Marly and Me

The English Lion: interior decoration for Marly Youmans’ novel Glimmerglass, due from Mercer University Press in September

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Images of my paintings, or details from them, have been chosen for the covers of quite a few poetry collections, novels, plays and textbooks. The usual process is for a publisher to approach me requesting the use of an existing image, and I just have to agree the terms. There’s no creative input on my part because the work is carried out by graphic designers. But while Marly’s The Throne of Psyche (Mercer University Press) carried a detail from one of my paintings, Touch, on its cover, the arrangement wasn’t repeated because thereafter we evolved more collaborative methods of working together.

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To date I’ve made covers for Marly’s novel Val/Orson (PS Publishing), the cover and interior decorations for The Foliate Head (Stanza Poetry), the cover and decorations for her epic poem Thaliad (Phoenicia Publishing) and the cover and decorations for her forthcoming novel Glimmerglass (Mercer University Press). In every respect these have been collaborations, as what I do is always a direct response to her writing. I read her manuscripts repeatedly before making any preliminary sketches, annotating their margins with my initial ideas. Marly and I don’t much discuss what will be required for a cover or for the decorations. She and her publishers entrust the visual aspects of her books to me. I think she quite enjoys the surprises that come through this way of working.

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Above: artwork for the back cover of The Foliate Head

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I never aspire to ‘illustrate’ a Marly Youmans book, preferring my role as provider of a gentle accompaniment to her words. I make an introduction (the cover) and then she sings the melody while I play a few chords in the background (the page decorations).

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It’s not the usual way for a writer to have much influence with a publisher over the choice of artist for a cover, and it’s perhaps because Marly elects to work with small, specialist houses, that she’s been able to bring me into the loop. At Stanza Poetry she even arranged for my brother-in-law, Andrew, to be the designer of The Foliate Head, because he and I are so in harmony in the matter of book design.

For Thaliad, the book was meticulously designed by the founder and editor of Phoenicia Publishing, Beth Adams, which made the entire process bespoke, rather than on the design conveyor-belt that is the modus operandi of most big publishing houses.

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Increasingly I like to produce not just the image for the cover, but the whole spread with the text incorporated into it. I love the art of lettering, and usually work the titles and authors through the medium of collage. And because adding images to the inside of a book doesn’t add printing costs as long as the designs are in black, Marly and I have been able to persuade publishers to have page decorations in her books.

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Above: chapter-heading for Thaliad

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The brutal economics of publishing these days means that there is rarely an illustration fee with a small specialist publishing house. So instead I strike a deal for copies of the book. At the end of the day I own the original artworks, and they can be offered for sale with my dealer. I couldn’t make a living as a book illustrator if this was my only source of income, but as the process of collaborating with Marly is tangental to my career as a painter, I don’t have to rely on it.

I don’t think we ever set out to work together so regularly, this author and her ‘illuminator’. The processes gently evolved, and now there’s a familiarity to them that feels comfortable and ongoing. Marly barely approaches me any more with the outright suggestion that I might do a book with her. It’s more a case of her asking ‘Are you busy?’, followed by ‘Could you possibly make the time?’ And my response is invariably, ‘What’s the deadline?’, followed by ‘Ummmmmm, is there any wriggle-room?’

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Above: cover artwork for Glimmerglass in progress

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I’m strictly hands-on. I paint, draw and collage my designs together, having had no experience of rendering on a computer.

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Above: work-book sketches for Glimmerglass

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It’s not that I’d be averse to working on a screen, but I haven’t had the time to teach myself. I’d probably prefer to combine both ways of working, as I don’t like the idea of spending more time in front of a keyboard than I already do.

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Above: a dragon for the cover of Glimmerglass

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Marly and I had collaborations that preceded our work together on the three ‘decorated’ books. In 2011 it was Marly’s suite of poems celebrating my sixtieth birthday retrospective exhibition that kick-started the anthology The Book of Ystwyth: six poets on the art of Clive Hicks-Jenkins (Grey Mare Press/Carolina Wren Press/National Library of Wales), in which she was joined by Dave Bonta, Callum James, Andrea Selch, Catriona Urquhart and Damian Walford Davies. (The title of her poetry sequence loaned itself to the collection.) Additionally in 2011 she was a contributor to Clive Hicks-Jenkins: a monograph, published by Lund Humphries, with her essay Fire in the Labyrinth exploring my preoccupation with the ‘miraculous’.

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There are other projects in the pipeline. I already have an anthology of her poems waiting on my computer desktop, and I have my eye on her forthcoming novel Maze of Blood, because who wouldn’t want to design a book with a title like that?

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