Man Slain by a Tiger

Man Slain by a Tiger. Screen-print. 56 x 56 cms.

Image by Clive Hicks-Jenkins, printed in an edition of 35 by Daniel Bugg at Penfold Press.

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Last weekend print-maker Daniel Bugg arrived at Ty Isaf with a brown paper parcel containing proofs and prints of my first screen-print project with the Penfold Press, Man Slain by a Tiger. (You can read about the genesis of the print HERE.) Dan has made a wonderful job of the image, and it was a pleasure to sit down with him at the dining-table on Saturday morning to number and sign the edition of thirty-five prints.

In a fortnight I’ll be making the stencils for the first image in our fourteen print series based on the medieval poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I’m using the Simon Armitage translation/reworking for my inspiration, which is the version I like best. The print will be launched in time for Christmas.

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Ben’s Beast: ‘Man Slain by a Tiger’

Over at the Penfold Press in Selby, Daniel Bugg is working away on a test piece in the run-up to beginning our collaboration on the ambitious, fourteen-print series based on the medieval poem of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. But instead of making a Gawain test print, Dan and I opted to produce a print of what had originally been a very small drawing I’d made as a birthday gift for my friend Ben Koppel.

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In 18th-century India, the ruler of Mysore, Tipu Sultan, commissioned the making of an automaton representing an incident in which a man had been attacked and killed by a tiger. It’s thought that the ‘toy’ was an expression of Tipu Sultan’s hatred for the British, and it was discovered and requisitioned by the East India troops when they stormed his Summer Palace in the capital in 1799. Tipu’s Tiger, as it’s since become known, is now in the collection of the V&A.

The gruesome incident was also commemorated in a rather jaunty Staffordshire group called The Death of Munrow, and it’s this vivid ceramic that was the model for the drawing made for Ben.

In the Staffordshire piece the man is identified as ‘Munrow’, and shown in the uniform of an army officer. However, it’s believed that the historic event commemorated in the Staffordshire group, was  the death in 1792 of Hugh Munro, a civilian. He was the son of General Sir Hector Munro, who had commanded a division during Sir Eyre Coote’s victory at the Battle of Porto Novo in 1781, when Hyder Ali, Tipu Sultan’s father, was defeated with a loss of 10,000 men. Eleven years later Hugh Munro, while on a hunting expedition in India, was attacked and killed by a tiger, and Tipu’s Tiger appears to be an expression of schadenfreude by Tipu Sultan at the death of an old enemy’s son. The Staffordshire group The Death of Munrow, seems to have conflated the event portrayed in Tipu’s Tiger, with Tipu Sultan’s hatred of the British armed forces in India.

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A few weeks ago I started making the separations for the print, working in lithographic crayon and paint on drafting-film and TrueGrain.

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Below: pencil guide.

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Below: lithographic crayon on TrueGrain, a drafting-film with a granulated quality that’s akin to lithography stone.

From my separations, Dan made the screens ready for printing, and began the process of assembling the print. Here are some of the proofs made as he’s tried various colours.

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Below: a lemony yellow lends a pleasingly toy-like quality to the image.

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Above: a warmer yellow, and an adjusted blue, red and pink, printed before the final, black pass.

Below: an olive green better harmonises the print.

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Sombre shadow makes the image deeper and the mood more elegiac.

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A rich and harmonic image, with the yellow, warmed, and the green not unduly pulling the eye.

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These will soon be arriving in the post for me to look over. When Dan and I have agreed the way forward, he’ll begin the job of making a final proof, and then editioning.

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The Beastly and Mr Beam

I am some degrees beyond excited. Indeed much closer to bursting-with-creativity like a dam about to haemorrhage a torrent. The sublime Jeffery Beam had agreed to be my collaborator on Beastly Passions. We discussed the poetry he might pen to accompany my images, which take as their theme the darker, Penny Dreadful realms of Staffordshire pottery groups, in which unspeakable doings such as murders by brutes and savagings at the sharp-ends of escaped menagerie beasts, were commemorated in naive imagery straight from the world of the Regency toy theatre. I had made a tiny, postcard-size drawing of ‘Tipu’s Tiger’ as a starting point, and Jeffery had been moved by it. He has since written a poem which has my mind spinning into delirium at the sheer, heartrending beauty of it. I cannot share it yet, or indeed any time soon, as this project won’t come to fruition until 2016. But here, to tantalise, a tiny fragment of what Jeffery has today presented to me: That terror could have a pelt so sheened and orange So like a tower at dusk on a precipitous cliff Ocean below rushing to otherwise From The Kiss: Tipu’s Tiger, by Jeffery Beam We are up and away, Mr Beam and I, and the creative riptide is tugging us far out to sea. We may be absent for some time, but we shall return with treasures.

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Below: preparatory sketch for Beastly Pleasures. Woman slain by an escaped tiger and her baby eaten.

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