Ray Harryhausen. 1920 – 2013

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In all the advances made in the field of onscreen digital magic, there has been no exponent of special effects whose name has prefixed films in the way Ray Harryhausen’s once did for his millions of fans. As a kid I was always at a heightened pitch of anticipation for the next ‘Ray Harryhausen film’, and I’d scour American film-magazines… when I could find them… for clues as to what aspect of fantasy he’d turn his attention to next. (My parents were hugely disapproving of my addiction to Famous Monsters of Filmland, which added an illicit allure to the copies I could get my hands on!) Harryhausen gave audiences dinosaurs and cavemen, dinosaurs and cowboys, aliens, deep-sea monsters, Arabian adventures peppered with myriad unlikely creatures and Greek myths crammed with elegant inventions that swept us along on a tide of wonderment and excitement. And to all of them he brought his own brand of stop-motion animation combined with miniature rear-screen projection, the hallmark of Harryhausen films.

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Harryhausen’s eohippus (Dawn Horse) sequence in The Valley of Gwangi swept me away with its delicacy and charm.

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The darkly elegant Hydra from Jason and the Argonauts.

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As an adult I attended a couple of his lectures, and was able to ask him questions about his craft that I’d always been curious about. He was unfailingly eloquent and entertaining in his replies, a consummate ‘maker’ happy to share his inventive techniques. And once I met him quite unexpectedly, and was able to speak to him privately, an occasion so significant that I wrote about it in the biographical chapter of my monograph.

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The magnificent fighting skeletons from Jason and the Argonauts.

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Despite my admiration of him, I didn’t become an animator, though I thought about it quite hard. Instead I studied dance, and later puppetry too. Interestingly, one of my questions to Harryhausen in later life was about whether he’d ever studied dance, as his creatures are invariably sleekly graceful in movement. (The Hydra in Jason and the Argonauts is an example, so serpentine and elegant in its appearance and choreography.) It turned out he hadn’t, but I figure that you can’t turn out work like that without possessing an endlessly curious eye. I think Harryhausen had the mind of a choreographer, but didn’t know it.

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And here I am, an artist currently making images come to life by means of the stop-motion techniques I so admired in my childhood hero. This morning as I sat at the table pinning together a pair of skeleton horses with brads, Peter came downstairs with the radio tuned for me to the news of the great animator’s passing. I looked down at what I was doing, and there could have been no better moment to be grateful for the impact Ray Harryhausen had on my creative life. His creatures helped shape my imagination, and they proved to me that in visual matters, the ‘impossible’ can always be made real. I still watch the dinosaur-wrangling scene from The Valley of Gwangi with complete awe. He was the one who showed everyone how to do it!

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UPDATE: I’ve been searching without any luck for a good online clip of the Hydra sequence from Jason and the Argonauts. However, click HERE and you’ll find a trailer for the film. Not an original trailer dating from the release, but a later one made from an excellent print of the film. It’s got a score added that isn’t the original, but it has drive and energy, and the glimpses the trailer affords of the Hydra illustrate just how beautifully the creature was realised by Harryhausen.

sherwood: the one that got away

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Above: twenty-foot puppet of ‘Plague’.

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Last week I posted about a musical called Sherwood, a project from my distant theatrical past that came to grief and never got beyond rehearsals. (Read HERE.) In the process of excavating the poster from my archive, I came upon some of the costume and puppet designs for the production, and it seemed not a little sad to leave them hidden away in boxes without at least an airing where they might be enjoyed by a few of you. (I know there are Artloggers who like to peek at some of the oddities of my past career!)  And so in the tradition of being open here at the Artlog about experiences I put behind me long ago, here they are.

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Above: under-garment, Marian

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Above: under-garment, Robin.

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Above: a photocopy of a design, long since vanished, for Marian.

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Above: Helmet design for Marian, and the armour under construction.

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Above: Sherwood was an ‘ensemble’ production, with the cast required to dance, act, puppeteer and move scenery. The gauze masks were to be worn for puppeteering and scene-changing.

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Above: the textures of the production were roughspun for the poor, and gleaming and overwrought for the privileged.

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Above: the ghost of Adam Bell.

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Above: contemporary reference material of amputees. The cutaway-drawing is to show the prop-makers how the amputation illusion is to be achieved.

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Above: giant ‘tapeworm’ puppet.

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Above: a lot of the costumes were designed as quick-changes for the ensemble. A cloak and a helmet could transform a performer in moments.

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Above: borrowing from Rodin here. His Burghers of Calais were the models for these apparitions.

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This was was my second go at nailing the story of the man in green. I’d previously worked on a ‘Christmas’ production of Robin Hood made for the New Theatre in Cardiff. For that my producer had suggested I approach the design more as if we were doing a musical. I obliged him, though ultimately I thought the traditional performance elements of pantomime were odd bedfellows with the darker and almost operatic visual presentation. (See HERE.) But the audiences seemed to love it, and perhaps it would not appear so strange today, when we’re all so much more accustomed to theatrical hybrids.

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Sherwood sprang from that first exploration of the legends of Robin Hood. In almost all respects I thought the idea of taking the same subject and creating something entirely different from it, an insane one. But my producer was adamant that we try, and so off I went to kick some ideas around. As I immersed myself in the task I found that what had at first seemed implausible… a musical based on a relatively slender series of folk-stories… became much more interesting when the characters were fleshed out and developed into more than cyphers. For Robin Hood I’d woven in elements of the supernatural, and they had worked. But for Sherwood those aspects were excised, replaced by the darker psychological threads of hubris and delusion. Ironic then that the very characteristics I was using to create flawed but interesting characters in the script, were the same ones driving the producer to make the catastrophic errors of judgement, bringing down his production company and Sherwood with it.

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the one that got away

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Last year a visitor to the Artlog wrote a comment that led me to her own site. I left a message there, and she responded. We were getting along famously when she mentioned in passing that her husband ran a graphic design company called ‘Stills’. With a sinking heart I replied.

DATE: 22 May 20122: 11;03: GMT

‘Suzanne, many years ago, when I was working as a director/producer at the New Theatre in Cardiff, I wanted some input into the poster for a musical that we were going to be presenting at the Dominion Theatre in the West End of London. The original poster commissioned by my fellow producer was awful and we’d badly fallen out over it. I had a clear idea of what the poster should be, though no time to do it myself. So we went off to a design company to discuss ideas. I spoke to a young man there who really listened hard to what I was saying. He produced a poster that completely captured the tone of what I’d wanted. It was beautiful, with a stag’s head rendered in thready line against a field of black. Gritty and dark, mystical and yet hard-edged. Wonderful. More like a sleeve for a heavy metal-band. The musical never got beyond rehearsals. My fellow producer had lied to everyone, me included, about the funding. The whole enterprise collapsed around our ears. Hundreds of thousands of pounds were owed to cast, crew, makers and collaborators. The producer fled, never to be seen again. My career stalled in the wake of the mess. It took a long time to recover my reputation. (Most everyone knew that I wasn’t a party to the deception, but nevertheless, once thrown, mud tends to stick.)

Two years of work I’d put in on the show went unpaid for. I felt that many of the people who’d been involved in the production had been there because of loyalty to me, and that the producer had taken advantage of the fact to get the best team together before dumping and running away from his financial obligations. I wrote to everyone apologising. I sent out dozens of letters to those who in good faith had done work that hadn’t been paid for. I wrote to the last people who’d been involved in the debacle, the design company in Newport who’d produced the beautiful poster, but whose invoices had subsequently gone unanswered. The musical was called Sherwood, and the design company that produced the poster design was called ‘Stills’! I can hardly believe this coincidence. It must be the same company. Did your husband ever forgive me? I would never have drawn anyone into the enterprise had I known what lay ahead. I am so, so sorry. The whole thing haunted me for many years.

In part I recovered my career, but the experience had devastated my confidence in the business and my own ability to deal with producers who lie and cheat. Eventually I stopped taking work, turned aside, changed my course. For the longest time I couldn’t speak of Sherwood, so appalled was I by what had happened. Some companies went down with the sinking ship, and I feared that ‘Stills’ may have been one of them. I’m so relieved it survived. Jesus Christ!!!! When I wrote to you this morning I had no idea of any connection, and no idea that this laid-to-rest-apparition from the long-ago past would emerge. I am SO happy that you like my work. It’s small enough recompense for having been a party to the catastrophe that nearly took down your husband’s company thirty years ago.’

C x

 

 

Suzanne wrote back:

Date: 22 May 2012 11:27:43 GMT

‘Good God!!!  Isn’t life funny – shit it must be hard for those with no sense of humour.

You have sent us down memory lane this morning.  Listing bad debts that the business has had to survive.  Well – we’re still here at least!

My husband and myself weren’t together at the time but we were friends and I remember the poster very well.  It’s a story that’s been told a number of time by Chris and his business partner Dave.  You will probably have met them both at that time as they used to work on all the jobs together.

I’ll send you another message later today as I’ve got to go out now but I just wanted you to know that we’re still speaking.’

Suzanne x

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Click HERE to see that ‘Stills’ not only survived the Sherwood debacle, but went on to be a thriving company. I’m so happy to know that Suzanne’s husband Chris and his business partner Dave were able to steer their vessel out of the choppy waters I’d inadvertently led them into.

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Audrey II: gone but apparently not forgotten

As I grapple with a supernatural beast (of sorts) for The Mare’s Tale music project, it seems apt if strange to have stumbled upon a blog site previously unknown to me, that has on it a paean to a creature I designed and brought to life on a theatre stage long, long ago. Click HERE and scroll to the bottom of the post to read ‘Bogleech’s’ appreciation of the puppet I dreamt up for the Theatr Clwyd production of Little Shop of Horrors over twenty-five years ago! (Labelled in the post as ‘A mysterious Welsh Audrey II’)

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Above: the third-stage Audrey II under construction.

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Above: the framework of the puppet when clad with latex skin.

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I wasn’t able to leave a comment at the blog, but I sent an e-mail to the blogger to give a little more information that I thought might be of interest. I wrote:

‘Hello. I’m Clive, the designer and director of  the ‘mysterious Welsh Audrey II’!

The full-scale Audrey went into storage in Mold, but I’m quite sure she’s long gone as that was over twenty years ago. We’d hoped to nationally tour the production, which had been a great success at Theatre Clwyd, but financing was not forthcoming. I heard that the model for the ‘expressionist’ set was still knocking around in the carpentry shop ten years later, but no doubt that too has now vanished.

There’s an interesting and rather poignant tale about the first-stage Audrey puppet. It went with the actor Michael Finesilver, who had played Seymour, to live in New York. Ten years later a box arrived by post at my home in Wales. Inside was Audrey looking rather the worse for wear. The latex she was made from was crumbling and her cable-controls had broken. With her was a note that read:

“Audrey II has been with me for a long time now, but I fear I can no longer look after her. Time to move on. Please give her a good home. Love Fikey.“

Audrey II stayed with me for five or six years, and then came a time when I too had to move on. By then every time I looked at her another piece had fallen off the poor old thing. Finally I called it a day, and she was consigned to landfill.

I’m so touched to find an image and an appreciation of Audrey II on your blog. Thank you for that.

Clive Hicks-Jenkins

Aberystwyth’

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Above: Mike Finesilver as Seymour, with the ‘Audrey’ puppet he later took with him to the USA.

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Above: the model of the Little Shop set.

More about the production can be found HERE, HERE and HERE.

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I see that I wrote in one of my three Little Shop posts back in 2011 that I was going to make a fourth and last one about the inestimable contribution costume designer Terry Parr made to the production, but somehow I never got around to it. I’ll make good that deficit very soon. I have many photographs of  Terry’s costume work on LSoH. She was an inspiration to me as the director, but more importantly she inspired the cast. Terry was a genius at finding the perfect clothes for characters, and I saw the actors physically change at their wardrobe fittings. It was wonderful to watch.

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UPDATE: 18/02/13

Date: 18 February 2013 02:06:42 GMT

From Jonathan at Bogleech.

So glad to hear from you! I’d been sent the photos by someone who only said they were “pretty sure” it was “a Welsh production,” which is as detailed as they seemed able to get. Very happy to have correct info, a name and some links to attach – I’ve already updated the old article, along with a new thought or two. Sad to hear she wound up in the trash after so long, but I know with these things you have to focus on getting props working for the show at hand, rather than lasting forever somewhere. I was invited to a temporary art showing here in Florida where I turned an old toilet into an ugly sculpture that now rots outside, collecting stagnant water. Not an inappropriate fate for it, really, but I’d have tried to keep it pristine if I only had a place to put an entire extra toilet that doesn’t do anything.

Love the paintings on your homepage, and what you’ve shown from the Mare’s Tale doesn’t disappoint! That Mari Lwyd maquette is amazing and looks rather hauntingly more like a painting than a physical object; just the photographs of it could qualify as stand alone art. I didn’t even know much about this tradition, surprisingly considering how much I enjoy reading up on customs big and small from around the world. It’s fascinating how innocent it’s supposed to be but how easily the costumes can cross into nightmare territory, especially for young children who don’t know what’s going on…something that applies to a lot of great traditions, and inspires a lot of great art down the road!

Thanks again for e-mailing!

Date: 18 February 2013 02:44:25 GMT

From Jonathan at Bogleech.

Oh, in addition to my previous response I want to say how much I loved reading the other production posts on Little Shop of Horrors, the unreal and imaginative sets (it’s a pity how many other productions, especially today, aim for bland realism over unique flair) and your design processes. I especially enjoy the connection with Baba Yaga’s hut, and I can see more clearly now that Audrey II had sort of “vestigial” eye areas, really like a baby bird! Do you mind if I add the concept sketch to my old article post? I may also make an entry on my main blog about the update and your site.

I wish the very best of luck for your new endeavors, and the kind of long lasting attention your hard work really deserves!

digging up the past

In the picturesque chaos of the ‘Battery’ (my attic studio, so named because of the pipistrelle bats I share it with) I occasionally find some avalanche of papers newly toppled from a once orderly stack. In this way barely remembered drawings come to light, and drawings remembered but long considered lost. Every time this happens I think to myself  ’I really must get this place sorted out.’ But life goes on, and there are always more pressing matters to attend to, so the piles languish and occasionally topple, and nothing gets sorted out at all.

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The two drawings below were made in preparation for the Old Stile Press 1998 edition of The Affectionate Shepheard by the poet Richard Barnfield. (1547 – 1627) It was my first major undertaking for the press and was a close collaboration with Nicolas Mcdowall, who designed and printed it, and Frances McDowell, who made the beautiful paper used throughout. In the finished edition the types were printed in Bulmer, but in some of my preparatory drawings I played with the idea of writing the text in longhand.

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Above: preparatory drawing made with glass pen and ink, wax crayon and watercolour.

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The notion behind my decorations for the book was not to directly depict Barnfield’s cast of gods, goddesses, nymphs and shepherds, but to conjure them as though through a performance of his narrative given by a group of ‘players’ equipped with makeshift costumes and props. And not a ‘public’ performance either, but something rather more private, very likely involving quantities of alcohol and resulting in not a few of the participants falling out of their clothes! Hence the allegorical ‘Pride’ of  the poem, in the drawing is shown as a youth with strap-on wings, a stage-helmet and very little else. Another version of the subject is reversed and more briefly drawn, and must be a try-out for the finished decoration which had to be ‘engraved’ back-to-front on specially-coated glass before being made into a relief-block ready for printing. I strove for loosely-drawn images even though the ‘engraving’ process was resistant to capturing flowing line. But despite the challenges of the technique, printed onto Frances’ paper the overall effect is rather silvery and delicate, the rippling surfaces catching the light and exaggerating the fragility of the image. Quite different to the original drawing, but appealing nevertheless.

Above: drawing made with glass pen and ink and wax crayon.

Below: the relief-printed  image as it appears in the book.

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Krampus-comes-a-calling!

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Krampus is a demon particular to eastern and northern Europe, especially Austria and Hungary. He accompanies Saint Nicholas during the Christmas season. But whereas Saint Nicholas dispense largesse and gifts, Krampus is the dark side of the partnership, warning and punishing bad children.

The word Krampus originates from the Old High German word Krampen, meaning claw. Traditionally young men dress up as the Krampus during the weeks of Advent, particularly on the evening of 5 December, St Nicholas’ Eve, known in Germany as ‘Krampusnacht’. Demons roam the streets with rusty chains and bells, making a clamour and threatening with their teeth and talons. Traditional images of Krampus show him with a basket on his back, carrying away bad children to the portals of Hell! In the words of my friend Paul Bommer, who himself has done a mighty fine picture of Krampus, ‘Don’t worry about the child in the basket—he has been very naughty and had had many stern warnings from his grandparents, so he had it coming!’

With the exception of the background and the boy’s t-shirt, made of coloured paper from an art supplier, the collage has been constructed entirely of shapes snipped from the pages of a couple of magazines. I like the bright, flat, graphic quality that comes from the printed papers, particularly their tonal aspects. Working this way facilitates speed, and once an image is underway there is the sense too of improvisation, with every magazine-page flipped offering new possibilities for how the collage may develop. I need to explore these techniques more.

We have not done cards this year, and so this last post of  the holiday is by way of a Christmas Greeting to you all from me and Peter. All at the Artlog is in the hands of Lucy, Curator of Alphabet Soup and trusted blog-sitter, while I have what she tells me is a much-deserved break. And so now l take my leave of you swiftly, in the spirit of one of the great traditions of panto… Pooooooof… like a Demon King down a star-trap!

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an e-mail to francesca kay

The rose arbour at Tretower Court in a painting I made when I worked there.

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Francesca Kay and I have a friendship that goes back a long way. We met at Tretower Court and Castle where I worked in a custodian’s hut… long since demolished… selling tickets and guide books, and she’d come to care for the newly-constructed medieval garden, re-placing the modern plants the contractors had provided with ones that were more appropriate to the period. It was in the hut at Tretower I made masks in my spare time, and there too that Francesca wrote poetry and planned her garden talks that were such a well-loved feature of the site. Francesca and her mother Angela continued as gardeners at Tretower long after I had left, and under their care the ‘new’ medieval garden matured into a beautiful, timeless sanctuary.

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Clive to Francesca: 16 December 2012 10:00:32 GMT

‘Francesca, I dreamed about you last night! We were both working in a huge stately-home-type garden, looking after it I suppose, though in what capacity wasn’t too clear. I seemed to have something to do with the life-size clockwork figures that decorated the herbaceous borders, and you were marshalling a vast tour-party of poets, split up into groups and swarming everywhere. There were ‘events’ going on all over the estate, and you and I were buzzing around being terribly important! At one point I cornered you and said… with a sort of weary resignation… ‘It’s come to my attention that you’ve been infiltrating my blog site and altering some of the posts, and while I don’t particularly see any reason to object, I’d prefer that you spoke with me first rather than change things behind my back without any discussion!’ You whooped with unseemly amusement, though I noted you looked slightly shame-faced as you tossed your curls and skittishly ran ahead to avoid the confrontation. I called out after you ‘I want to know how you did it. Clearly it’s a breach of security!’ But I was shouting into the air, because you were gone, with only the trill of your laughter trailing across the grass as you skipped away to take refuge among your poets!’

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The medieval garden at Tretower

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You can read more about Francesca at the Artlog HERE and HERE.

You can visit her blog HERE…

… and purchase her delightful literary and opera finger-puppets HERE.

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AFTERWORD

For the seven years I worked there, my approach to Tretower was by car along the lane that turns off the Abergavenny to Brecon road. It’s less than a mile long, curling across the valley floor to the Court and Castle and the village of Tretower beyond. As soon as I’d turned into it I would slow down to a crawl, better to appreciate the magnificent reveal of the sentinel tower across the field beyond the flowery mead of the ‘medieval garden’. For me that short stretch of lane, bisecting meadows where geese and horses grazed and the stream rushed about its business, was the approach to heaven. Sometimes the small pond adjacent to the Court’s boundary wall would be flocked with ducks spilling out into the lane. Their chattering and the smell of stone, old wood and honeysuckle in the sun, is how I always conjure Tretower in memory.

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Don’t Look Back, painted at the time I stopped working at Tretower in 1996.

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The wall of Tretower Court is about shoulder-height, and I always thought it a delight that  a view of the garden, and particularly the rose arbour that runs parallel to the lane, was afforded over it for passers-by, regardless of whether they paid to enter the site. In the painting of the garden at the top of this post you can see the wall to the right of the composition, as it was during my time at the monument. Alas it does not look like that now. CADW Welsh Historic Monuments has erected a high hurdle fence on top of the wall that entirely obliterates the view of the garden from anyone on the lane. It seems to me an act of wretchedness to hide a prospect that once was there for everyone to enjoy. In past summers when the arbour was in flower, the roses were a fragrant cumulus of blossom banked along the top of the wall. Now there is just the grey blankness of hurdling masking the beauty, and a sinking regret in the heart that those who once walked along the lane to appreciate the flowering of the arbour, are now denied even a glimpse of it. All must pay their pennies and enter. Shame on whoever at CADW was responsible for this mean-spirited decision.

haunted by a puppet

This time last year my friend the novelist Kathe Koja asked me to write a short story for a guest post at her blog, Under the Poppy. Kathe posted it on December the 15th, and I included a link to it from this site so that friends of the Artlog could read it there. But a year on there are a lot of new readers at the Artlog who won’t have seen the story, and so I post it here for the first time, with a new collage made especially to illustrate it.

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Dec 2011

I have a mystery in my life… a ghost story if you like… that is ongoing. It has un-spooled in episodes of hallucinatory clarity across the years, but awaits… or more precisely I await… a denouement! It started with a prologue that to date has been followed by two acts. Now a two-act drama is always unsatisfactory, so of course there must be a third, though in this case decades have elapsed since the second, and still no sign of the last. Three, why is the magic number always three? When I paint a still-life there must always be three objects in it. Two unnerve me. Though the present interval in this ‘drama’ has now been going on for nearly forty years, I knew with complete certainty once the curtain had come down on the first act, that the story would not, could not be complete, until the end of a third.

Prologue
When I was a boy of six living in South Wales, I made my first glove-puppet. It was a green-faced witch… echoes of Margaret Hamilton’s Wicked Witch of the West there… and had a head modelled from papier mâché. I made a steeple-hat for her from a page torn out of one of my mother’s magazines. The paper had a full-page advertisement on one side in which most of the background was black. I cut and scrolled it into a cone and taped on a wide brim snipped from the same sheet. It was black all over, but the under-brim and the inside of the hat were covered in print. Interesting that I left it so, making the aesthetic choice there should be a cache of cut-off sentences hidden in the crown and barely visible in the shadows under the brim. I’ve always loved stories, poetry, text. Maybe I thought the oddity of a hat lined with words was apt for a witch versed in spells.

I was mightily pleased with my puppet creation, but at some point she went missing, as things made by children so often do, or did back then, when there was less sentiment about the fledgling skills of the very young. Parents weary of clutter threw juvenilia away. My mother threw away plenty, so it would come as no surprise were I to find that the green-faced witch had been discarded by her when she’d thought I’d outgrown it. The truth is I’ll never know what happened to the puppet. It just disappeared, and I’m not entirely sure I even noticed at the time.

Act 1
Some years have passed. I’ve forgotten about the witch. I’m perhaps nine or ten and I’m walking along the street where we live. I’m on the opposite side of the road from where our house is. The weight of my school satchel is against my hip, but I’m heading away from the direction of both school and home, though why I’d be doing that I can’t imagine and don’t recall. I’m passing sombre red brick terraced houses with narrow strips in front of them hemmed by walls of varying heights, some low but some as high as my shoulder. Few plants in these ‘front gardens’. Most are paved and used as spaces to park bicycles. Ahead of me I see something small, dark and conical perched on the top of one of the higher walls. My step slows as I draw level. l look up and down the street to scout whether anyone is about, stare at the blank front window beyond the wall to see whether anyone is looking out. This isn’t a house where anyone known to me lives, so I must be careful about picking up anything that may have been put out on the wall for a purpose. I reach out my hand to the witch’s hat, still pristine as the day it was made years before. I turn the brim toward me to see what I know will be inside, the odd, disjointed, random text I’d memorised, my witch’s words of magic. I place the steeple-hat back on the wall and walk away. I don’t look back, even though I dearly want to. Nothing will ever be quite the same again for me, because now I know there are mysteries, and this one is mine and will always be with me.

Act 2
I’m in my twenties, a choreographer living and working in London. I’m rehearsing dancers in a dingy hall at the Elephant & Castle. Things are not going too well and I slip away in my lunch-break to walk the empty, shabby back streets while I try to think my way through the problems. It’s chill and I’m wearing a dancer’s flimsy rehearsal clothes, regretting already that I didn’t grab a coat on my way out. I’m striding with my head down, preoccupied, arms folded against the wind. The gutter is full of litter blowing about. Something there catches my eye, nails me to the spot, peels back time and makes the hair of my scalp crawl.

When I return to rehearsals I’m twenty minutes late, and the dancers, so recalcitrant, loud and ill-tempered that morning, have grown quiet with unease, because I am known never to be late. I carry on where we left off, working now at speed and with renewed focus to shape the choreography to the music. Everyone is exhilarated, relieved, smiling. But roiling around in my head are the remembered words of magic I’d read while hunkered at the pavement edge, having prised apart the fragile, crushed-though-familiar paper steeple-hat to find them hidden within.

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the one that got away

In the late 1960s I was an actor/puppeteer with the Caricature Theatre, a company that toured extensively. I’ve always been an enthusiastic early morning explorer when in new places, and for me one of the great pleasures of touring was discovering the byways of the towns and cities visited. Often I was rambling in the early mornings, long before businesses were open, and it was in this way I came upon a backstreet shop in Exeter that caught my attention. It had a window of the old-fashioned variety, not large, and situated at chest level… rather like a sweet shop… with a rail and half-curtain at the back, dividing the display from the interior beyond. There wasn’t much room for wares, and at this remove I can recall only one object on show, a framed gouache that halted me in my tracks the moment I saw it.  There was no label, but I knew it as the cover artwork for Alan Garner’s children’s fantasy novel, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, of which I had a much loved and dog-eared paperback copy.

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Now this was not a grand-looking establishment, but a rather dusty shop, and the gouache was modestly framed. I got it into my head that it was something my meagre resources might stretch to. The director of the Caricature Theatre, Jane Phillips, had been known to allow me the odd advance against a Friday pay-day when on tour, and so I planned my financial strategy. But I needed to know the price of the painting. (Jane would want that crucial information before agreeing.) I returned to the shop the next day, and every morning thereafter in the hope that someone would be there. It had the air of one of those places that kept rather random hours. I raced to it after performances, but it was always closed. I left Exeter empty-handed.

The decades passed, but every time I picked up my well-thumbed Brisingamen, I thought about that backstreet shop with its shadowy interior and the little bit of magic I spied in its window, and I wondered how the gouache would have found its way there. I’d discovered that the artist was George Adamson, born in New York in 1913, but educated in the UK. He’d studied at Liverpool College of Art, and from the 1960s had illustrated Norman Hunter’s Professor Brainstawm books. But my interest lay only in his iconic covers for Alan Garner’s Brisingamen and Gomrath, and I still feel a frisson of childish excitement when I look at them.

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Today I discovered that George Adamson died in 2005 at the age of ninety-two. His place of death… Exeter.

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‘I could not have hoped for the mood of the book to be better expressed. George Adamson has caught it exactly. Fenodyree is just as I imagined him and the eyes are the best part of the jacket. I am delighted.’

Alan Garner

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Alan Garner at the time The Weirdstone of Brisingamen was published in 1960.

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full circle

1973

Above: National Theatre poster for Equus. The image is by Gilbert Lesser.

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Peter Shaffer’s Equus enthralls London audiences when first presented by the National Theatre at the Old Vic. The play is directed by John Dexter and designed by John Napier, starring Alec McCowen as Martin Dysart and twenty-year-old Peter Firth in his breakthrough role as Alan Strang. I see the play and I’m swept away by its power.

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1977

Above: Gilbert Lesser poster for Sidney Lumet’s film of the play. (My thanks to John Coulthart at Feuilleton for identifying the designer .)

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Sydney Lumet directs the screen version of Equus, adapted by Shaffer himself. Richard Burton and Peter Firth head a cast that includes Eileen Atkins, Joan Plowright, Colin Blakely and Jenny Agutter.

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1986

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I’m asked to direct a murder mystery play by Anthony Shaffer. Whodunnit is an opportunity to work with an interesting cast on a national tour, and I accept the offer. However, I harbour a faint hope that in so doing I might meet the playwright’s twin brother Peter and, by dint of the wonderful work I plan to do, convince him I’ll be the perfect director for his great play, Equus. At the opening Anthony declares himself delighted with the production of Whodunnit, but I never meet Peter and I never direct Equus. A few years later I leave my career in the theatre to concentrate on painting.

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2001

Above: Red Halter. Clive Hicks-Jenkins. Conté pencil on Arches paper.

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My first major exhibition in a public gallery, The Mare’s Tale, opens at Newport Museum and Art Gallery. The main body of work in it is a meditation on my father’s childhood memory of the Welsh mid-winter tradition of the Mari Lwyd, and how he was marked by the experience and haunted by it right up to his death. The Mari Lwyd was from the ‘hobby-horse’ tradition of mumming, and manifested as a horse’s skull on a pole with a sheet draped to cover the man who carried it. But in my drawings the Mari appears in many forms, some of which echo Shaffer’s horse-worshipping boy.

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Above: Stumbles and Falls II. Clive Hicks-Jenkins. Conté pencil on Arches paper.

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Above: The Mare’s Tale. Poems by Catriona Urquhart and images by Clive Hicks-Jenkins. Published by the Old Stile Press in 2001.

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Catriona Urquhart produces a ‘poetic text’ for the exhibition, originally intended to be printed onto gallery panels. However, Nicolas and Frances McDowall at the Old Stile Press are so impressed by the poems, that they publish them to coincide with the opening. Titled The Mare’s Tale, the edition is illustrated with pen and ink images that I make specially for it.

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Tend: Clive Hicks-Jenkins. Conté pencil on Arches paper.

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I’m invited to show two works from The Mare’s Tale series in the exhibition Dreaming Awake at the Terezin Memorial Gallery in the Czech Republic.

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2002

Deposition III. Clive Hicks-Jenkins. Conté pencil on Arches paper.

A second Mari Lwyd exhibition, The Tower on the Hill, opens at Brecknock Museum and Art Gallery, with all the drawings from The Mares’s Tale plus a handful of new works on the same theme. Among the new drawings is Deposition III, which is acquired by Nicolas and Frances McDowall of The Old Stile Press.

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2007

Above: Clive Hicks-Jenkins. Collage made as a trial image for the Old Stile Press illustrated edition of Equus.

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Equus has continued to transfix audiences and actors over three decades, and diverse productions of it have been staged in countries around the world. Finally a major London revival of the play appears when Thea Sharrock’s production opens at the Gielgud Theatre with Richard Griffiths and and Daniel Radcliffe as Dysart and Strang. A performance is attended by Callum James, who has seen my drawing Deposition III while staying with Nicolas and Frances McDowall at their home in Wales. Later that weekend Callum meets with Nicolas at a London book fair, and whispers the words ‘Equus‘ and ‘Clive Hicks-Jenkins’ in his ear. Nicolas approaches me with the notion of making an illustrated edition of Equus. Permissions are sought and agreed with the author and Penguin Books. After a trial image made from collage, I begin work by making a series of preparatory maquettes before starting on some drawings.

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Above: Clive Hicks-Jenkins. Maquette made in preparation for the Old Stile Press illustrated edition of Equus.

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Above: Clive Hicks-Jenkins. Preparatory drawings for the Old Stile Press illustrated edition of Equus. Conté pencil and acrylic on paper.

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2009

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Above: Clive Hicks-Jenkins. Images for the Old Stile Press illustrated edition of Equus.

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The Old Stile Press illustrated edition of Equus is launched at the London Art Book Fair. Simon Callow, who has been playing Dysart in the national tour of Equus, turns up at the event to lend his support. His insights into the text have been fundamental to the way I’ve approached it.

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2011

Above: Both Fall. Clive Hicks-Jenkins. Conté pencil on Arches paper. Collection of Simon Callow.

My sixtieth birthday retrospective opens at the Gregynog Gallery of the National Library of Wales. The National Museum of Wales, Brecknock Museum and Art Gallery and private collectors from across Wales lend works for the exhibition, and for the first time since 2002, all the large Mari Lwyd drawings are assembled in one place.

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Above: the Gregynog Gallery of the National Library of Wales, 2011.

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Lund Humpphries publish a monograph of my work to coincide with the retrospective, with an introduction by Simon Callow in which he describes that it was a drawing from the Mare’s Tale series seen in a Bath art gallery, that led him to seek me out. A Mari Lwyd drawing from his own collection hangs in the gallery.

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2012

I’m approached by Isabelle De Cat, picture editor at Penguin, who asks permission to use an image of one of my maquettes on the cover of the play, due to be re-editioned in new livery by Penguin Modern Classics. The new Penguin edition will be available in mid-2013, forty years after I first saw and fell in love with Equus at the Old Vic.