Work continues on my collaboration with poet Olivia McCannon on a new retelling of Beauty and the Beast, to be published by Design for Today. Working with Olivia is a revelation. Ideas bat back and forward between us in e-mails, and I find the conversations to be revelatory. We both make discoveries through the processes of discussion, exploring connections and explaining new ideas to each other, and I find that the e-mails and all the ideas they contain are as equal a source of the images I’m making as her evolving text. Recently Olivia wrote to me that she believed there was a rich seam to be considered in regard to Cocteau’s casting of the role of the Goddess Diana in the 1946 film, and that’s opened a whole treasury of possibilities about the living statues, which we’ve adopted for our own version of the story, and how their origins might be explored.
In another e-mail she wrote thrillingly of her imagined source of the jewels the Beast bestows on Beauty, and afterwards I could barely sleep for a week with excitement in anticipation of the images that were evolving in my head out of her ideas.
At this stage I can explain no more. While I enjoy sharing the creative processes of making images, in this instance I don’t want to offer them before they’ve been realised and the book published. Suffice to say that this is going to be a version of Beauty and the Beast like no other.
Clive Hicks-Jenkins' Artlog: 
How wonderful to have such an exciting and fruitful collaboration! A rare thing indeed. I look so forward to the final reveal knowing it will be tremendous!
Knowing that this is in the works, complete with your artwork, is a wonderful thought, Clive!
So lovely Clive and this is one of my favourite films. It sounds like a lovely collaboration!!!
Nice, nice, nice! Thank you
Lovely to read of the collaboration very interesting. And ha ha, not only are you a master artist, you’re a master of suspense too, you have us on the edge of our seats!xxxL
Thank the gods for your return here, at the Artlog, Dear Clive.
I was worried, not seeing you in such a long time. And I dared not ask. I see now, this absence of yours was all for the good. And I can’t wait for more news, and, of course, for the book.
Love from Madrid
Dear Maria, I had the same fear because you had left no messages here. Peter and I are SO relieved to know you are well, and our apologies that you were concerned for us. I send my love and I shall write an email for a proper catch-up. XXX