led to a commission from Penguin Classics to contribute an image for the cover of a new edition of the play in 2006, still in print today.

While at OSP I learned craft on the projects Nicolas chose for me, it would be fair to say it was in the books springing from my creative enthusiasms as an artist, that I’d find the most satisfying experiences. Simon Armitage’s 2018 revision of his translation of the medieval poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight for Faber & Faber gave the opportunity to use the fourteen-print series on the theme I’d made with Dan Bugg at Penfold Press, edited into illustrations for the edition. That led to a second collaboration with Simon of a much-loved fairytale for publisher Design for Today, Hansel & Gretel: a Nightmare in Eight Scenes, which won me the 2020 V&A Illustrated Book Award.

Next came a second book at Faber with Simon, by now appointed Poet Laureate. The Owl and the Nightingale was conceived as a companion volume to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and like its predecessor was a ‘translation’ of a medieval text.

Joe Pearson at Design for Today makes extraordinarily beautiful books which honour the great traditions of illustration, and after Hansel & Gretel in 2019, he invited me to make a child-size ‘pamphlet’ book, The Bird House, which enabled me to indulge my love of toy birds and toy buildings. No text with this one, just page after page of pictures.

Throughout the pandemic lockdowns I worked on my second ‘fairytale’ project for Design for Today, Beauty & Beast, in a reinvention by poet Olivia McCannon. Our starting points had been the eighteenth century French novella of the fairytale and the 1946 film La Belle et la Bête by poet/artist/director Jean Cocteau. However in Olivia’s hands the source materials were thrillingly transformed, underpinned by 21st century concerns about global warming and the destruction of environment.

For fifteen years I’ve been producing cover artwork and page decorations for the American poet and novelist, Marly Youmans. My most recent work for her has been a collection of poems under the title The Book of the Red King, and her novella-length narrative poem, Seren of the Wildwood.

This year I produced my second cover for Penguin, an edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, working with Penguin/Random House art director, Suzanne Dean.

Over the years I haven’t seen myself as being an illustrator so much as an artist with a wide range of interests, among which books are admittedly a bit of an obsession. Some of the book projects have been ones I’ve instigated and brought to completion with the help of others. Joe at Design for Today has been my major facilitator for the most significant ones, while others have come via publishing commissions. But however made, the books produced in collaboration with writers I greatly admire, such as Marly, Olivia and Simon, often thereafter cast their influences further into my practices as an artist. I have been majorly influenced and fuelled by poetry. It’s a persistent thread throughout my work at the easel, on the stage and in books. The past year has seen me working for Folio Society on a new illustrated edition of Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf, due out this summer. The project just dropped into my lap, brought to me by Folio Society art editor Raquel Leis Allion. I’d long wanted to work with the text, so it’s been a bit of a dream come true.

What You Don’t See

Featured

Posted on December 15, 2022 by Clive Hicks-Jenkins

The orchard behind the house is is thick with hoar frost, glorious in the winter sun. Despite the sharpness of the imagery in this video capture, what I experience is not what you see here, good though my I-phone camera is. Tiny irregularities on the surface of the human eye make the crystals of ice appear to glitter and flash as I move through the garden. It’s utterly beautiful. Dazzling.

Think back to the Golden Age of Hollywood. Whenever a screen goddess appeared in rhinestones or sequins, her image would simply be off the charts with the reflective sheens and sparks given off by them, because the lenses back then were a lot closer to the imperfect human eye, and their surface imperfections created the starbursts of dazzle which photographers and cinematographers turned into glamorous magic. Here Marlene Dietrich turns the ‘pixie’ hat into an accessory for seduction, with cuffs to match.

Watch any film or tv commercial today and glitter has been added in post-production, and frankly looks like it. Instagrammers add sparkles to their selfies, staring in soft-focussed self-absorption through storms of ‘glitter’ produced by an app. All those 20th century Christmas cards embellished with glitter-frost spoke to us because they looked the way we saw ice and snow crystals with our own eyes. Everything glittered and flashed. These days the Etsy merchants selling vintage Christmas cards ‘with glitter’ can’t reproduce them effectively to show at their online stores. Their cameras can’t capture the reality. Everything flattens out, the glitter/glimmer/sparkle vanquished.

I recognise digital sparkle the moment it appears. It’s unconvincing, not remotely similar to what we see with our own eyes. It isn’t even what cameras from an earlier age captured. I know it isn’t real, just as surely as I know when confronted with a CGI dinosaur, no matter the artistry involved in its making, that it isn’t real. The artifice makes me feel differently about what I’m watching, certainly on a conscious level but almost more so on an unconscious one. I’m just not as engaged/involved. In the first Jurassic Park film the stand-out episode for me was not one created with CGI, but rather the sequence with the hunting velociraptors in the kitchen, which was created with brilliant puppets and razor-sharp editing.

All this is to come to the elephant in the room, which is the AI generated imagery now flooding Instagram. So much of its candy-coloured allure and textural brilliance is leaving many illustrators, painters and stage and production designers feeling that their long-honed drawing and painting skills are going to become obsolete. How, they wonder, can anyone compete with AI capacity to take/steal existing materials and reassemble and embellish them to such clever effect? How can any artist with pencils and brushes compete at anything like the speed? While I don’t believe there will be any turning aside from the technology, neither do I believe it’s game set and match. Just as CGI continues to co-exist with analogue skills, so there will be things which people still do better than a computer programme. After all, old-style glitter is still defeating the apps.

Rudi and the Puppets

Featured

Posted on December 6, 2022 by Clive Hicks-Jenkins

Jan Zalud’s beautiful facsimiles of the Hansel & Gretel puppets he’d made for the stage production of 2018 arrived here several weeks ago.

I commissioned the puppets when the producer Kate Romano of Goldfield Productions and the Goldfield Ensemble, repeatedly declined to lend the originals for my forthcoming exhibition at Oriel Myrddin. It was an inexplicable decision on her part because the puppets were funded in part by an Arts Council of England grant to Goldfield, and in part by me, and so ownership could be disputed. However instead of all the anxiety of embarking on a legal challenge, I decided instead to commission and pay for the facsimiles. It was the right decision. Jan has made a spectacular job of the rebuilds, and I’d defy anyone to spot the difference between these and the originals. Soon they’ll be on their way to costumier Oonagh Creighton Griffiths, who costumed the first puppets.

Rudi is fascinated by the puppets and is very gentle with them.

A Winter’s Tale

Featured

Posted on November 10, 2022 by Clive Hicks-Jenkins

Over at the Sussex Lustreware website, Gloria has packed the shop with items from the Harlequinade range that we collaborated on last year. Harlequin, Columbine and a host of characters drawn from the great Victorian traditions of Toy Theatre, are resplendent in their sequinned finery and ready for ‘Curtain Up’. To celebrate the range, David W. Slack and I have produced our tribute to the golden age of the Victorian stage!

The shop may be found at:

https://shop.sussexlustreware.co.uk/products

Tomcat in the Red Room

Featured

Posted on October 17, 2022 by Clive Hicks-Jenkins

I find myself feeling sad, a condition, increasingly, of our times. Back in 2013 the book blogger known as Tomcat in the Red Room wrote a dream review of Marly Youmans’ novella/poem, Thaliad, published by Phoenicia. Now Thaliad is a jaw-dropping literary achievement by any standard, but Tom wrote a review which beautifully cast a net to ensnare readers who may not otherwise have found it. When I read his words I rejoiced, because he really understood what a talent Marly is, and eloquently conveyed the fact. I know it, but no-one is going to listen to me. Marly and I have been working together for nearly twenty years, and so when the long-term collaborator says “Read this woman’s work. She is a genius!”, people might well reply “Well he would say that, wouldn’t he?”

So here is Tom’s book-report, so insightful, tender, and clear-sighted. I discovered today that his blog is no longer active, or even viewable. I don’t know whether he still writes online, or even, given the events of the past few years, whether he is still with us. I will forever be indebted to him for what follows.

Tom Cat in the Red Room on Thaliad.

It seems that post-apocalyptic narrative is definitely on a roll here in the early 21st Century; what with Cormac McCarthy, China Mieville, David Almond etc. all turning to the genre in recent years. Marly Youmans’ ‘Thaliad’ is an unusual addition to the field, but it’s also one of the best examples I’ve ever read. ‘Thaliad’ has a commonality with The Road in that it comes from a literary tradition decidedly outside of the SFF mainstream: it’s a mythopoeic epic poem about seven children attempting to survive the aftermath of some non-disclosed apocalyptic event referred to only as `The Fire’. One of the children, a girl named Thalia, soon emerges as the de facto leader of the group, and together they settle in the ruins of an abandoned village on the edge of lake Glimmerglass. What follows is a desperate and genuinely moving cling to life that’s equal parts bleak and uplifting, harrowing and hopeful.

A lazy crib would be: `The Road meets Lord of the Flies in verse’, but such a label, however succinct, fails to encapsulate the sheer inventiveness and lyrical exuberance of Youmans’ writing. Who, for example, could resist such beautiful and strange and violent language as:

Nothing could have halted them from verdict

And vengeance, save angelic messengers

Arrived by unexpected thunderbolt.

A wail went out from Thalia and streamed

Across the mire, across the slough of blood

It’s structurally formal, but the poetry never feels rigidly metered or constrained; a feat entirely due to the beauty, flow and vitality of the writing. Sure it’s heavily stylised in the way you’d expect from epic verse that channels, among others, Homer; but the writing isn’t at all arch or overbearing. Furthermore, the book has some strikingly novelistic traits: chapter divisions, direct speech, and a first person narrator, all of which should act as a helpful way-in for those readers more familiar with novels than poetry.

‘Thaliad’ is composed in blank verse (that is, unrhymed iambic pentameter), and there’s a definite tension between the book’s future-looking, sci-fi-esque premise, and the New Formalist way it eschews free verse in favour of this more traditional approach to rhythm and prescribed syllable count. Wrapped up in this tension between the book’s setting and its form are Youmans’ playful references to the canon of classical epic poetry. The opening line, for example, “It was the age beyond the ragged time” references the first line of The Iliad, with “age” and “ragged” bearing more than a passing phonic and visual resemblance to Homer’s first-line repetition of “rage” (as it’s translated in English, obviously); and this serves as a definite tonal signifier for the poem that follows. Similarly, such chapter headings as `Seven Against the World’ make reference to Greek Tragic drama (as do the frequent allusions to masks), and the text itself is replete with lively puns, such as this clever nod to both the Icarus story and the fabled fluid that supposedly ran in the veins of the Greek Gods (the `ichor’):

The heavens, ichorous, let down a rain

That seemed as if it could have been the blood

Of dying Gods dreamed up in ancient worlds.

The most striking Classical reference is, of course, in the book’s name. Using the titular suffix `-iad’ would have been an act of pure hubris in the hands of less able writers, and initially I was sceptical, expecting Thaliad to be open to accusations of self-aggrandising pomposity and stylistic misappropriation; after all, calling your book `Thaliad’ and hence inviting comparison with Homer could be mistaken as a very cocky move indeed. Happily, there’s a fantastic inter-textual rationale behind this book’s title and its neo-classical form. The narrator (and supposed writer) of Thaliad, Emma, is speaking 60 years after the events she describes, and learnt her trade as a poet-historian by salvaging what books she could (presumably the Classics) from the ruined world’s libraries. So ‘Thaliad’, then, fictionalises the story of its own creation; the book itself is supposedly a piece of history, written as a record of the first years following `The Fire’.

It’s not unlike China Miéville’s post-apocalyptic landscape the `Railsea’, whose inhabitants have re-ordered society through a kind of collective performance of Moby Dick. The world of ‘Thaliad’ likewise addresses the problem of overcoming the apocalypse through an act of textual salvage: Emma and Thalia have re-constructed the world’s history via this filter of Classic literature, and the results are surprisingly uplifting. It really works, but only because the post-apocalyptic setting provides suitable thematic gravitas: no other genre of 21st Century fiction could get away with appropriating the language of classic Greek literature without simultaneously committing some enormous faux pas.

But don’t worry if Homer et al isn’t your particular thing. ‘Thaliad’ doesn’t pre-suppose an understanding of Greek literature, and knowledge of the Classics is not a pre-requisite to fully enjoying this poem. The book’s real appeal is its language, its characters and the heartbreaking decisions they find themselves making. Marly Youmans takes great pains to ensure that ‘Thaliad’ isn’t one of those post-apocalyptic narratives whose characters are mere passive bystanders swept along by Big, Important, Global events beyond their control. Choices made and not-made are the thematic heart of the poem, and for me the book’s most significant event occurs at its very beginning, when the children make their first collective decision: to abandon one of their number, Gabriel, a boy who won’t stop crying:

They shouted at him that he’d learn a thing,

Or two, to not be so unendingly

Unbearable, to weep as all could weep

But did not do.

[…] They drove away.

They drove away! And left that little boy

Alone with bridges, river, blowing ash,

Immensity. He was eleven, a child

The six remaining children soon realise what an appalling thing they’ve done and turn around, hoping to find Gabriel once more, but all to no avail.

The abandonment of Gabriel influences the moral identities of the children more so than any other of the book’s events. Chapters and decades later, it remains the significant episode of their lives, presumably because, unlike `The Fire’, discarding Gabriel is a tragedy of their own contriving. If the apocalypse can be read as a second Fall (and there’s plenty of Biblical imagery at play: “There is no peaceful land, / And gates of Eden long ago clanged shut”), this first decision made by the children is definitely their loss of innocence. On numerous occasions various speakers equate this early naivety with all their future tragedies:

– For where is Gabriel, that child of light,

Who might have been the father of the world? –

[…]

Perhaps the sin of Gabriel, forlorn,

Abandoned on the track has weighted us

Like pocket stones in deepening water.

If you want to be twee about it, you could probably argue that ‘Thaliad’ functions as a metaphor for the end of childhood and the violent emergence into the adult realm of moral responsibility. I wouldn’t tug at this thread too much, but it’s there if you really must.

It would be remiss of me at this point not to mention Clive Hicks-Jenkins, who as well as designing the book’s cover, has illustrated small iconographic vignettes that head each of ‘Thaliad”s twenty four chapters (note: the same number of books divide The Iliad). These striking black and white collages definitely influenced my conception of Thaliad’s world, and the grey-tone in which they’re rendered acts as a satisfying visual call-back to the descriptions of ash and rubble that dominate much of the poem’s imagery. As well as being unusually beautiful, Thaliad’s artwork is loaded with symbolism and connotation. The image that heads chapter twenty three, for example, depicts two of the children (now fully-grown) fighting over Thalia. The icon itself is a silhouette-esque depiction of two men locked in combat, with their swords provocatively placed so as to resemble the positioning of erect phalluses in a way that alludes to the lust that is the deeper subtext and reasoning behind their feud.

Thaliad is an extraordinary, deeply moving and fiercely intelligent poem, and I hope I’ve given some indication of its many achievements. I’ve not written much about the plot because, frankly, it’s difficult to do so without resorting to massive spoilers, but suffice it to say that several of the story’s twists are genuinely shocking, genuinely original. Its greatest accomplishment is the way it successfully melds so many disparate literary traditions into something cohesive, without seams. References to Diana Wynne Jones can be found adjacent nods to Ovid or Cormac McCarthy and Andrew Marvell. It plays with form in memorable and mischievous ways (the first fourteen lines of chapter 18, for example, could easily be isolated as a kind of weird blank verse bucolic sonnet), and it always works. Thaliad is a convergence of genre spaces, and we Science Fiction fans, sometimes so rigid and stubborn in our reading, would do well to embrace it.

Dance of the Vampires

Featured

Posted on August 20, 2022 by Clive Hicks-Jenkins

Roman Polanski as Alfred in *Dance of the Vampires*

A largely forgotten masterwork directed by Roman Polanski, Dance of the Vampires AKA The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967) rewards on every level – if you can find it. Ignore the US print from which sixteen minutes of footage was butchered by interfering producer Martin Ransohoff, who additionally saddled the film with an unnecessary animated credit sequence. He also extended the title to The Fearless Vampire Killers, or Pardon Me, But Your Teeth Are In My Neck, and dubbed Jack MacGowran’s Prof. Abronsius with a silly, cartoonish voice. Polanski so resented Ransohoff’s vandalism that he asked for his name to be removed from the credits of the US version. I have a Blu-ray disc made with a dubbed soundtrack for the Spanish market (El Baile de Los Vampiros), but it comes with the original English soundtrack as an extra. It is, inasmuch as I can tell, Polanski’s original edit. (It runs at 103 minutes as opposed to the 88 minutes of the US release.)

Dance of the Vampires/The Fearless Vampire Killers – as seen in Polanski’s original cut – is both a horror film and a comedy, and the two elements intertwine elegantly with no shortage of thrills along the way. It looks utterly ravishing, with designs embodying every trope which fans of the Transylvanian vampire genre could possibly wish for.

Ferdy Maine as Count von Krowlock and Sharon Tate as Sarah Shagal

Wilfred Shingleton and Fred Carter worked together on production design and art direction, and their creations of the garlic-festooned inn and the dark castle rearing out of a pristinely glittering snow-bound landscape, are nothing short of magnificent. Look out for the scary portraits of Count von Krolock’s ancestors lining the castle walls. The camera doesn’t linger, but what we see is typical of the attention to detail characterising a Polanski film.

The inn is a masterpiece of squat, labyrinthine passageways and interconnecting rooms, wonderfully lending the creaks and pistol-cracks of its expanding and contracting wood construction to a soundtrack ripe with stealthy footsteps on boards and the reassuring clucking of unseen poultry in the yard beyond. Beds with grey over-stuffed duvets, fat as ticks, cram into rooms too small to accommodate them. Everywhere there are unexpected spaces, with cupboard-sized rooms crammed under eaves and a wine cellar which provides a suitably claustrophobic setting for a vampire chase. The design aesthetic is European in every sense, but then Polanski is a European director clearly revelling here in the things he knows and loves. The Chagall-ian tavern (the owner is named ‘Shagal’) embodies the character of a shtetl in a way that would never be seen outside a European film, save perhaps in Fiddler on the Roof. In visual terms the film is completely consistent throughout, with nothing of the ‘real’ world to distract from its immaculate construct. Where real landscapes are incorporated, they are melded perfectly with exterior miniatures and with additional painted scenic elements. It’s a twilight landscape of picturesque snow-drifts and ice-bound forests, where characters freeze solid and have to be carried, stiff as boards indoors, to be thawed back into life. (Or in one case, thawed into undead life.)

The innkeeper’s wife laments the icy fate of her husband

Studio set: a landscape of snowdrifts and fenceposts

The castle is the best in any vampire film, ever. Polanski was paying tribute to Hammer Films with the lush, gothic style, but this goes way beyond anything the Hammer studios ever achieved.

The galleried castle courtyard was elaborately designed for the most perfect ‘chase’ gag, made in an unedited take, and it pays off wonderfully. But the film’s triumph of design is the sequence in which Professor Abronsius and Alfred pick their way across the snow-blanketed battlements and roof-scapes of the castle, and as the camera slides sideways to take in the full, wide-screen panoramic loveliness of the architecture against the mountains, the effect is simply breathtaking.

Above and below: the studio set of the castle roof with an atmospheric painted render of the landscape beyond

Polanski in costume for his role, in front of an exterior miniature of the castle

The cast is perfection, with stand-out ensemble work from Polanski as the timid Alfred and Jack MacGowran as a whippet-thin and physically elastic Professor Abronsius, as though Peter Cushing were being played by Mr Pastry. Alfie Bass is outstanding as the obsequious innkeeper Shagal, bowing and bobbing in deference to the retreating vampire Count (the supremely elegant Ferdy Mayne) who’s just abducted his daughter. Shagal’s basilisk-eyed termagant of a wife is played by Jessie Robins, and Polanski brilliantly contrasts the couple’s physical disparities to create the sense of Shagal as a hen-pecked husband always doomed to come off worse within the marital state, though always straining to outwit the odds stacked against him. With her mountainous presence under an equally mountainous duvet in their tiny bedroom, he looks as though he’s about to be stifled under an avalanche of snow.

The Count’s shambling henchman, Koukol, is the British boxer Terry Downes, just thirty at the time of the filming, and he is astonishingly good. The character’s presence is one of the sinister/humerous lynchpins anchoring the film. He’s both funny and scary, and lumberingly lethal. (He polishes off an aggressive wolf with his bare hands and teeth!) And then there’s Sharon Tate, luminous as the Shagals’ daughter, Sarah, giving a performance so sweet and pitch perfect to the film that your heart aches for what we lost two years later.

Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski larking about in front of the miniature of the castle exterior

Stand out sequences:

The lyrical yet sinister moment when Tate in her bubble-bath suddenly realises that snow is falling in the room, the window above her having been opened.

The Vampire Ball in which our heroes dance with the undead until the sublime moment when their game is suddenly up.

Crossing the snowbound rooftops of the castle.

Alfred carries the frozen Abronsius across the castle battlements

A wonderful pursuit of Alfred by Count Von Krolock’s gay vampire son, Herbert, who has goodness knows what mischief in mind. (What I loved about this film both when I saw it on its release, and now, is that Iain Quarrier neither minces or camps, as a gay vampire would in any American or British film of the time (Kenneth Williams in Carry on Screaming), but plays it as a brooding, predatory dandy, like a blonde Lord Byron. It’s refreshing, funny and scary!)

Krzysztof Komeda’s music for the film shimmers with swooping vocal tracks that make a wordless vampiric chorus to the action. The effect is wonderfully atmospheric and spine chilling, and it was a crying shame he wasn’t enlisted to write music for the German stage musical, Dance of the Vampires, in which the magic of the film was utterly vanquished by relentlessly dreary songs, as though someone had pieced the show together from whatever leftovers never made it into Phantom of the Opera and Les Miserables. You can hear bits online and it’s deeply depressing. Komeda wrote the music for several Polanski films, including Rosemary’s Baby, but in my opinion his triumph was what he produced for Dance of the Vampires.

In the Realm of Monsters

Featured

Posted on August 9, 2022 by Clive Hicks-Jenkins

It’s with huge delight that I can reveal, at last, that my current big project is the commission to illustrate a new Beowulf for The Folio Society, in the acclaimed translation by Seamus Heaney. The illustrations must remain shrouded in secrecy until the book is ready for launch, and I won’t be showing work in progress. Suffice to say that I’m already deeply bedded in the project, awakening every morning excited to be in the thick of it and enormously enjoying the many discussions and planning sessions with my wonderful Folio Society art director, Raquel Leis Allion. But this little vignette is all you’re going to see before the book is published, because we’re keeping the images under lock and key.

I’ve greatly enjoyed the notion of ‘the monster’, whether in novels, in film/tv or in folklore and mythology. Aged eight I was sold on the idea of the ‘Gorgon’ from the first moment I read about her, and the Hydra, too, and the three-headed Cerberus, guard-dog of Hades. As a child, when too young to actually see X-rated films, I pored over imported copies of Famous Monsters of Filmland, so I knew all about the Universal Studios monsters – which were vintage even back in the fifties when they were being given lush spreads in the magazine – long before I ever saw the films themselves. I thrilled to the images of Lon Chaney being unmasked in The Phantom of the Opera, of Bela Lugosi curling back his lips in a pasty-faced vampiric leer, and Karloff sitting in Jack Pierce’s makeup chair being transformed into one of the most iconic monsters of cinema history.

I’m not a fan of all ‘horror’ – in extreme form I find it distasteful – but when makers are creative in producing something that nails you to your seat, the ride can be thrilling. I particularly love it when the scary bits are not too in-your-face. One of the greatest strengths of Alien, is that it pre-dated CGI, and so the fully-grown creature is half-shadowed and all the more alarming for it. I think the best scares in Jurassic Park are in the kitchen where a pair of Velociraptors hunt down the children, because most of what you see is staggeringly clever animatronics and puppetry, made even better by masterful editing. When the monster is actually there, in close contact with the actors, and not just a man in green wielding a ball-on-a-stick to cue their eye-lines for special effects to be added later, there are worlds of difference in the performances.

I’ve particularly enjoyed it when I’ve been given illustration opportunities to engage with old-school classic creatures. For the cover of These Our Monsters (2019, English Heritage), I was able to trace back to Bram Stoker’s account of Vlad Dracula, which was quite an eye-opener because the original descriptions are not remotely like any of the character’s film incarnations. (The cover image here is for The Dark Thread by Graeme Macrae Burnet, who sets his troubling and elegiac short story in Whitby at a time when the mentally fragile Stoker has returned to confront his own creation.)

There were entirely new monsters in the book, too, and I loved creating what Sarah Hall only suggests in The Hand Under the Stone, which is about as close as I’ve ever come to making a monster inhabiting a similar ‘between-worlds’ plane of existence to those found in the ghost stories of M. R. James which I love so much.

I’ve made several varieties of Witch for two quite different books on the theme of Hansel & Gretel, for a stage production in which she was presented via shadow-puppetry, and for a toy theatre for Benjamin Pollock’s Toyshop.

My first Hansel & Gretel book was a more or less textless picture-book for St Jude’s in which there was a Witch scary enough to require a warning for more sensitive readers. I made her glaucous-eyed and short-sighted – as witches traditionally were in some folk and fairy-tales, the Grimm Brothers telling of Hansel & Gretel included – but I dressed her in a garment embroidered with eyes to send out a different kind of message. (I stole the idea from a portrait of the first Queen Elizabeth in a gown embroidered with eyes and ears, as a coded message to her subjects – and more particularly her enemies – that the monarch saw all and heard all!)

A short-sighted Witch in a garment sewn with many eyes

For the Simon Armitage version of the tale, Hansel & Gretel, a Nightmare in Eight Scenes, I collaborated with paper-cut artist Peter Lloyd, providing him with rough drawings that he then transferred into elaborate stop-motion shadow-puppets. To begin with Hansel and Gretel saw only a crone in a bonnet and cloak, but when the cloak came off, the full horror of a spiny crab-like carapace was revealed, reverse-joint legs – like a bird – and a tail with a stinger that snaked into view and coiled and thrashed about.

Guide drawing for Peter Lloyd’s shadow puppets

Close up hands for the Witch created by Peter Lloyd

Animating a large Peter Lloyd shadow-puppet Witch’s head, used for close-ups

When Simon Armitage’s libretto for the stage production was published in 2019 as an illustrated book by Design for Today, I made a monstrous Witch – seen below as she’s turned into a gobstopper when Gretel pushes her into a cauldron of sweets boiled down into molten sugar – and a monstrous personification of the haunted forest, too, wonderfully described by the poet in a text that’s an illustrator’s dream.

The personification of a fairytale haunted wood

Beowulf is jam-packed with the eponymous hero’s encounters with monsters of many varieties. There’s a deep-sea-creature that drags him to watery depths, a dragon he slays – though he becomes fatally wounded in the process – and that arch-monster of literature and father of all horrors that came after him, Grendel, who is of a sufficient size to stuff thirty human corpses into a bag and make off with them. Beowulf tears off Grendel’s arm as a trophy, and the fatally wounded monster slinks away to die ‘off-stage’. We then discover there’s worse waiting in the wings, for Grendel has a mother, and she’s as wrathful as a nest of Asian Hornets on the warpath when she sets out to avenge her son’s death. (And you thought the vengeful mother was invented by the makers of the second Alien film. Turns out that she goes back to Anglo-Saxon literature, and before that to even more ancient mythologies and tales.)

So I am thrilled to be making images of these archetypal monsters, and hopefully in ways that will be unexpected and visceral enough to raise a few hairs at the nape of the neck. But in a good way, of course.

The Hour That Never Was

Featured

Posted on August 7, 2022 by Clive Hicks-Jenkins

I was – and remain – a big fan of The Avengers. I loved the whimsy and style of the series, the brilliant pairing of the characters John Steed and Mrs Peel, brought so affectionately and stylishly to life by actors Patrick Macnee and Diana Rigg, and the way it dipped so regularly into science fiction, weird fiction and a brand of folk-horror that was all its own.

In The Avengers the streets of London could always be relied upon to be strangely empty – which had the bonus of intensifying the tone of the series and foregrounding the players – and the countryside to be charmingly picturesque and devoid of eyesores. With droll dialogue and unexpected plots, each episode was a pitch-perfect jewel of escapist tv drama, and moreover was never un-balanced by overwrought visuals. The designers and special effects departments worked on a rigorously spare budget, and the constraint made everyone infinitely more inventive. Rigg and Macnee were masters of the quip and the ironic raised eyebrow, so that wherever the implausibilities of the plots would have tripped up more earnest actors, Steed and Mrs Peel instead exchanged knowing looks, poured glasses of restorative champagne and roared off in a convertible to the next chapter. (Or as below, trundled off on the back of a milk-float!)

The Hour That Never Was logged in at episode nine in the fourth series. As so often in the series … because actors know a good thing … it had a sterling supporting cast including Gerald Harper and Roy Kinnear. (The Avengers could always be relied upon for wonderful guest actors.)

Central to the plot of The Hour That Never Was, was a milk-float and a dead milkman. The United Dairies vehicle was an iconic one on the early-morning streets of the country, and there was a popular die-cast Triang toy of it.

My friend Simon Shaw, who is an aficionado of British tv/cinema horror and science fiction, has been busy producing wonderfully inventive models and figures for his Hobbs Lane Etsy Store. (He recently added a glow-in-the-dark possessed bed-sheet to his shop, based on the wonderful Jonathan Miller tv play Whistle and I’ll Come to You, starring Michael Hordern and adapted from the M R James short story Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad.) Having found a vintage Triang milk-float in an extremely play-worn condition, he sanded it down (actually he got his ninety-four year old dad to do that bit for him), re-painted it in new livery and then added 3-D printed elements, including milk-crates and the body of the deceased milkman, to make a perfect miniature replica of The Hour That Never Was vehicle right down to the correct number-plate. Then he boxed it in a commercially available reprint of the packaging, adding bespoke stickers to complete the effect. Brilliant!

Hats off to Simon for ingenuity in this charming ‘homage’ to a series so many of us remember with great affection. And yes, dear reader, I did acquire it, to go alongside some of the other memorabilia of tv I’ve loved, including several boxed sets of characters featuring Jo Grant from Doctor Who, given to me by the girl herself, Katy Manning, who’s my much loved cousin.

Prudence Hyman and the Stare that Turned to Stone

Featured

Posted on July 20, 2022 by Clive Hicks-Jenkins

In 1964 Hammer Films released its Terence Fisher-directed horror, The Gorgon. It was an elegant and unexpected addition to the Hammer canon, taking as its titular ‘monster’ a creature borrowed from Greek mythology.

The studio was rather good at creating female ‘monsters’, The Reptile in 1966 being a significant success, as was The Countess Dracula in 1971.

Working out of Bray Studios, what Hammer Films lacked in budget, they more than made up for in lushly gothic design and brooding atmosphere. Their teams of writers, directors, set and costume designers, make-up artists, matte and model artists and composers, created a rich seam of cinematic horror. They re-invented the old monsters of the Universal Studios – Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster and the Mummy among them – in ways that found completely new audiences. The films were largely strongly European in their settings, with brooding Carpathian castles looming over villages where peasants lived in dread of their vampiric overlords.

‘Castle Borski’, a combination matte-painting and model for *The Gorgon*. The skill of the Hammer matte artists created wonderfully painterly settings for the sinister goings-on.

The cast was stellar: Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee and Richard Pascoe, with Barbara Shelley in the role of Carla Hoffman. Shelley was the studio’s top female star. With her rich auburn hair, evenly chiselled features and low voice, she brought gravity as well as beauty to all her roles. In Carla she played a distaff to that horror staple – the werewolf – by being transformed at full moon into Megaera the Gorgon, whose dreadful stare turns human flesh to stone, the premise for which is the ‘serial killer’ heart of the story.

Fisher and his team were concerned that transforming Shelley into the Gorgon was going to create multiple difficulties. The story required the creature’s true identity be revealed only toward the end of the film, but given there were to be several close-ups of the monster’s ‘killer stare’, it was believed the deceit would be hard to pull off were Shelley to be under the make-up. There was also the matter of time. Transforming Shelley’s classic looks into Megaera would hold up filming on a regular basis, so despite the fact that she was very keen to play the character in both manifestations, no matter the discomforts involved, it was decided to use another actress who might plausibly represent a grotesque version of her, up to the point when the duality is revealed.

Enter Prudence Hyam, an actor and retired ballet dancer who Fisher and his team believed would have the necessary performance skills to embody the elegant, poisonous intensity they hoped to achieve in the Gorgon, yet be up to the rigours of of the uncomfortable physical demands. Hyam didn’t disappoint. She cheerfully submitted to the heavy headpiece hiding the snake mechanisms under her wig, which was over seven pounds in weight. She wore bloodshot, full-sclera contact lenses that in these early days of the technology were not at all comfortable.

This short clip shows Prudence in full make-up and towelling dressing-gown, marching out of the Bray Studios make-up department having hitched the cumbersome loops of snake-mechanism cable-controls over her shoulder, while make-up man Roy Ashton follows with the box that will operate everything out of shot. Hyam looks like a woman not to be put off by seven pounds of special-effects attached to her head!

Prudence in the make-up chair while the hairdresser attends to her snaky locks.

Hyam clearly didn’t have any problem with playing a character deemed to be ‘monstrous’. One gets the sense she was a performer to her core, relishing the challenges and an opportunity to be evil.

Make-up designer Roy Ashton working with life-casts of Prudence Hyam and Barbara Shelley.

When the Gorgon makes her first appearance in Castle Borski, it’s a moment of spine-chilling unease. Cobwebs billow as she emerges from behind them, a simple effect that adds to the sense of predatory malevolence. Hyam was on a small wheeled platform that created a gliding trajectory – rather like the one employed under Josette Day in Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la Béte – and her dancer’s posture wedded to an icy intensity of expression, makes the moment unforgettable.

The set is one which fans of Hammer will know from several films, instantly recognisable by the colonnaded gallery encircling the entrance hallway and the stairway that’s so effective in terms of staging low-angle dramatic moments. Here the space is tellingly furnished with the life-sized hulk of a headless and decaying classical statue, a queasy clue as to what haunts its shadowy recesses.

The Gorgon is not a film without flaws. But having seen it, despite its X-certificate, when I was just thirteen – the local flea-pit cinema never having ever turned down a ticket-purchase on the grounds of age – the memory of it has stayed with me for a lifetime. The appearance of the Gorgon herself has attracted occasionally – in my opinion – unfair comment from critics, with jibes about the character’s design deficiencies. But the jerky rubber snakes and the the too-obvious scaly skin appliances notwithstanding, her appearance gives the film moments of genuine horror, and Hyam’s fierce intensity as she glides out to literally petrify her victims, has persisted in my dreams for five and a half decades. So many times the mood of that colonnaded gallery with its monstress glimmering as green-as-absinthe in the cobwebby shadows has nudged into my work, whether in Neo-Romantic paintings of mood-drenched ruins, or in the creepy filmed sequences of interiors I made for the stage production of Hansel & Gretel: a Nightmare in Eight Scenes.

Soon there is to be a little tribute to the Gorgon, in all her basilisk-eyed venomousness, in a little project I currently have on the go. Watch this space.

Those who deserve credit:

Director: Terence Fisher

Music: James Bernard

Cinematography: Michael Reed

Editor: Eric Boyd Perkins

Production Design: Bernard Robinson

Art Direction: Don Mingaye

Make-up: Roy Ashton

And lastly, Prudence herself, who so memorably added to the canon of movie grotesques, and deserves to be better credited and celebrated.

Madam Rathbone and the Elocution Lessons

Featured

Posted on May 6, 2022 by Clive Hicks-Jenkins

I’ve had this card for most of my life. Say hello to Ethel Marion Foreman, born in 1887 and died in 1976. Marion was an actress and the first wife of actor Basil Rathbone. While performing with Frank Benson’s Shakespeare company, Rathbone met and fell in love with her. He wrote:

“Marion Foreman had been on the stage for some time before I met her at Stratford on Avon in August 1913. She was an excellent actress with a beautiful speaking and singing voice. Both on and off the stage we saw much of each other for many months.”

The couple were married at the church of St. Luke, Battersea, London, on October 3, 1914. The following July their son Rodion was born. The Rathbones divorced in 1926. Marion believed they would come together again, though that was not to be. Much later the Hollywood ‘press’ presented their marriage as an indiscretion of ardent youth, and she’s barely mentioned in Rathbone’s autobiography. Rathbone was reunited with his grown son Rodrion when the young man tried his hand as an actor in Hollywood, and indeed lived for a time with Rathbone and his wife, Ouida. The evident warmth between father, son and stepmother as expressed in the movie magazines was not to last, and the three were estranged after Rodion and his wife felt that their wedding had been hijacked by Ouida as a Hollywood ‘society event’. (Ouida was her husband’s manager, and by all accounts was a very busy networker.) Rathbone’s Hollywood career placed him on a high pedestal of achievement and success, but his staginess was not to everyone’s taste. The renowned stage actor and wit, Mrs Patrick Campbell, described him in her autobiography as “an umbrella taking elocution lessons.”

Around or about 1956 in Newport, Monmouthshire, my mother Dorothy was getting anxious, believing that I should speak with no trace of the accent she was convinced would hold me back in life. I was five when she delivered me to ‘Madam Rathbone’ for elocution lessons. I recall very little of the lessons beyond the room in her house in which they took place, whch was airy though dark with heavy furniture and the glimmer of silver frames containing photographs on many polished surfaces, including the piano. Madam R would have been in her late sixties at the time, which to me seemed incredibly old, and she wore black. What her connections to Newport may have been or why she lived there, I have no idea. Her address has survived and bears the name ‘Rathbone House’ in Serpentine Road, not far from Newport Civic Centre. (My thanks to Stephen Lyons for that information.)

I was an obedient student and a quick learn. I could imitate with skill. By the time Madam Rathbone was through with me my speaking voice had changed forever. What you hear today is how I spoke when I emerged from her tutelage. Later, as a young actor in my early teens, already I sounded like something out of my time, forever cast as toffs.

I look at Marion Foreman in the photograph, in her teens or twenties, from an earlier age of the performing arts that seems almost inconceivable to us in the first quarter of the 21st century. Marion was born a Victorian, and she bequeathed me the speaking voice I have today.

Obituary of Marion Foreman

1887 – 1976

“Miss Marion Foreman, the Shakesperean actress, died at Denville Hall, Northwood, on September 8. She was 89. One of the oldest surviving members of Frank Benson’s company at its meridian, she played in many Stratford upon Avon festivals. Benson held that she was the best Viola in his experience.

Born on June 2, 1887, Ethel Marion Foreman went on the stage when she was 15. At Stratford before the First World War she was in those famous seasons remembered as idyllic and intimate, that were led by a dedicated visionary. With Benson, too, she toured North America during 1930 – 40, acting Jessica, Gertrude and Ann Page for a company that included, beside her husband the young Basil Rathbone, such celebrated classical players as Randle Ayrton, Dorothy Green and Murray Carrington. A ready and endearing actress (in her day applauded as Juliet and Ophelia), she was also an expert fencer.

During the summer of 1919 she and her husband – who would become as well known in the cinema as he was in the theatre – returned to Stratford for the first festival directed by W. Bridges-Adams. Between wars she acted a great deal in the United States. When finally she retired to settle at Newport, she directed, for charity, performances of Macbeth (1939), playing opposite Donald Wolfit at Caerphilly Castle before the Princess Royal. She also directed at two other castles: a Macbeth at Chepstow and Hamlet at Usk. Respected as a teacher, lecturer and adjudicator, she put on many Shakespearian and modern plays among the Welsh miners with whom her association was always understanding and affectionate.

Her marriage to Basil Rathbone (by whom she had a son) was dissolved.”

UPDATE: I am most grateful to Stephen Lyons for the following information about Ethel Marion Foreman:

Ethel Marion Foreman was born in Stepney, London. Her father Edward was a Superintendent of Baths and Gymnastics Director. Sometime between 1891 and 1895 he moved his family to Wales, where he took up a job with Newport Corporation. In 1939 Marion was living at 1 Serpentine road, and was a Drama Lecturer, Producer and Actress. She was also volunteering as an Ambulance Driver.

The Poet Thief

Featured

Posted on April 30, 2022 by Clive Hicks-Jenkins

I lift the latch of a blue-painted iron gate under the trellis archway laden with the Rambling Rector rose that was the gift of my sister, and enter the garden past the reading-bench tucked to my left under the umbrella canopy of a weeping crab-apple.

Pausing only briefly to admire the unlikely olive tree that has survived in the shelter of this place, I skirt the trimmed box-bushes now grown to the size of large sea-boulders and the myrtle propagated from a sprig stolen by a Scottish poet from a shrub in the grounds of a royal residence, grown from a sprig pulled from a nosegay given to Queen Victoria in 1845 by Prince Albert’s grandmother, the Dowager Duchess of Saxe Gotha.

The olive tree in the circular bed, with the myrtle grown from a stolen sprig to the right beyond it.

I ascend a grassy bank springy with tussocks and clustered with primroses to the ruins of the myrtle thief’s chair, still at the uppermost part of the garden, where in her last evenings with us she sat in the dusk among the flicker of hunting pipistrelle bats, the glimmer of the illicit Gauloises betraying her secret vice as I anxiously watched for her while washing the supper things.

My beloved friend Catriona Urquhart died early on May Day 2005, at home in Caerleon with her partner Ian, her mother and siblings and nephew and niece around her. I was sitting in the chair at the top of the garden in Aberporth thinking about her when the call came with the news. I’d spent time with her the previous week, squeezed her hand and whispered my goodbyes to her closed, peaceful face.

Seventeen years have passed, and still she is with me. Here at Ty Isaf the stick-in-a-pot she gave us is now a walnut tree nearly thirty feet high. Her collection of poems with Old Stile Press, The Mares Tale – still available from OSP – continues with its power to make me weep, because I feel as raw and bereft as I did on the day of her departure. But I laugh, too, whenever I see the myrtle, because Catriona was emphatically not a Royalist, and she would positively crow with delight to see the fruit of her thieving doing so well in this west Wales cottage garden.

The Mare’s Tale

>>><<<

In a World of My Own Making

Featured

Posted on April 8, 2022 by Clive Hicks-Jenkins

*Hansel & Gretel Toy Theatre* for Benjamin Pollock’s Toyshop, Covent Garden, 2017.

Above: artwork for the *Benjamin* *Pollock’s Hansel & Gretel Toy Theatre*.

I should say up front that I never set out to be a designer or maker of toy theatres. I love the whole idea of toy theatre and I’m an aficionado of the form. I collect toy theatre ephemera and have from earliest memory. My discovery of 19th century toy theatre sheets as a child was a significant influence on getting me to stage school as a young teenager for the training I’d need for a life of theatre, and while there I found my way, of course, to Benjamin Pollock’s Museum and Toyshop in Fitzrovia, which place still thrills over fifty years on.

Above: Benjamin Pollock at his Hoxton shop.

Above: design of a toy theatre proscenium for the Sussex Lustreware range of *Harlequinade* tableware.

Design for a joint-Penfold Press/Hicks-Jenkins Christmas card. (Well who doesn’t love a pair of birds in top-hats sitting on windmills or a duck on wheels pulling a cart?)

So all of those things link up for me: love of toy theatre, love of theatre and love of Pollock’s. But what I didn’t see coming was that I would occasionally find myself designing toy theatres. That, was a surprise.

Above: *Beauty & Beast Toy Theatre*, designed in collaboration with David W. Slack for Design for Today. (Photograph of Jennifer Castle courtesy of Ross Boyask.)

As a stage designer in my thirties, my background of toy theatre undoubtedly influenced the way I thought about stages and the way pictures on them were presented to audiences. Always the sense of a frame and what’s seen through it, which is not so very far from looking at a painting in a frame on a wall.

Above: commissioned Toy Theatre for an as-yet-unreleased horror film.

Above: large toy theatre made as a studio aid.

Above: two of my toy theatres at Benjamin Pollock’s Toyshop, Covent Garden.

Above: illustration of a toy theatre in Simon Armitage’s *Hansel & Gretel: a Nightmare in Eight Scenes* for Design for Today, 2019.

Above: backdrop for the Benjamin Pollock’s Toyshop *Hansel & Gretel Toy Theatre*.

Reference and Adaptation in ‘Harlequinade’ for Sussex Lustreware

Featured

Posted on March 23, 2022 by Clive Hicks-Jenkins

When Susan Williams-Ellis of the Portmeirion Pottery designed her Pantomime range in the 1960s, the records indicate she found the images in a book published by Pollock’s. Mention is made of the engravings being too faint to successfully reproduce on china, which may well be true, though by re-drawing them she will also have sidestepped photographic copyright issues. Whatever the full truth of the matter, her ink drawings were dark and sharp, and they reproduced with clarity.

Portmeirion ‘Pantomime’ ware designed by Susan Williams-Ellis

All the reference material for the Sussex Lustreware Harlequinade range of ceramics has come from my own collection of 19th century toy theatre sheets. Because there were so many printmakers producing these – Green, Skelt, Redington, Pollock etc – I did quite a lot of adaptation so that Harlequinade would have the unity of a single visual aesthetic. Some of my drawings stayed fairly close to the original material, but occasionally I ‘improved’ the designs so as to be what I needed to work for the collection, while always staying firmly within the bounds of the toy theatre ‘style’. My collaborator at Sussex Lustreware, Gloria, came up with the idea of using freehand lustre swags to link the transfer-ware vignettes of the audience around the edges of plates.

Susan Williams-Ellis had rendered her ‘Pantomime’ designs in pen and ink. I drew mine in soft black pencil scanned in greyscale to make transfers ready for applying and firing to the earthenware. Neither Susan’s ink drawings made in the 1960s or my pencil drawings made last year mimic the engravings that were our inspirations, but each of us made what we knew would reproduce well on white ceramic. My pencil drawings have the same silvery tone as some of the old engravings, and the results look particularly good when combined with the soft gleam of pink lustre.

The Golden Beehive Inn is a backdrop from Whittington and his Cat or Harlequin Lord Mayor of London, re-printed by Benjamin Pollock from the play originally produced by Green and then Redington. (The origins of plays can be tangled as toy theatre printmakers frequently re-engraved earlier plates, replacing the original makers’ names with their own.) The Whittington engravings are quite crude, though have a pleasing naive boldness and vigour, and the scene of the inn on a harbour is one I liked so much that I kept returning to it. I combined it on a mug with ‘street’ characters from Green’s The Castle of Otranto or Harlequin and the Giant Helmet, including a ‘Postman’ and an ‘Egg-seller’.

*The Golden Beehive* from *Whittington and his Cat*

Occasionally an original engraving required quite a bit of ‘adaptation’ to produce the image I required for Harlequinade. Clown Riding a Donkey was one such, as I wanted an illustration with much cleaner lines and a better definition of the subject matter than provided in the engraving.

Popular poses and groupings of characters from Harlequinades appear repeatedly in 19th century sheets, drawn by different artists for various publishers. Sometimes I adapted from more than one version of a particular design, as in this drawing for Clown and Pantaloon having a tea-party, reproduced on the Sussex Lustreware Harlequinade teapot.

Groupings of Harlequin characters in a pyramid are enormously popular on toy theatre character sheets, usually with Columbine at the apex.

Above, my drawing for a pyramid of Harlequinade performers, and below, the reference on a sheet by the publisher Skelt. I replaced the two ‘Imps’ with performing dogs.

Sussex Lustreware Teapot with a Harlequinade ‘pyramid’

Pieces from the Harlequinade range may be purchased direct from Sussex Lustreware

HERE

If you can’t see what you want in the shop, then you may order any piece by leaving a request at the contact button.

Woman in a Bunker

Featured

Posted on March 15, 2022 by Clive Hicks-Jenkins

In 2016 Random Spectacular published a picture-book of my dark re-working of the fairy tale Hansel & Gretel. There was no text, save what I hand-lettered into the illustrations.

The following year Benjamin Pollock’s Toyshop in Covent Garden commissioned a toy theatre kit from me, based on the book.

In response to the two publications, Goldfield Productions engaged me to direct and design a stage production. Hansel & Gretel: a Nightmare in Eight Scenes with music by Matthew Kaner and a libretto by Simon Armitage, was created for a chamber consort, a narrator/singer and two puppeteers, and it premiered at the 2018 Cheltenham Music Festival followed by a five month tour.

Simon Armitage meets Gretel for the first time at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama.

A matinee at the Barbican was recorded and broadcast by BBC Radio 3 Christmas week 2018.

The following year Design for Today published a hardback edition of Simon Armitage’s libretto that I illustrated, and in 2020 it won me the V&A Illustrated Book Award.

Bombs destroy the children’s formally idyllic world.

In 2023 there’s to be a major exhibition of my work on the theme of Hansel & Gretel at Oriel Myrddin in Carmarthen. The exhibition is to include original artworks made for the several publications, my project books, maquettes and preparatory works.

Auditions for puppeteers at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama.

Lay-out for an illustration from my project book.

There will be many items from the stage production, including shadow puppets created by Peter Lloyd, set models built by Phil Cooper, vintage toys that I loaned to the production and a huge doll’s house, the inside of which I decorated and filmed to represent the interior of the Witch’s lair.

Peter Lloyd’s shadow puppet for the Witch being animated by me. Photograph by permission of Phil Cooper, who was my wonderful design assistant on the production.

Designer Phillip Cooper animating Lebkuchen he’d made for the production.

One of several animations from the production used to illustrate Hansel and Gretel’s imaginative worlds of play.

My little Russian clockwork singing bird (she was made in St Petersburg) appeared in the stage production, and then in the book published by Design for Today.

Permission for a loan to the gallery of the puppets of Hansel and Gretel designed by me for the production, has been turned down by Goldfield’s Artistic Director, Kate Romano. She gave dislike of me as her reason. Given that the costs of designing and making the puppets had been paid for out of an Arts Council grant, and given the budget was so tight that I personally paid a costume designer to create a wardrobe for them, her decision seems at best ill-judged. As the director of a charitable trust which has been extensively funded from philanthropic organisations, anyone might expect better from her than this. The exhibition will be especially appealing to children, and for a registered charity to deny a ‘museums accredited’ gallery the opportunity to inspire young minds with such beautiful examples of the art of puppet-making, is not merely perplexing, but frankly shameful.

I approached the Chair of the Goldfield Trust, Caroline Clegg, hoping that she might persuade Kate to change her mind and save the company from public scrutiny into a matter that looks very bad for both of them. It would be hard to tell from Caroline’s e-mail that she and I know each other, having both worked on the production for months when she was appointed by Kate as dramaturg to it. Weirdly, both her e-mails to me make it sound as though we’ve never met before. This has added another layer of the surreal to what has frequently felt decidedly strange when dealing with Kate Romano and Caroline Clegg. Here’s Caroline’s second e-mail to me:

Dear Mr Hicks-Jenkins,

In response to your recent request the Trustees of Goldfield Productions support Ms Romano’s decision not to loan the Hansel and Gretel puppets.

Kind regards

Ms Caroline Clegg

as Chair of Goldfield Productions

Why am I writing about all this now, so long after the event? Certainly not to persuade Kate Romano to change her mind about loaning the puppets. Over four years I’ve several times held out a hand of reconciliation in the hope of encouraging her to set aside resentments so we may together protect the legacy of what we made. I was and remain proud of my work on the stage production of Hansel & Gretel, and want to be able to share what was achieved in the exhibition. However everything I’ve written to Kate has gone unacknowledged and unanswered. There’s been not one e-mail reply to any of my attempts to lower the temperature of her antagonism. She is down a bunker in this matter, refusing to engage, and such behaviour in the world the way it is right now, is not a good look for anyone, let alone an arts administrator. Today I’m writing this because many are beginning to ask whether the puppets are going to be in the exhibition. Luckily because we have an ample record of the puppets in drawings, photographs and videos, they will be seen, though not be present.

It would be easier in many ways just to make a simple excuse for their absences which skates around what’s happened, but I see no reason to do that when Kate Romano and Caroline Clegg should clearly be the ones to explain why they’ve made the decision to hide the puppets from public view.

Puppeteers Di Ford and Lizzie Wort, who brilliantly brought Hansel and Gretel to life.

Simon’s reinvention of the fairy tale, is eerily prescient of what we’re seeing now in Ukraine. The puppets would have meant a great deal to many visitors had Kate Romano found it in her heart to lend them to the gallery, but she did not. The puppets were conceptualised and designed by me, their making supervised by me, in part funded by me and their performances on stage, shaped by me together with puppeteers Di and Lizzie. Kate’s reason for refusing the gallery loan appears to be all about personal enmity, which is troubling in a CEO in the performing arts. Anyone who feels that she made a decision that requires explanation, might take it up with her.

Kate Romano, CEO and Artistic Director of Goldfield Productions (Registered charity: 1173427) and CEO of Stapleford Granary Arts Centre.

Beauty & Beast: a play with music for toy theatre

Featured

Posted on February 20, 2022 by Clive Hicks-Jenkins

The completed film of the Design for Today Beauty & Beast Toy Theatre that David W. Slack and I have been working on over the past several months, is now available for viewing at YouTube:

HERE

The film was made and originally released in five one-act instalments at Instagram. We’d intended it to be a promotion for the just published toy theatre and an encouragement for would-be performers, to show them what might be achieved with the model. However it swiftly evolved into something that was a creative project in its own right, and as David and I planned and worked, our ambitions for the film became greater.

Even though we elaborated on the presentation in ways that were clearly only possible in the realms of digital animation, we felt that the overall effect would be to encourage anyone performing the toy play to be inventive and give creativity a free hand.

I’d asked Olivia to give me a play-script that incorporated all the traditions I associate with nineteenth century toy theatre productions: actors directly addressing the audience, rhyming verses, jokes, songs, political references, allegorical characters and opportunities for sumptuous stage effects. But it was important too to have that sense of the slightly bonkers that I see in just about every historic toy theatre play script. Fairy tale is the right material to be allowed its head in matters of strangeness. Too much sanitising and it loses character. Beauty and the Beast as a narrative can be so much more than is usually allowed. Olivia has followed the threads of earlier iterations, but has reinvigorated the tale by making climate change and pollution the culprits for Beast’s condition, rather than a dark fairy’s curse. Moreover Beast is allowed to be more thoroughly himself than when the storyline moves toward a princely restoration. (When Jean Cocteau gave a first showing of his film La Belle et la Bête (1946) to its cast and technicians, he invited his friend Marlene Dietrich as his guest. As the end credits rolled she could be heard in the darkened viewing-room loudly wailing:

“Ou est ma Bête?”

Most audiences ever since have agreed with her.

The Beauty & Beast Team:

Animated Film: David Slack & Clive Hicks-Jenkins

Script: Olivia McCannon

Original Music for Time for a Change of Heart: Paul Sartin

Narrator: Jennifer Castle

Jennifer Castle’s Portrait Photography: Ross Boyask

Accompaniment for Time for a Change of Heart: Tricia Kerr Mullen

Adapted from the Beauty & Beast Toy Theatre published by Joe Pearson at Design for Today

The Design for Today Beauty & Beast Toy Theatre (see above) may purchased online, direct from the publisher:

HERE

All toy theatre is an abbreviation, by reason of the medium. Fifteen minutes is about the maximum length a toy theatre performance can sustain. However the complete fairy tale as retold by Olivia McCannon in Beauty & Beast, illustrated by me throughout, is to be published by Design for Today in Spring this year.

The Owl and the Nightingale at the Royal Court

Featured

Posted on February 12, 2022 by Clive Hicks-Jenkins

The Owl and the Nightingale will be performed as a reading at the Royal Court Theatre, Jerwood Theatre Downstairs.

In a new translation by the Poet Laureate Simon Armitage, this witty and enchanting edition of the medieval debate poem will be directed by John Tiffany and read by Maxine Peake and Meera Syal with Simon Armitage.

Portrait of Simon Armitage by Clive Hicks-Jenkins

Following his acclaimed translations of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Pearl, Simon Armitage shines a light on another jewel of Middle English verse. The disputed issues within the piece still resonate – concerning identity, cultural attitudes, class distinctions and the right to be heard.

Following the performance there will be a book signing in the Balcony Bar.

The Owl and the Nightingale reading is supported by The Institute of Digital Archaeology.

The Book That Ran Away To Join the Circus

Featured

Posted on February 4, 2022 by Clive Hicks-Jenkins

Well, not quite to join the circus, but certainly to have an adventure!

Before the World of Wonders range emerged from Sussex Lustreware, Gloria sent the above photograph of herself with the sheets of the drawings-reproduced-as-transfers, ready to start work in her studio. It was an exciting moment as the precursor to what came later.

None of this would have come about without the novel that started the whole journey, Marly Youmans’ Charis in the World of Wonders, for which I was commissioned by the US publisher Ignatius to make a cover and chapter headings.

So the novel first, then the illustrations for the novel, then the publishing of the novel with its illustrations and after that, the collaboration with Sussex Lustreware to produce the World of Wonders range using the drawings made as chapter headings.

Finally, the still-life paintings I’m currently making of the World of Wonders lustreware. Everything tumbling along merrily. Literature begetting art begetting ceramics begetting art. What a delight it’s been, in the company of people I both admire and love.

The Dead Mother

Featured

Posted on January 5, 2022 by Clive Hicks-Jenkins

All life is light and shadow and the struggle to hold those two in balance. I know that at the extremes, my preoccupations can seem hard to make sense of. One moment artworks I know viewers can find hard to look at, and the next, animations in which the characters of Victorian Harlequinade spring to joyful life. Night versus day, dusk versus dawn, grief versus joy.

At the private view of my Autumn 2021 Martin Tinney Gallery exhibition, a man I barely knew began quizzing me. Gesturing to the walls teeming with illustrations for Simon Armitage’s about-to-be-published The Owl & the Nightingale, he said “So you don’t paint anymore.” (Note the statement, not a question.) I’m always taken aback when someone is challenging almost from the first sentence. I didn’t want to defend myself to a man putting words into my mouth, so I replied simply, “I paint every day.” He carried on regardless, again gesturing to the walls. “Yeah but not REAL paintings any more, you know…” and here he grappled for words … “… the BIG ones!” Me, fixing his eye. ”I paint the things that I care about, and I always have. And now you’ll excuse me.”

The first subject matter that brought me serious attention as an artist was The Mare’s Tale in 2001. As an exploration of a nightmarish experience in my father’s childhood he carried with him for more than eighty years, the work has often been described by others as ‘the son’s exploration of the father’s trauma’. It was partially that, but it was also grief, not only for my dad, but for the many of my family and friends who had gone.

In Simon Armitage’s extraordinary reworking of Hansel & Gretel, the children’s parents are not the malign mother and weak father of the Grimm Brothers’ original tale. Simon sets the story in an unnamed war-torn country, and the children are not abandoned but in an act of parental desperation, directed away from home and bombings. They’re migrant children. At the end of the story they return home to find their father broken, their home in ruins and their mother, dead and buried in a coffin made from their bomb-splintered beds. When making the illustrations for the book (Design for Today, 2019) I researched, made hundreds of studies and drew on memories that are always with me.

My mother’s health had been catastrophically compromised by childhood meningitis. I think she can only have been in her thirties when she had her first heart attack, and though she lived another three decades, the steady advance of heart and organ failure was unstoppable. She was courageous and fought to be well, and there were times of respite when illness didn’t shadow her so heavily.

But in the end, it got her. In those days visiting hours in hospital were strict. No matter how ill the patient, there were no exceptions to the rules. My mother died alone in a public ward without anyone she loved to hold her hand. It was the end she feared most, and not a damned thing that we could do to stop it. We were called at the crack of dawn and raced to the hospital. It would have been kinder of the nurse to tell us the truth in the phone call. Instead we drove like maniacs only to find my mother icy-cold in her bed, having died hours earlier. My father retreated to a corridor, buried his face in an alcove and howled like a dog. I held my mother’s hand and studied her face, careworn with illness but still beautiful.

All life gets poured into my art. Here she is, recalled in the illustration in Hansel & Gretel of the dead mother in her unlined coffin, tenderly garlanded with flowers.

The Pollock’s Legacy

Featured

Posted on December 2, 2021 by Clive Hicks-Jenkins

Ralph Richardson added by photographic trickery to a Pollock’s toy theatre stage

It’s largely forgotten these days that the actor Ralph Richardson was significant in the preservation of the toy theatre tradition. Benjamin Pollock, the last of the print-making toy theatre sellers, died in 1937. Thereafter his daughters ran the shop in Hoxton Street until damage sustained during the Blitz forced its closure.

Alan Keen, a local bookseller, together with Richardson, picked up the threads of Benjamin Pollock’s business and remaining stock, and together carried forward the tradition, enlisting practitioners of the art of toy theatre, famous artists and renowned actors to assist them. George Speaight was an historian, enthusiast and collector of toy theatre ephemera, who in 1946 published the still unsurpassed textbook of the toy theatre tradition, Toy Theatre, and he was among those Keen and Richardson worked with.

Richardson’s celebrity ensured the added lustre of luminaries such as Laurence Olivier and playwright J. B. Priestly stepping forward to promote the art of toy theatre. Olivier agreed to a toy theatre adaptation of the 1948 film of Hamlet, which he’d directed and starred in. Published by what was now being called ‘Benjamin Pollock Ltd’, the Hamlet toy theatre is a curious thing, quite wan in many ways because the ‘puppets’ are all tinted photographs of the actors from the film, while the sets are sketchy if atmospheric black and white drawings by the film’s production designer Roger Furse.

A far more lavish and full colour affair was The High Toby, with a script by J. B. Priestly and scenery and characters painted by the prominent artist, Doris Zinkeisen.

Ralph Richardson with artist Doris Zinkeisen and a Pollock’s toy theatre

The growing cost of the book outstripped Alan Keen’s available funds, and it was done as a Puffin Cut-Out Book ‘in association’ with Benjamin Pollock Ltd. But even with these celebrity contributors, while the book is very pretty, anyone who has tried to offer a performance will know that it’s less satisfactory as a play than one might imagine given who wrote it, and though Zinkeisen’s settings and characters are lavishly detailed, she took no account of how difficult the puppets would be to cut out, massively compromised by fine details like whips, walking-canes, feathers on hats and the slenderest of wrists.

Moreover even when those hurdles had been clambered over, the characters don’t register particularly well against the backdrops, their drawing-room elegance and soft colours legislating against them. Toy theatre needs a robustness not present here, and The High Toby is toy theatre play that looks far better in the imagination, and on its pages, before scissors, paste and card have been brought into play.

Toy theatre is an art, and not just a physical reduction. A long and complex script isn’t the best accompaniment to a toy theatre performance, and scenery cannot simply be a version of what might be seen in a live theatre. There’s something like alchemy in the process of making a successful adaptation of a story to the reduced script and the reduced stage of a toy theatre. The same rules of drama don’t apply, nor do the rules of perspective used on a full-scale stage with breathing actors. The toy theatre requires its own, unique aesthetic. It’s so much better when allowed to be itself, rather than when trying too hard to ape its origins in the live theatre.

When all the components are in place and a toy theatre can be made to work, it works magnificently. But it’s a form fraught with perils, and more get it wrong than right, and always have. English toy theatre – for it was almost uniquely an English form, practiced most successfully in London, that city of many theatres and printmakers – had a period of unrivalled brilliance. When not made overly sophisticated, and when drawing on the lively tradition of the English printmakers’ ‘Actor Portraits’ of the Regency and nineteenth century, toy theatre was at its best, graphically bold and slightly bonkers. Later it became displaced largely because the far more sophisticated toy theatre imports from France and Europe were catching the eye of the public, and the meteoric rise of native toy theatre faltered when comparisons were being made to the enormously elaborate foreign imports. English Toy theatres were not subtle. They had the character of folk art, and were the perfect vehicles for barnstorming melodramas and that most unique theatrical tradition of these islands, the pantomime. (Harlequinade was a hugely popular entertainment of the English stage, and the characters of Clown, Harlequin and Columbine were endlessly reproduced in toy theatre character sheets.)

Marguerite Fawdry acquired the Pollock’s business in the 1960s, afterwards transferring it from Covent Garden to its current address in Fitzrovia, where there was room for a toy museum over the shop and a basement where the Pollock printing press and stock of engraved plates could be stored. The business has continued as a family affair, now helmed by Marguerite’s great grandson, Jack, in whom the toy theatre tradition is still alive and flourishing. There’s a Pollock’s Trust, too, to lend support to the Museum, led by Chairman Alan Powers.

I was commissioned in 2016 by Benjamin Pollock’s Toyshop to design the Benjamin Pollock’s Toyshop Hansel & Gretel Toy Theatre, which was published in 2017 and is still available from the shop. The project led to others, most significantly a commission to develop a new stage production of Hansel & Gretel, and in 2018 Hansel & Gretel: a Nightmare in Eight Scenes, a stage production for music ensemble, actors and puppets with a score by Matthew Kaner and a poetic text by Simon Armitage, directed by me, premiered at the Cheltenham Festival of Music before embarking on a tour. A performance of the work before an audience was recorded by BBC Radio 3 and broadcast Christmas week 2018.

In 2019 the text of Hansel & Gretel: a Nightmare in Eight Scenes was published by Design for Today in an edition illustrated by me. In 2020 I won the V&A Illustrated Book Award for my work on it.

In November 2021 Design for Today published my new toy theatre, Beauty & Beast, made in collaboration with Olivia McCannon, who wrote the script, and David W. Slack, who assisted me and designed the model.

The Beauty & Beast Toy Theatre is available from Benjamin Pollock’s Toyshop in Covent Garden and Pollock’s Museum and Toyshop in Fitzrovia, and also online from:

Design for Today

>>><<<

David W. Slack and I are currently making an animated film of Olivia’s play script, with actor Jennifer Castle performing the text.

Clive and David’s Big Adventure: Part 2

Featured

Posted on November 23, 2021 by Clive Hicks-Jenkins

Design for the Beauty and Beast ‘Tulip Tapestry’

With Olivia’s play script for the toy theatre delivered, it was time to consider who might write the music to accompany her lyrics for Beauty’s song ‘Time for a Change of Heart’, performed at the end of the play. Olivia approached her friend, musician Paul Sartin of the group Bellowhead, and to everyone’s delight, he agree to join the team.

Once his music was ready, it was time for graphic designer Laurence Beck to lay out Olivia’s play script, Paul’s arrangement for her lyrics, David’s instructions for constructing the model and my brief histories of toy theatre and the origins of Beauty and the Beast, into the booklet to accompany the model. The 10 construction-cards to cut out and make the toy theatre, scenery and characters of the production, together with the 24 page booklet, were designed to fit into a 23 x 25 cms folder where the scenery, puppets and script could be stored for safe keeping once the theatre was made. All that remained was for the many elements of the toy theatre to be printed and packed ready for sale.

To promote what was about to be published, with Joe’s agreement David and I set about producing an animation video for the Beauty & Beast Toy Theatre, to be shown at YouTube and on various social media platforms. The plan was to offer a condensed visual account of Olivia’s scenario set to music, and as he’d already played such a significant part in creating the toy theatre, David was perfectly placed for making the animated version of it. With the animation prepared, everything was set for launch. We would have our beautiful toy theatre out in good time for the Christmas market.

Still we weren’t through. David and I had been wondering how we might further promote the toy theatre, and what alternatives might be open to us if we weren’t able to have a pre-Christmas live event to which an audience could be invited.

A broadcast film of a performance might be the solution, but even that could be difficult to organise given the current circumstances. So we began to plan a film in which all the contributing creators could work at a distance from each other. The first and most urgent requirement was to find an actor to read Olivia’s play script, and moreover one who would seize the multiple opportunities afforded by it. Here were poetry, humour, menace and crackling atmosphere, and we needed an actor skilled on multiple levels to give a nuanced and mesmerising performance. Luckily I knew who would deliver all that for us in bucketloads, and Jennifer Castle became the final creative talent to join the Beauty & Beast team, alongside Ross Boyask, who undertook to both record the audio tracks of Jennifer’s performance and take the many portrait shots of her that we needed in order to incorporate her into the film.

The work is underway and further announcements will be forthcoming before too long. Here’s a toy theatre that is not just a desirable object, but one that comes with all the online creative encouragement and inspiration that anyone could wish for. I’m enormously proud of the team that made it. My thanks to:

Joe Pearson at Design for Today

Olivia McCannon

Paul Sartin

David W. Slack

Laurence Beck

Jennifer Castle

Ross Boyask

The Design for Today Beauty & Beast Toy Theatre is available

HERE

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Copies of Beowulf may be purchased HERE

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: