The Laurel Prize

 

I’m both honoured and very happy to have been asked by Simon Armitage to create the logo of his ‘Laurel Prize’ for eco-poetry, an annual award that’s been launched today by Sally Carruthers, executive director of the Poetry School.

My early sketches had included a stash of drawings of an ark, its rainbow replaced with arching branches of laurel.

 

 

But at the last minute I roughed out a single sketch of a paper boat adrift on rough water. Simon wrote back:

“A strange synchronicity for me: I’ve often described the act of writing a poem being like making a paper boat and putting it into the river – you don’t know if it will make it across the ocean or sink before the first bend. 

To me it symbolises hope, fragile hope, the traditional art of writing and doing so against rising sea levels. I also think it’s no bad thing to move away from the direct “ark” idea since the ark is more particularly connected with the olive tree, as far as my memory of bible stories tells. So in a sense we’re creating our own symbolism. S”

…

So the paper boat was given the go-ahead by the organising team and several trial versions later –

– the finished render was agreed that has become the symbol of the new award.

Simon writes in today’s Guardian newspaper:

“Ted Hughes was often seen as being unfashionable for his nature writing and it was something he doggedly persevered with, to the point where he was a campaigner as well at low levels. It’s interesting to me that poetry has been able to swing back in the direction of nature; it didn’t fit in with a lot of the psychologies of the 60s and 70s and 80s, it wasn’t metropolitan, and maybe attached itself to the Romantics – Wordworth and Coleridge and particularly John Clare. Now nature has very much come back into the centre of what poetry can, and should, be dealing with.”

…

Afterword

Sometimes here at the Artlog, the most interesting things get written not in the posts but in the comments. ‘Keviniz’ wrote to me: “Love seeing the development of your finished piece. Thinking through your changes was like choosing words and images in poetry. Wonderful!”

I replied:

“Kevin, it was a happy process. These days Simon is a busy man but he nevertheless found time to answer questions and offer observations. To me it was crucial that the image should have personal resonance for him. We’ve worked together quite a bit now and I figured he’d asked me because he believed I’d have connection and insight. But it also had to be a masthead that made sense to anyone coming to The Laurel Prize for the first time.

Logos are sometimes abstract, more of a visual aesthetic than a figurative representation of a product or organisation. The Laurel Prize logo, while stylised, is figurative. It offers clues as to what idea it represents. During my research I looked at examples of icons that have lasted the test of time and have been robust and flexible inasmuch as they’ve been regularly re-designed without losing their recognition factors. The Lloyds Bank ‘black horse’ and Penguin’s penguin have magnificently lasted the course. Because Simon’s brainchild is The Laurel Award, we had to work out how ‘the laurel’ might figure in it. The difficulty is that the intact ‘laurel wreath’ has become the signifier of excellence for film, and so I almost immediately discarded any notion of a laurel crown. For the longest time I toyed with an open book to represent poetry, and I tried in every way to incorporate it to the point where I had it transforming into other elements.

I have clumsy sketches in my project book of an ark with its pitched roof formed from a book. There are drawings of an open book beneath an ark, and others where the shape of the upward facing open book is one of the waves keeping the ark afloat. The more you try to pull off these weird transformations, the further away you get from a simple, graphic solution. Nevertheless you have to try many ideas just to be sure of what works and what doesn’t. The book in one form or another stayed in my drawings for a long time, first with the ark and afterwards with the paper boat, before it gradually dawned on the team that in terms of meaning, it had become redundant to the image. We went at a stroke from four elements – a book, a paper-boat, water and laurel sprigs, to three. And that’s how it stayed to the conclusion. We had storm-tossed seas and calm seas, a placidly sailing paper boat and one being thrown about in a tempest. Laurel sprigs arced like rainbows or arose sparkling from the water like Esther Williams in one of those super-kitsch Hollywood musicals. In one of my favourite drawings a pair of laurel sprigs curved upwards either side of the paper boat like unfurling wings. But in the end we wanted the dynamic of movement, too, and so the laurels were detached from boat and waves to be added as sprigs blowing around to suggest blustery weather. Climate change is implied, though without turning the image into anything overly apocalyptic.

In a way I had to very thoroughly over-think the brief before coming back to something so simple that it doesn’t seem as though much thought at all has gone into it. But that’s probably the way many simple solutions are arrived at. The destination is not so very far from the starting-point, but we travel to it not as the crow flies, directly, but by a tortuously circuitous route that ensures we take in all the landmarks along the way. Just in case any one of them might give us the solution.

I filled a project book exploring ideas for The Laurel Prize, and then made ten fully finished versions for the team to select from. It was quite an adventure and makes me appreciate even more than I usually do the convoluted processes that have to be gone through to arrive at an effective, simple result.”

…

Bernie wrote: Wonderful, it also reminded me of the points of a star.
B xxx

 

I replied:

“I keep on thinking what a nice animation might one day be made showing the wind of climate change tearing the pages from an open notebook, one of which blows through an open window and onto the desk of a poet who writes a poem on it that gets snatched away by a thieving magpie before dropping onto a beach where it’s found, folded into a paper boat and set upon the waves by a child!”

…

4 * Review for Hansel & Gretel from Rian Evans in The Guardian

Parabola Arts Centre, Cheltenham

In this striking modern update, set to words by Simon Armitage and music by Matthew Kaner, the children are refugees and the fairytale is a nightmare

Pulling all the strings … Hansel & Gretel with Diana Ford and Lizzie Wort. Photograph: Spencer McPherson/Still Moving Media

Not a sugary dream, but a nightmare in eight scenes: make no bones about poet Simon Armitage’s contemporary retelling of the tale most familiar in the Brothers Grimm version. Hansel and Gretel’s plight becomes that of child refugees, whose parents’ agonising decision is to abandon their offspring to give them their only chance of surviving war. Armitage took his cue from the darkly imaginative illustrations by artist Clive Hicks-Jenkins, who has now translated those original visions into a puppet show with new music by Matthew Kaner. In this premiere performance at the Cheltenham Festival, staged by Goldfield Productions, what appeared at first to be a slight, small-scale affair in the end resonated altogether more deeply.

Kaner’s quintet of players – strings, wind and toy pianos – were arranged on either side of a screen whose animated shadow play featured first the parents and then the ravenous craw of the archaeopteryx-like witch. On the central trestle table were Hansel and Gretel, wooden puppets barely a foot high that were manipulated by Diana Ford and Lizzie Wort. It was the intimacy of tiny gestures offering expressive detail, in turn mirroring Kaner’s musical mood, that spoke volumes. Armitage’s words are the constantly shining white pebbles guiding the piece; his final verbal riff on light and dark will be even better savoured on the published page. Narrator Adey Grummet – twice bursting into sung lines – emphasised the mix of humour and satire with the moments of dystopian horror, making this an all too timely reminder of some children’s living, waking, starving nightmare.

 

Rian Evans

Touring until 4 November.