Detail of a maquette
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I make maquettes as models for the drawings and paintings that come later. However there were no maquettes that preceded the 2001 Mare’s Tale drawings, because I hadn’t evolved the use of them at that time.
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So here I am, over a decade after the original series of drawings was made, fashioning maquettes so that I can bring the Mari to life on stage in animation sequences of a newly commissioned music work ( working title: The Mare’s Tale) for Mid Wales Chamber Orchestra. The above image is a detail of a Mari Lwyd’s head from a drawing titled Entanglement, a reference for one of the maquette-puppets currently on my work-table. Luckily all those sharp edges of muscle and bone will help disguise the puppet’s joints. I’m just experimenting with this. All might, and very likely will change tomorrow. I’m firing in many directions, like one of those catherine-wheels we used to nail to the shed in the garden on Bonfire Night, only for it to whizz free of its mooring and shoot everywhere!
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Above: the component parts. This is just the head of what’s planned to be a full figure.
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These new maquettes (this one, and the one you posted about below) are really, really wonderful!! I love how the texture of this one suggests both wood and muscle. This looks like it will have great possibilities for animation, but strangely the last, de-composed composition really pulls me in…
You always speak of your father’s death in such a beautiful way (I’m thinking of your comments to Phil now), and I think of course you can think of the end of your theatrical life as a kind of death from which you rise again (being a phoenix, hatching again and again.)
That penultimate photograph really reaches toward horse and bird, doesn’t it? I hear a corvid shriek…
In some ways this maquette looks quite different from the series of drawings; it reminds me of a grotesque, jointed suit of armor–over what? Some horror of nothingness drifting inside?
Marly, I wanted to remove the present ‘re-examination’ of the Mari Lwyd theme from my family history explored so tenderly and comprehensively by Catriona Urquhart in her poems, and to remove it too from the outpourings of writers on art and poetry… Damian Walford Davies among them… who’d been interested in the real events underpinning the work. Over the years I’d pretty comprehensively answered questions about the autobiographical aspects, and I felt I had nothing more to contribute on that front. If I were to re-engage with the Mari, then I wanted that process to be collaborative, with others bringing fresh insights.
Damian is creating a narrative that, while it draws on the atmosphere of the drawings, is a new creation, and that excites me. I’m excited too by the notion of visual images expressed through music, and Mark Bowden is a wonderful choice of composer because his work… as I see it… is intensely ‘painterly’. I listen to it and in my imagination the images flow freely.
Yes, you’re right about the ‘corvid shriek’. I thought how like a bird the image was when I took the photograph. I like too your description of the new drawing/maquette. It seems right that everything is in flux as the old bones are excavated and put back together again. I’m fired by your ‘armour’ analogy. ‘Over what?’, indeed! Something scary, I’m quite sure!
Was just reading a Chinese poem where the warriors have on armor fitted from pieces of hide and also fit their shields together in a kind of piecework way as they advance, and thought of your Mari Lwyd…
And then thought of Yeats and re-making, rebuilding, at the end of “The Gyres”:
What matter? Those that Rocky Face holds dear,
Lovers of horses and of women, shall,
From marble of a broken sepulchre,
Or dark betwixt the polecat and the owl,
Or any rich, dark nothing disinter
The workman, noble and saint, and all things run
On that unfashionable gyre again.
As you disinter the Mari and make it new…
Looking forward to seeing how this one develops Clive
Just awesome, the power rippling across the hide and hair of this beast is so alive, fearsome but beautiful, I can see you’re fizzing like a firework but it’s marvellous, like you’re tapping into a vein of something slightly uncontrollable
Phil, that’s an insightful observation. I’ve always been slightly out of control when engaging with the Mari. I never know where I’m going to be carried.
The original Mari works were made in an intensive period of work that began in 2000 and was all done by 2002. The Mare’s Tale at Newport Museum and Gallery in 2001 was my first major show in a public gallery, followed swiftly by a second, The Tower on the Hill at Brecknock Museum and Art Gallery, for which I added drawings made in the months between the two. In the second exhibition emphasis was placed on the fact that references to Tretower Court and Castle… a monument just a few miles from Brecon and where I’d worked as a custodian for seven years… abound in the Mari drawings. After the Newport and Brecon shows, while works from the Mari series appeared in many exhibitions, including one at Terezin in Czech, I never made another drawing or painting on the subject. What underlay the drawings had been difficult territory for me, and I was emotionally wrung out from the journey. I needed to move on to other ideas, and I wanted to return to colour!
During the past decade I’ve often been asked whether I’d one day return to the series, given that the themes underlying it of my father’s illness and death, and my own creative ‘death’… if I can put it that way… as a director and choreographer, are ones that will always be with me. But my feeling was that I was done with it. Though I didn’t realise it at the time, the drawing of the fallen Mari on a Welsh hillside, had marked the conclusion of the series.
When The Mare’s Tale came up in discussions with the conductor James Slater as the possible subject matter for a commission of a new work for Mid Wales Chamber Orchestra, while I was happy to explore the more general aspects of what I’d created back in 2001-02, I didn’t want the autobiographical elements that underlay the drawings to be the source of any narrative that might be required. However the idea of collaborating with composer Mark Bowden and writer Damian Walford Davies to build a new story from the images, felt like a very exciting prospect indeed.
And so I begin to image the Mari again, freeing the creature from the world of the original Mare’s Tale drawings to inhabit this new landscape of music and text. As the pencils flow freely over paper, I find myself as emotionally engaged with the beast, and as beguiled, as when I made my acquaintance with it through the tale my father once told me.
Thanks for your reply Clive, the background story to the original drawings and now to The Mares Tales is fascinating and very touching; that intense emotional engagement is so evident in the drawing of this fabulous maquette. I can totally appreciate how you must have felt wrung out after the work on the original Mari drawings ; I look at them and they look at me right back, I’m not sure who’s in control, they haunt me
Ha ha!!! What have I unleashed?
xxx
Gorgeous! And so beautifully lit and photographed. I love the gleaming copper colour, so very suitable to that fierce equine head.
Glad you like him Natalie. He does look quite fierce, especially when he does the roaring thing! (-;
I absolutely LOVE the direction you are galloping with this, Clive! Giddy up!
Not exactly sure where I’m galloping right now, but it’s good that you like the general direction, because I don’t think I could reign things in at this stage even if I wanted to! Must needs go where the beast carries!
Clive I really like your rendering of this beast – the timber and the steel.
‘The timber and steel’. I like that! Good title for something.
Just amazing what you do with your pens and scissors. This is bony and yet muscular . Love those laid back ears; unlike the Equus head I liked there’s nothing sombre about this head, he’s very fearsome. Fabulous textures Clive.
It should be said that the horse-like creatures of The Mare’s Tale are my particular take on the Mari Lwyd, carried to a point far beyond the mumming tradition.
I just scribbled this really. Sometimes fast works best.
Your scribbling is good though! Mine would just look like scribbling
It also has a look of being carved out of wood about it.
Thank you, Jacqui.
wow! this is an amazing creation– that eye is something spectacular, and the maquette is the perfect vehicle for the kind of motion i imagine such a creature to have…. already, with just the head, he is so frightening and full of odd motion!
I must say I’m looking forward to finishing it, and thereafter to animating the figure. This won’t be smooth animation, but quite jagged and jarring. (My love of German Expressionism coming to the fore!)
yes!! that’s exactly it…
I can see those brain synapses are working overtime and fizzing with energy. What a great feeling! Great results too.
My synapses certainly seem to have loosed their moorings and are currently firing somewhat alarmingly in all directions. I think I must drink some cocoa and have an early night!
(-;