Crown of Leaves, by Clive Hicks-Jenkins, 2016
Clive Hicks-Jenkins lives in the Welsh hills at his home Ty Isaf with his beloved Jack Russell terrier, Jack. To purchase his work contact the Martin Tinney Gallery.
Clive's official school portrait. (I'm guessing his sweetness is about seven years old.)
I have many questions, Clive. The moment I saw your work, I was captivated. We share a love of the medieval and the imagination. We both embrace living remotely with our art, close to nature. Can you begin by telling your readers about your childhood, and whether or not you believe it influenced your art today? What was the ten-year-old Clive like? Where would we find him?
I was shy almost to the point of muteness in company, though happy as a lark as long as I had books to read or pencils and paper to draw. My mother often said later that she thought I was deft enough with a pencil, though nothing survives. My parents were not of a generation that held their children's scribblings to be as anything of value or worthy of keeping. But in all other respects, my mother was hugely supportive and spent money that was scarce on the books that I loved so much. I have an earlier memory of being in my father's lap as he taught me to read from a Rupert Bear annual he held in front of us. "C" is for cat. C - A - T - CAT!" That was the best lesson of all, and the best gift, my precocious capacity to read. I was reading reasonably well by the time I went to primary school. Interesting, because I never saw him read a book himself. Papers to do with work, or a newspaper. But never anything else. I'm not sure he can ever have read a novel. But he was good with words and had a gold medal in Pitman's shorthand. To the day he died at eighty-seven he could take down a conversation around the table conducted at a fair old lick. All my life I have loved and collected books. I left school when I was fifteen and a half and began to work. Everything I learned thereafter came from books.
My mother loved mysteries and romance novels. I cut my teeth on Agatha Christies and Georgette Heyers. But her true passion was for the cinema, and she made me her confederate in that from the beginning. Not children's films, but just about everything else. We would sit in the 'dress-circle' of the local cinema on Saturday afternoon—she thought the stalls vulgar—and I would snuggle with her and watch the screen entranced. Pictures conjured out of light above our heads, the beams turbulent with the rising smoke from her cigarettes. I thought the whole experience of cinema was the most glamorous and thrilling. I lived for those Saturday matinees, the cinema almost deserted. It was our realm.
I played with toy theaters as a child. An actor friend of the family gave me some old Pollock's scenic sheets, though no stage and no character sheets. So I made a stage and drew the characters. And here I am, more than a half-century on, still making toy theaters and characters to play on their stages. I also had marionettes, which I loved. I was never happier than when making constructed worlds. I felt safer in them. I still do.
The Green Knight Arrives, by Clive Hicks-Jenkins, 2016, private collection
What training have you had if any? Is there a mentor in your past? I am thinking of historical characters that inspire, as well as feet on the ground...
Mentors. There have been many and various throughout my life, but I'll confine myself here to the early ones. I don't think I even realized what was happening with the earlier ones. I know I didn't thank them, not realizing at the time the value of their contributions. Mel Thomas and Mollie Wanklyn at Monmouthshire Young People's Theater. Mel was the Drama Officer for the county, and he took me to MYPT when my parents confided to him that they were worried about me. Mollie was the main tutor and director, and she enthralled me with her "actress" voice and inspiring choral verse speaking, which hit me like revelatory lightening. Myra Silcox, my fearsomely waspish but encouraging ballet teacher, and Bunny Griffiths, who cast and choreographed me in the MYPT production of Peter and the Wolf, and showed me how shyness could vanish when I inhabited another character. Later, in London at a vocational school, my headmistress, Miss Brierly, once paid—privately—for a small group of pupils to attend a performance of Gemma Jones as Shaw's Saint Joan. We sat in a box, and it was another revelatory moment. I've watched Gemma Jones on stage and in films all my life, most recently in the film God's Own Country. Boy and man I've loved her work, all unknown to her. She is everything I most admire in an actor. Her eyes can tell you all you need to know about her character, her life, her dreams, her joy, her despair. Miss Brierly opened a door to all that for me, with the gift of a ticket to a performance in which a gifted actor gave a luminous performance that became a gold standard for me as I moved toward a career as a director. In my teens, after I'd left the school, a letter came in which she enquired what the results of my O levels (graduation exams for non-Brit readers) had been. She wrote, joshingly, "You children can be so ungrateful. You never think we'd like to know!" And I lived up to that summation because I didn't reply. Awkward and unformed as I was, her words at that time didn't strike me with the force they do in memory, all these years later. I wish, I wish...
Clive, Molly Wanklyn and his friend Linda Henderson, backstage during a performance of Maeterlinck's The Bluebird.
I had no further education after vocational school. My first career as a choreographer and director ended when I was in my early thirties. I was successful enough, but not, for many reasons, happy, and I walked away from it. These days I'm skeptical of vocational schools as forcing beds for young talent. I went to ballet school when I was too young to know my own mind, though I thought I did. I believe that children who embark too soon on their training and career trajectories, too often lack a more rounded view of the world, and that can be catastrophically disadvantageous in later life. This is why you see so much burnout in fields of sport and entertainment. I think I was quite strong to walk away from a professional world that didn't make me happy, though it was a strength that came wrapped in the disguise of a nervous breakdown. Life is complicated. I walked away from something I had fallen out of love with. Yet that didn't stop me from grieving for what was lost. I grieved for my abandoned career for a very long time. I was forty before I began painting. I taught myself. The last thing on earth I wanted at that point was to go to school again. The process was private, diligent, and exhaustive. I have always worked ferociously hard. I don't have an off-switch.
Clive, about sixteen years old, filming on the Yorkshire moors. He is wearing the boater.
Working with a dancer at the Vienna Festival.
You live in a lovely estate called Ty Isaf, does it have a family history or did you and yours adopt it?
It's not an estate. It's a house with some land. About four acres. A horse paddock with some loose-boxes, two orchards, a rose terrace, a lawn, and a pleasure garden. We also have a bit of woodland, a stream and a couple of waterfalls. it sounds grander than it is. A lot of the garden has a natural, wild feel. We've planted many trees. In the first years of the 20th century, Ty Isaf was the family home of Rose Macaulay, the novelist. She lived here with her parents after she'd graduated from university, and wrote her first novel in the house. (We don't know which room was hers.) We have photographs of how the house looked back then, which was not so very different to now, though they had a grassed tennis court with pretty corner pavillions that's now just a lawn. The pavillions are long gone.
The view from Clive's studio at Ty Isaf.
You post photos of your studio on Instagram, tucked up under the eaves. While there, how do you work? In silence or with something to listen to? What things in life steal you away?
Life steals me away. Walks with the dog, endless organization of exhibitions and all that goes into them. Discussions with my framer, photographing and scanning work for reproduction, the masses of e-mails that underline every project, whether a book cover design, an animated film to accompany a concert, a themed exhibition, or more recently, the collaborative work with the Penfold Press to produce and publish fourteen screenprints on the theme of the poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I lecture, I mentor and I occasionally teach. I curate. This idea of me in my eyrie high above the Ystwyth Valley, is a fiction, of sorts. Partially true, but mostly not. I am, in some ways, like a factory. There are many components to every outcome, and all must be managed. Right now I'm arranging a study-day as one of the events surrounding my forthcoming exhibition at MoMA Machynlleth. There are guest speakers to be contacted and briefed, travel and accommodation arrangements to be made. Six speakers and several interviewers. A pop-up bookshop to sell the books to the audience. I don't have a team of people doing this for me. I have people around me who help, but I don't pass responsibility to them. It's all a joint effort. I like collaborative endeavor, but I choose my collaborators extremely carefully. What happens at the easel or drawing board is just a part of the output. I work long hours.
To be continued...
The Soldier at Segura, by Clive Hicks-Jenkins, 2017
Clive is headed to Andalusia, where he will be attending his animation of Stravinsky's The Soldier's Tale. The "spanking" new version he's edited in association with festival director Daniel Broncano will be screened at the Música en Segura festival in Andalusia, May 16th, 2018.
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