Please join us for the Private View
Martin Tinney Gallery
Wednesday November 28th
5 – 7.30pm
Grand Tour: drawings commissioned by English Heritage
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Tag Archives: Martin Tinney Gallery
Field of Play
The commission to make the image of Saint George and the Dragon for English Heritage Magazine, came in over Christmas while Peter and I were staying with our friends Liz and Graham at their home near Lamonzie Montastruc, Dordogne.
Because the deadline for completion was so tight, and moreover I needed to get a preliminary off for approval before we returned to the UK, the first sketches for the painting were made at the kitchen table while Lizzie busied herself with preparations for supper – and puss thought that sitting in the middle of my sketch pad was a good way to help me better concentrate. (Here she is getting my attention to let her in!)
A few days later, back in my studio and with the clock ticking down, I painted into the small hours to complete the work so that I could deliver it for scanning at the National Library of Wales the following morning. Skin of the teeth timing!
Framed and titled ‘Field of Play’, the painting sold at the Martin Tinney Gallery a couple of weeks before it appeared in the Spring edition of English Heritage Magazine. I’m currently working on the next image in the series.
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I think I should go to stay with Liz and Graham whenever carrying out commissioned work. La Crabouille is clearly conducive to my creative flow!
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Farewell to 2017
2017 was jam-packed with work and events from start to finish. In the Spring the Música en Segura festival took me to Andalusia for Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time concert, for which I’d made images to be screened during the performance.
Back in the UK at the Lotte Inch Gallery in York, there was a two-person exhibition with my friend Sarah Raphael-Balme, and in Wales an exhibition at Oriel Tegfryn of all the drawings I’d made for the Random Spectacular Hansel & Gretel Picture Book published in 2016.
Below: specially-bound cover of Hansel & Gretel made for me by Christopher Shaw
The Hansel & Gretel Toy Theatre I’d designed for Benjamin Pollock‘s Toyshop in Covent Garden was launched, alongside a beautiful pop-up card based on the theatre and a handsomely packaged game of Hansel & Gretel ‘Pelmanism’.
I was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Arts by Southampton Solent University. I lectured and/or taught at Southampton, Hereford and Cambridge, and these were wonderful interludes in an otherwise gruelling schedule of project deadlines. I guest curated an exhibition, Imagined Realms, at the Royal Cambrian in Conwy, and was able to invite a spectacular array of artists I both admire and love, to take part.
By far the lion’s share of effort went into completing the fourteen screenprint series in collaboration with Penfold Press, based on Simon Armitage’s 2007 translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, in time for the forthcoming exhibition opening on Jan 10th at the Martin Tinney Gallery, Cardiff. The exhibition will be accompanied by an illuminating text from curator and art writer James Russell.
Below: separations on lithography film for The Exchange, and the completed print.
Below: Gouache, ink and pencil work on board – The Stain of Sin.
More news about what’s planned for the Gawain series to be announced shortly. News too of Hansel & Gretel, who are about to embark on a thrilling journey in the company of a whole bunch of old and new friends with whom to enjoy the adventure!
I’ll be making a visual accompaniment for Daniel Broncano’s Música en Segura 2018, this time to the music of Stravinsky –
– and there’s to be a sweetly pretty new Pollock’s Toy Theatre project.
In the US Marly Youmans has produced a scintillating new collection of poems that I’ll be making a book cover and decorations for, and there’s to be an edition of Jeffery Beam’s Spectral Pegasus poems, illustrated with my series of paintings from the Dark Movements series.
2018 is set to be a year of seeing long term projects developing in ways unanticipated at the times of starting them. Plenty of challenges ahead, then. And deadlines, of course. Always there are the deadlines.
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Hansel & Gretel Q&A
I did a question & answer for the main newspaper of north Wales, The Daily Post. Peter went to get a haircut at the barber shop in Aberystwyth, and our friends there had very kindly set aside a copy for us. I answered the questions so long ago that I’d almost forgotten what I’d said. Here’s the transcript:
Your name:
Clive Hicks-Jenkins
How old are you?
Sixty-six.
Where are you from?
Newport, Gwent.
Tell us about your family
My father was a wayleaves officer with the South Wales Electricity Board. He was responsible for brokering contracts between SWEB and the landowners/farmers whose acreage needed to be crossed by power lines. But because he was a countryman and loved the landscape, he was an artist when it came to placing them where they’d least be visible, hiding them in valleys and along the edges of woodlands. My mother was a hairdresser. She loved films and from an early age she took me every Saturday afternoon to the cinema. Never to see kids’ films though. She loved more dramatic fare, and so my tastes were quite unusual. I don’t know how she bucked the certificate system. She probably knew the local cinema manager and bargained haircuts against him turning a blind eye to a seven year old watching Bette Davies melodramas!
What are you best known for?
Probably my Mari Lwyd-themed series of 2000-2001, The Mare’s Tale. I had an exhibition of that name, and it made quite a splash. There was a book of poetry by the late Catriona Urquhart that accompanied it, and in 2013 the composer Mark Bowden and the poet Damian Walford Davies made a chamber work of the same name, based on the underlying narrative of a psychological haunting.
Tell us about your exhibition (what’s it called, what’s it on/where is it being held?)
The exhibition is at Oriel Tegfryn, Menai Bridge, and it’s the result of four years of exploration on the theme of Hansel & Gretel.
When is it running from/to?
Sept 1st – Sept 24th.
What can people expect?
Last year the publisher Random Spectacular commissioned a picture book from me that was based on the fairy tale. As my version is very dark it’s been marketed as being more suitable for adults. (It’s been described as ‘George Romero meets the Brothers Grimm!)
Simultaneously I was commissioned by Benjamin Pollock’s Toyshop in Covent Garden to design a toy theatre assembly kit of Hansel & Gretel. This has been quite a thrill. I played with a Benjamin Pollock toy theatre when I was a child, and so it’s a great privilege to be asked to make a new one to bear his name. Published this summer, in contrast to the picture book it’s a sunnier affair, quite suitable for children. Even so I put my own visual spin on it. You won’t have seen a Hansel & Gretel quite like it.
The Tegfryn Gallery exhibition consists of all the artworks made for the picture book and the toy theatre, plus illustrations for Hansel & Gretel alphabet primers that I made several years ago. Prepare for a Hansel & Gretel Fest!
Tell us five things which make your exhibition great?
1) Scary and beautiful is an alluring mix!
2) I can guarantee it’s not going to be like anything you’ve ever experienced at Oriel Tegfryn.
3) What’s not to love about art in which family dysfunction, unhealthy appetites and manslaughter are the principal themes? This is a fairytale for the soap generation.
4) There are Liquorice Allsorts deployed as weapons and gingerbread men that bite back!
5) If you want to know what horrors lie beneath a witch’s prosthetic nose, then this is the exhibition you’ve been waiting for!
Tell us what’s good about the venue
It’s a warm and welcoming gallery with wonderful staff. Visiting Oriel Tegfryn is like calling on friends who are always pleased to see you.
Who is your favourite artist and why?
The ‘who’ is George Stubbs, and the ‘why’ is because he painted animals with unparalleled compassion. His Hambletonian, Rubbing Down may be numbered among the world’s greatest equestrian artworks.
What piece of work are you most proud of and why?
Green George. It’s in a private collection here in Wales. If you type the title and my name into a search engine, you can see it. I paint only for myself and I never think about who might purchase. I made Green George as a painting I’d like to live with, though in fact I never did. It was finished only days before being shipped to the gallery, and it sold immediately. I knew even as I painted it that I was riding the wind. I couldn’t have bettered it.
Tell us a little known fact about yourself:
I once played Batman’s nemesis, the Riddler, in an American musical.
What are your best and worst habits?
I’m a fiercely loyal and loving friend. But I’m also implacably unforgiving when betrayed. It’s an unattractive trait.
What’s next for you? What are you currently working on, or what do you plan to work on?
I’m on the last lap of a fourteen print series on the theme of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in collaboration with Daniel Bugg at the Penfold Press. The press has been publishing the series sequentially. The art historian James Russell has been writing accompanying texts. It’s been a wonderful experience. The Martin Tinney Gallery is having an exhibition of the work in January.
Then I go into rehearsals for a new music theatre work of Hansel & Gretel that I’m designing and directing. The production opens in London before embarking on a year long tour.
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Invitation to ‘Gawain and the Green Knight’
Please join us if you are able at the opening of:
Gawain and the Green Knight: Clive Hicks-Jenkins and the Penfold Press
Prints, paintings and drawings on the theme of the medieval poem
Thursday 8th September, 6 pm – 7.30 pm at
The Martin Tinney Gallery
18 St. Andrew’s Crescent, Cardiff. CF10 3DD. +44 (0)29 2064 1411
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Exhibition runs from Thursday 8th Sept to Saturday 1st Oct, 2016
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Art commentator James Russell writes of the Penfold Press collaboration between artist Clive Hicks-Jenkins and printmaker Daniel Bugg:
“The story is the kind you might find in The Mabinogion. Sir Gawain is more human than your average legendary hero. Having taken up the challenge offered at the Camelot Christmas feast by the terrifying Green Knight, he embarks on a quest to find this ogre, only to be tested – and found wanting – in unexpected ways. Sir Gawain is both a glittering knight and a fallible young man, and it is this flawed human character that intrigues Clive. Each print is inspired by the text and rooted stylistically in its world, but beyond that Clive and Dan have allowed their imagination free rein.”
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Arenig
Good news today from the Martin Tinney Gallery in Cardiff. My little still-life with Arenig Fawr beyond it was the first work to sell in the just opened Arenig exhibition. That’s a nice boost to the confidence in the run-up to my one-man exhibition, Telling Tales, opening next month at Martin’s Tegfryn Gallery in Menai Bridge. Feeling chipper!
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Still-life Under Arenig
Clive Hicks-Jenkins. Acrylic on gessoed panel. 33 x 31 cm. 2014
SOLD
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Arenig Fawr
Still-life Under Arenig
Clive Hicks-Jenkins. Acrylic on gessoed panel. 33 x 31 cm. 2014
Enquiries to the Martin Tinney Gallery, Cardiff
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As a big J. D. Innes exhibition is about to open at the National Museum of Wales, Martin Tinney is holding an exhibition of gallery artists working to the theme of the Arenig mountain range in North Wales, a landscape Innes loved to paint.
I’ve made a still-life with Arenig Fawr beyond it. The foliate-head jug is one of many I made with Pip Koppel when Peter and I first moved to Aberystwyth. (she threw and I added handles and decorated) The small oval box once contained pralines given to us by our friend Rex Harley. The box was originally decorated with a printed design that I over-painted with waves and a masted ship, and has appeared in numerous still-life paintings I’ve made. In the bottom of the box is a drawing of a fish.
James Dickson Innes
Arenig, Sunny Evening c.1911-12
During his short life (1887 – 1914) James Dickson Innes stayed for several seasons in North Wales, close to the Arenig mountains. Innes was a pioneer in Britain of directly painted landscapes in a rather primitive style, which he first used in Collioure in the South of France in 1908. (Prior to Collioure, he’d painted in a conventionally academic manner.) He exhibited with the Camden Town Group in 1911, but like his friend Augustus John was only a fringe member.
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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.
countdown to the london art fair…
… opening this evening.
Detail from: The Greening of Gawain
Clive Hicks-Jenkins RCA
Collage of acrylic paint, coloured pencil and ink on paper – 2012 – 62 x 57 cm
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MARTIN TINNEY GALLERY
STAND 21 at LONDON ART FAIR 2013
BUSINESS DESIGN CENTRE, ISLINGTON N1
16 – 20 JANUARY 2013
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FAIR OPENING HOURS:
Tuesday 15th January 6.30 pm – 9 pm (invited guests only)
Wednesday 16th 11 am – 9 pm
Thursday 17th 11 am – 9 pm
Friday 18th 11 am – 7 pm
Saturday 19th 10 am – 7 pm
Sunday 2oth 10 am – 5 pm
Clive Hicks-Jenkins at MTG
In addition to the paintings that will be on the Martin Tinney stand at the forthcoming London Art Fair, these are some works of mine presently available at the Martin Tinney Gallery, Cardiff.
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Turn of the Tide
Clive Hicks-Jenkins RCA
Acrylic on panel 2010 41 x 63 cm
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Wolf Boy
Clive Hicks-Jenkins RCA
Acrylic on panel 2010 56 x 61 cm
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My Dream Farm
Clive Hicks-Jenkins RCA
Acrylic on panel 2011 60 x 128 cm
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Detail from My Dream Farm
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The Rapture
Clive Hicks-Jenkins RCA
Acrylic on panel 2011 153 x 122 cm
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Detail from The Rapture (modelled by my dog, Jacket)
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Sleep Fall
Clive Hicks-Jenkins RCA
Conté pencil and acrylic on arches 2011 57 x 53 cm
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The Angels in their Anguish
Clive Hicks-Jenkins RCA
Acrylic on panel 2010 112 x 82 cm
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How to find the gallery
Martin Tinney Gallery is situated in Cardiff city centre, less than 5 minutes walk from the National Museum of Wales. There are several car parks immediately nearby, and Pay and Display on-street parking directly outside.
18 St. Andrew’s Crescent
Cardiff
CF10 3DD
Tel +44 (0) 29 2064 1411
e-mail: mtg@artwales.com
OPENING HOURS
Monday-Friday, 10:00-18:00
Saturday, 10:00-17:00
Closed Sundays and Bank Holidays
Clive Hicks-Jenkins' Artlog: 
