Two Tales at the Tegfryn Gallery: C H-J and the Mid Wales Chamber Orchestra

Detail from Flight (see the full painting HERE)

2013 – mixed media – 56 x 76 cms

I’m pleased to announce that my next exhibition with Martin Tinney will be at Oriel Tegfryn, Menai Bridge, during May/June 2014. The title of the exhibition is Two Tales, and it will comprise thirty-five new paintings on the themes of the two productions I’m collaborating on this year with the Artistic Director of Mid Wales Chamber Orchestra, James Slater: the Stravinsky/Ramuz The Soldier’s Tale, and the Bowden/Walford Davies The Mare’s Tale. The recently completed Flight, which Artloggers have been watching in progress here over the past few weeks, is the first new work off the easel for this project, inspired by a scene in the animation I produced for The Soldier’s Tale at this years Hay Festival, in which Joseph and the Princess float over the palace garden.

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All enquiries to the Martin Tinney Galleries.

Flight

Flight

Clive Hicks-Jenkins

2013 – mixed media – 56 x 76 cms

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The painting has been completed. The bird, as discussed in the comments boxes of a previous post, was added as the finishing touch. Now all that remains is for it to be properly photographed and dispatched to my framer. I’ve hugely enjoyed taking some of the ideas that had evolved from the animation, and turning them into this work. Many more are planned to follow. I’ve already laid out the sketch for a large portrait of Joseph and the Princess, and another sketch in which she’s won by a lost hand of cards, and indeed is revealed emerging from their fan-like spread, a reference to Botticelli’s Venus posing coyly on a similarly fan-shaped scallop shell. The subject of poor Soldier Joseph and his travails has ignited my imagination, and when that happens there’s only one place for me to be: in front of the easel!

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Detail from Flight: Joseph’s soul in the form of a bird, already untethered and soon to be lost, flutters at his heels.

pop-up animated Sendak

Maurice Sendak, who died last year, would have turned eighty-five today. (It was a birthday he shared with my father, and so now June 10th will never pass without me thinking of both of them.) There’s a beautiful little animation celebrating Sendak on the Google home-page today, but it’ll be gone by tomorrow, so don’t delay taking a look. (Update: Jenny has left a message that all the Google animations are archived HERE. Thank you Jenny.) And while we’re thinking about Sendak, don’t miss THIS wonderful interview with the great man from the Believer, in which he dishes the dirt to Emma Brockes. There’s much to raise a smile, including his withering contempt for Richard Murdoch and a dismissal of e-books. Here’s a small taste, but go read the whole thing.

BLVR: What do you think of e-books?

MS: I hate them. It’s like making believe there’s another kind of sex. There isn’t another kind of sex. There isn’t another kind of book. A book is a book is a book. I know that’s terribly old-fashioned. I’m old, and when I’m gone they’ll probably try to make my books on all these things, but I’m going to fight it like hell. [Pauses] I can’t believe I’ve turned into a typical old man. I can’t believe it. I was young just minutes ago.

BLVR: Is the problem with e-books partly a problem of color?

MS: Yes. Picture books depend on color, largely. And they haven’t perfected the color in those machines. But it’s not that. It’s giving up a form that is so beautiful. A book is really like a lover. It arranges itself in your life in a way that is beautiful. Even as a kid, my sister, who was the eldest, brought books home for me, and I think I spent more time sniffing and touching them than reading. I just remember the joy of the book; the beauty of the binding. The smelling of the interior. Happy.

BLVR: Are you happy now?

MS: [Sighs] My friends are all dying. They have to die. I know that. I have to die. But two friends died last week. I was completely broken by it. One was a publisher in Zurich. I loved him and his wife. It’s the loneliness that’s very bad. They’re doing what is natural. If I was doing what was natural I would be gone, like they are. I just miss them, terribly.

And we miss you Maurice. Every day.

C H-J

done or not done…

… that’s the question.

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Not quite sure whether to draw a bird just to the left of Joseph’s pocket, coming in at the diagonal from the upper left corner, for strangeness. (Never underestimate the power of strangeness.) I shall sleep on this one. But if I do it, I shall make a bird like the one in the upper right of this…

… which was one of a flock that appeared around the Princess at the end of The Soldier’s Tale. (In my head the birds represented lost souls stolen by the Devil.)

the princess emerges

So here she is, transformed from maquette to artwork. An as yet faint and pallid Joseph awaits his turn with the pencil rendering, but once he’s coalesced from an apparition to his more usual self, the work will be just about done and ready for the camera, and after that, for framing. More images are nudging at the edges of my imagination. For 2014 I plan a full-scale exhibition of  work developed from The Soldier’s Tale.

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the princess flies

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Started in on the Princess today. I’ve decided to render her and Joseph in coloured pencil, mostly because it will make them appear almost collaged over the background of the palace garden. I particularly liked the playing-cards made for The Soldier’s Tale animations, the coloured pencils lending a slightly smudgy, softened quality to the Knave of Clubs and the King of Diamonds, and that’s my goal for this. It may or may not work, but I’ll give it my best shot. I prize visual and emotional disjunctions in paintings, and these two mediums… soft pastel and coloured pencil… will serve me well on that front. In the animated film the maquettes of Joseph and the Princess, drawn in coloured pencils, floated over a garden rendered in oil pastels, and the moment was pleasing because of the contrast of mediums. I want something of that moment in this artwork based on it.

Below: artwork for the playing cards in The Soldier’s Tale.

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Above: Princess in progress…

… and the original maquette.

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progress with the pastels

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Still working at the quarry-face. The depths of my pastel-box are yielding some pretty colours, and the glorious weather outside lends lustre to my efforts to make the composition ‘sing’. (I work in at attic with one smallish window, and so the clear light of a beautiful day is a big help to these weary old eyes.)

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So far today I’ve added tulips to the foreground (I plan for there to be more) and put in the distant view of a group of buildings.

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Above: it has to be said that the vertiginous view from my eyrie, while not directly transferring to the image on the easel, nevertheless always makes my mind drift away to create the bird’s-eye landscapes of my paintings. The paddock to the right is taking a rest from the horses this year, and is yielding the most spectacular display of wild flowers. From this height you mostly see the buttercups, but walking down there is a real treat, because the eye is rewarded with an impressionist’s dream of blue, violet, pink and lavender growing beneath them.

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UPDATE

Today I grew a field of tulips…

… and added some brick detailing to the garden wall.

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Fixative has slightly darkened the appearance of the image… as it always does… but I am absolutely in love with the Spectrafix that arrived in today’s post. This fixative is new to me, and is made from casein derived from milk, plus water and grain alcohol. Diffused from a pump-spray because it has none of the propellants necessary when resins/varnishes are present, it’s odourless and can be used in the studio without health issues. It dries to a matt finish with absolutely no glazing or sticky patches. Even when I lost concentration and sprayed too heavily and too close and the mix ran, it dried without leaving disfiguring stains.

One of the characteristics of freshly applied, unfixed pastel, is that the microscopic particles create a soft velvety bloom that is most attractive. Fixatives change that, binding the particles more closely and rendering the surface harder to the eye and to the touch. Many pastel artists elect to leave works unsprayed. But when framed, unfixed artworks will always shed, and there will be disfigurement of presentation as loosened pastel drops and gets trapped between glass and mount, or lies at the bottom of a box-frame.

Fixing changes the way light hits the surface of microscopic particles of pastel. Think of light hitting dry, silky-fine silvery sand on a beach, and how different the same sand appears when damp. Sand compacts when damp, and the reflected light from it shows the surface to be harder than when the grains are dry. Something similar happens when pastel is sprayed with fixative. The particles compact into a harder surface, and the light subsequently hits it differently. However, leaving work unfixed is not an option for me, the ‘velvet bloom’ not being something that I prize above wanting my work to be secure. What I dislike about aerosol fixatives is the glaze they leave on the the surface of the work, and Spectrafix is absolutely matt.

I’m sold on it. The two photographs below show the same detail of the work from yesterday when it was unfixed, and today, after fixing. There were some additions and slight re-workings by the time of the second photograph, but those are obvious.

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cocteau narrates the soldier’s tale

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Today, while I was working away at the easel, the postman arrived bearing a surprise gift from our friends Jenny and Penny. They’d e-mailed a few days earlier about listening to a recording of The Soldier’s Tale while closing their eyes and remembering the images they’d seen at Hay. Their disc had a cast that included Jean Cocteau as the Narrator, Jean-Marie Fertey as Joseph and Peter Ustinov as the Devil. I’d written back saying how much I admire Cocteau, and that his La Belle et la Bête is my favourite film, the one for my desert Island. No guesses then as to what was in their parcel.

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Thank you Jenny and Penny. I’ve been listening to it while working today. Wonderful stuff. Ustinov makes an elegant job of the Devil, and Cocteau… well of course Cocteau can do no wrong.

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Above: the garden coalesces. Soft pastel is a magical material, and it’s such a pleasure working with these beautiful colours. The oil pastel palette of the original image of the palace and garden was quite different. Principally an acidic green, red, yellow, pink and light turquoise.

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In the current version there are ochre-ish yellows and blues that veer toward violet, and the scene has more of  an evening quality. I’m not quite sure whether the entire work will be in pastel. I may well end up taking a mixed-media approach. We’ll see how things evolve.

the tale of the tale: life beyond the concert platform

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For months now Stravinsky’s Soldier and his Princess have been the centre of my creative world. From thumbnail drawings in my sketch-books, to maquettes and thereafter into the digital realm of animations projected during the performance at Hay, they have steadfastly and valiantly served. Animating can be quite a rough process for these fragile creations. After all they’re only made out of paper, and Joseph in particular had a fairly gruelling time because his arms and heads (of which he has quite a few) had to be constantly dismantled and then reconfigured for the many demands I made on him as an actor. Believe me, Lisa Dwan had an easy time by comparison!

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Joseph has even gathered a passionate group of admirers who wax lyrical about him in e-mails to me. But though the performing work of the maquettes has been accomplished, they’ve rested only briefly in their box-files layered with protective tissue-paper. Now the two are up and about again, secured gently to my easel where they’re about to serve as muses for the next stage of my work on The Soldier’s Tale…

…which is to make paintings.

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Above: Joseph and the Princess reunited, flying over a dream landscape as they did in the animated film, in homage to Chagall.

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Above: the Princess maquette takes to the sky in the animation.

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Above: the backgrounds for The Soldier’s Tale have been brought out ready to serve for the work in hand.

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Below: today’s progress on the Princess’s garden…

…working in lovely, crumbly French pastels. Silky dust rains down from them as I shape the Princess’s garden at my easel.

philippa and the toone puppets

Above: drawing in progress by Philippa Robbins of marionettes from the Toone Theatre.

I’m not the only one who found inspiration at the Toone Theatre on our recent trip to Brussels. I returned home fired by the idea of borrowing on the simple carved faces of the Toone puppets in order to create the character of Joseph for The Soldier’s Tale.

From Toone puppet…

… to a drawing of a Toone puppet in my notebook…

 … to Joseph the Soldier.

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And while I made maquettes and then animated them, my friend Philippa returned to her studio to produce a magnificent Conté drawing of puppets from the historic Toone collection.

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Having had a preview of the works Philippa has prepared for her forthcoming exhibition, Magical Thinking, at the Art Shop Gallery in Abergavenny, I can promise that art-lovers are in for a treat. In addition to this beautiful drawing there will be some smaller ‘Toone’ paintings in the show, for those of us who are in thrall to the puppets.

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Below: details from Philippa’s drawing.

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When we were in Brussels Philippa and I fantasised about having an adventure together. We planned a venue in the great European tradition of café/bars, where in the evenings we would mount puppet shows to entrance patrons. Not puppet shows for children, but puppet shows that would be darkly erotic, rumbustious and subversive. The programme would always be a secret, so no-one in the audience would know what was on offer until it happened, and the puppets and the scenery, which Philippa and I would make, would of course be works of art that afterwards would be sold to discerning patrons! (This is how, innocents that we are, we planned to create some extra income!) I’m not sure that Philippa is particularly keen on working the puppets, so that task would probably fall to me, though I’d enlist the skills of Dave and Philippa’s daughters Oonagh and Lauren, who I’m sure would make wonderful puppeteers, and would just need a little encouragement and coaching from me to bring out their performing skills!

Well, I guess the puppet theatre will remain a fantasy for us to occasionally dip into for inspiration. But at the very least Philippa and I should one day have a joint exhibition where we can indulge our passion for puppets, and  we should start seriously planning for that.