12 thoughts on “all the thaliad decorations to date”

  1. Pingback: designs for enamel plates | Clive Hicks-Jenkins' Artlog:

    • Paul, thank you for that glowing testimonial. The images for the book are quite quiet… no shouting and waving saying ‘look at us’… because I didn’t want them to distract from Marly’s wonderful poem. Her narrative is full of energy and incident, and so it seemed to me I might do well to avoid kinetic energy in the compositions of the decorations, though invest it in the brushwork of the collage papers from which I intended to cut them. Theory is all well and good but won’t amount to a hill of beans if the images themselves aren’t working. Luckily in this case they seem to be, and last night I saw a clutch of pages that Beth Adams has laid out incorporating text and images, and she has dome a really beautiful job.

      I’ve never been a commercial illustrator, though over the past twenty years I’ve made a number of ‘private press’ books in collaboration with the Old Stile Press, and that experience has gone deep with me. It certainly taught me that ‘decoration’ in books should not mirror what is already being done by the text. Simply put, if the text is a ‘circle’, then make the decorations a ‘square’. The toughest call was making images for the text of the play Equus, a drama pretty much at fever pitch from beginning to end. Initially I went head to head with Shaffer’s words, matching them with baroque configurations of horses and nudes in the manner of my Mari Lwyd drawings. But it quickly became apparent that on the page the effect was overwrought, as though playwright and illustrator were slugging it out to see who would be left standing. I changed tack and found another way, and the result was a book where the decorations made still points to meditate on.

      Equus was my last book to date with Nicolas and Frances McDowall at OSP, but I’ve taken all that I learned there and brought it to the two books I’ve done this year for Marly. Moreover, it looks as though I may make a decorated volume for another poet I work with regularly, and so I’ll get to ‘play’ again quite soon!

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  6. fantastic, I love the willow motif. I have been researching early 19th century American mourning art for a painting concerning grief. Your willow seems kin to those images. I like how you have adapted the design to suit your aesthetic.

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    • Quite right Leonard. The willow is indeed associated with grief in early American naive art, and that’s why it’s here in my decorations for Thaliad. It’s an interesting shape and will stand well in a sea of white paper.

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