Yesterday I finished the second of the two new works made for The Discerning Eye exhibition, opening at the Mall Galleries next month. A drawing was made a few months ago, but illustrator Judy Watson prevailed on me to leave it as it was, rather than obscure it with paint. That effectively stayed my hand. However, I returned to it and used a part of it for the new work, Borderlands V: Night Beast.
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The original drawing remains. I did as Judy bid!
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My studio walls are densely papered with sketches that I’ve blu-tacked onto them over the years. Scraps flutter and seethe when the windows are open and the wind blows through. Projects once current lie under the many that came later, so the walls have become layered repositories of the raw materials used to produce myriad paintings, exhibitions and illustrations.
I rarely take anything down, but just add more over the top. Today I took a turn around the space with my camera, and snapped away. I found plenty that took me by surprise, dislodging memories of finished works long vanished out into the world. Nearly all of the drawings are small, no more than a few inches square, and each one was stuck to the wall at a time when it was needed as fuel for endeavour at the easel or work-table. Here are the young warriors and green knights, the bruised boys and their beasts, the enigmatic angels and the anchorites, the sideways-slipping still-lifes, the simplified landscapes and the cut-outs I sometimes make to try out new shapes or notions in compositions before committing to changes made with paint. They were never intended to be seen by anyone but me. They are my laboratory.
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Gawain and the Green Knight
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Study for the cover of Marly Youmans’ novel Val/Orson
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Still-life
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Hervé and the wolf
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My father
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Peter Shaffer’s Equus
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Marly Youmans’ Thaliad
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Cut-out shapes
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Jack
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Landscape and building
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Barnfield’s The Affectionate Shepherd
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L’histoire du soldat
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The beautiful boys
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Part 2 follows soon
It started back last Christmas when I made an e-card to send to family and friends. Three colours only, blue, pink and white, painted onto tinted board and then worked over with a black pencil. The idea was to produce something relatively quickly.
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But I liked the result so much that I thought I’d pursue it, and when I began producing new works for a one-man exhibition at Oriel Tegfryn, I used the same technique and characters for portraits of Oberon and Titania from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
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I turned then to a regular theme I’ve been exploring for ten years, the blind saint Hervé and his wolf…
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… before trying the same technique worked on panel rather than board, which gave a much grainier effect.
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The most recent work has been on two illustrations for a forthcoming edition of Alice in Wonderland.
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What started as a brief foray, has turned into an obsession.
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Blue Hervé. Acrylic and pencil on board. 2014
Enquiries to the Martin Tinney Gallery
The following comments (and my replies) are from a post I made back in January on completing the work titled Blue Hervé. This is the kind of dialogue I find really gets my creative juices flowing. I’ve illustrated today’s post with images of the work in process, from the maquettes to the daily progress on the easel. (The sharp-eyed will notice that I changed the head of the maquette part-way into the process.) I thank Jacqui Hicks, Marly Youmans, Phil Cooper, Jeffery Beam and Rebecca Verity for being such stimulating and supportive company at the Artlog.
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Jacqui Hicks: Ah textures… I love those textures Clive, the suit, the t-shirt, the wolf’s fur; when you are painting clothing do you imagine the texture of a specific fabric or is it more the fall and folds that inspire?
Clive H-J: Both, really. It wouldn’t do were I to capture too specific a texture if the finished result distracted from the overall idea, so I tend to think of surfaces as patterning.
In this image I began to see the wolf’s fur as the eddies apparent on the surface of water, and that was fine, because it added another layer of possibilities to the piece. Moreover it took me down a different route to THIS image, where I thought of the fur almost as a cursive language that was a secret repository of wolfish knowledge.
My work on this theme tends toward the hieratic, and so lacking the kinetic in obvious terms, I place falling leaves to conjure restlessness. They also help the viewer to know how it is to be blind Hervé in that moment, with the sense of displaced air as the leaves pass, and the cold vulnerability of exposed skin in the presence of rough fur and sharp teeth.
So many things to be thinking about as a painting like this comes together, and I rarely capture all the thoughts buzzing through my head. And so I make another, and another, and another…
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Marly Youmans: The ‘cursive’ fur made me think of Diana Wynne Jones’s “Spellcoats.”
Strange kiss: teeth and neck.
I was thinking about how this story relates (in some odd fashion) to your love of the Staffordshire outsize dog-with-child figures. (And perhaps they dimly relate to the original mystic semi-encounter with the hooded man and his giant dog/wolf, when Jack was a mere puppy-child.)
Phil Cooper: I’d snatched a couple of peeks at this painting on my iPad in breaks at work this afternoon, taking in bits at a time; it’s grown on me over the day and now I’m looking at it on the big screen at home I’m completely smitten, it is really mesmerising me. I love the silvery whites cutting through the richness of the reds and blues, the wildness of the wolf with the tenderness coming through, Herve’s delicate expression, the planes and shapes running round the picture, the shadow across the wolf’s hindquarters, I’m astonished, it’s brilliant.
Clive H-J: You express thoughts so poetically that I think we’re completely in tune on this, on what I’ve tried to express and what you feel. As is ever the way, I see only the failings and the lack, and feel sharply how I might have made it better. But then it’s these feelings, no matter how painful, that spur me on to the next. There always has to be another, to make up for the deficiencies of the last.
Thank you, Phil.
Phil Cooper: I do identify with what you write about how you feel about your work Clive – maybe, as you say, it’s better it were thus as it spurs us on to making more work and striving for new heights. But in this case of this painting, gosh, you’ve created something of real power. That hand grazing the foreleg is the clincher for me, so soft but it’s like lightning!
Clive H-J: Lightning! Yes, I like that description. Thank you Phil. Lightning it is then.
Jeffery Beam: I love the sense of floating, suspension in this. The falling (in love?) and the contrast of the red (oxblood red) and the blues made even richer by the little bit of grey, and the black. Also that the Wolf looks straight at us while Hervé bends away with eyes closed, but not in fear it seems, but in transformation. The missing shoe, as mentioned above, Hervé’s shirt lifting up showing belly. All so tender and deeply felt. I’ve enjoyed watching the progress of this piece. Bravo as always wise and masterly Clive.
Clive H-J: No, not wise… or not wise enough… and far from masterly. But I aspire with each day at the easel to both those things, and doomed to failure though I must be, I still keep trying.
I’m glad that you see so much in it that moves you. It is deeply felt. I’m always moved by this tale, and never tire of it. Each time at the easel I feel as though I discover it anew, and fear I’ll never do it justice, no matter how many times I paint it.
Thank you for writing so beautifully about it, Jeffery.
Rebecca Verity: There is always something about each of your paintings that really gets me thinking. Often I can go online and research the story and learn something new, but today I will spend all day thinking about that missing shoe…
What action/adventure happened just before the moment of the painting that made him drop it? Where is he going next and how willl he get there with one bare foot?
Or maybe they’re just lying in a field together and he merely kicked off a shoe to feel the sunlight on his toes, and the other shoe will be kicked off in a moment.
I will never know, and so I will always wonder.
Clive H-J: Well I can see, Rebecca, that you recognise there have to be mysteries, and so I shall add nothing to distract from your own musings. A painting should be like life: lots of peculiarities that are unexplained and will most likely remain that way. But just so that you know, there are always reasons behind the oddities in my paintings, though I try to avoid being pinned down about them. (I recall the art historian who kept insisting that there must be a symbolic reason for the red horse in Green George, and how put out he became when I refused to oblige him with an explanation.)
However, if you’re interested in the back story of why I constantly return to the subject of the blind boy and his beast, then read THIS.
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Clive Hicks-Jenkins explores a narrative tradition of painting, particularly in relation to the Welsh mumming custom of the Mari Lwyd, and in his examinations of stories with miraculous events at their hearts. His Mari Lwyd drawing, Stumbles and Cannot Rise, is in the National Museum of Wales, his re-imagining of the annunciation, The Virgin of the Goldfinches, hangs permanently in the Saint Dyfrig Chapel of Llandaff Cathedral in Cardiff, and his painting, Christ Writes in the Dust, was commissioned for the Methodist Collection of Twentieth Century Art, held at Oxford Brookes University. For a decade he’s regularly produced works on the legendary themes of the blind Breton monk, Hervé, who had a wolf for a companion, and the Irish hermit, Kevin. Kevin held a nest in his outstretched hand while a blackbird laid and incubated her eggs in it, hatched them and reared her young until fledged, a legend recounted by Seamus Heaney in a poem the artist has long referenced in his paintings on the subject.
Completed today
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There will be a number of new Hervé and the Wolf works in my forthcoming Oriel Tegfryn exhibition. Here is the latest one, completed today.
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Blind Blue Boy
Mixed media on board. 30 x 36 cm. 2014
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Telling Tales: New Narrative Works by Clive Hicks-Jenkins
Opening on Saturday May 10th
at
Menai Bridge
Anglesey
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For anyone interested in what will be on view at Oriel Tegfryn, between now and May 10th I’ll regularly be adding new images to the Telling Tales exhibition Pinterest page. All the work will be for sale.
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I’m not yet through with Hervé and his wolf (will I ever be?), and this fragile sketch on an off-cut of mount-board gifted to me by my framer in Aberystwyth, Anthony, has already disappeared under paint at the easel as I bring it to completion for my forthcoming exhibition at Oriel Tegfryn. That blind boy and his beast always stir my brushes.
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There are a number of Hervé works on the go right now, precipitated by the new maquettes of the saint and the wolf I recently made. (See above.)
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The image grows day by day, detail creeping across the panel as I get closer to completion. This will be the last post-in progress of blue Hervé and his beast, as I hope the next will show the finished work.
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Below: back where it started
Clive Hicks-Jenkins' Artlog: 
