Clive Hicks-Jenkins

Clive Hicks-Jenkins

Grey Mare Press

The National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth recently mounted an exhibition of the work of Clive Hicks-Jenkins to mark his sixtieth birthday. Two books were also published during this year, one offering colour plates and critical discussions, the other a collection of poems by six poets with detail from paintings on which they comment. What follows here are some of my own instinctive responses to this art.

I referred some time ago to this artist's work by using one of his illustrations to accompany previous blog comments on ‘The Ballad of the Mari Lwyd’ by Vernon Watkins. The collection of poems published this year includes a more recent Mari Lwyd poem by Catriona Urquhart. The stark black & white series of conte drawings featuring a looming horse's head attached to, or manipulated by, naked male figures have all the balletic energy of the artist’s previous trade of choreographer. His fascination with this folklore figure is apparent but many of his other paintings also feature animals in some relation to humans and this, for me, emerges as a dominant theme in my response to the paintings. 

 ‘Green George’ re-interprets the dragon-slaying myth, portraying the beast with a set of human-like teeth and eyes directly confronting his killer who rides on a crimson horse returning his gaze, has green-hued flesh and wears a soldier’s steel helmet. Physically near, but as if inhabiting a different plane, a girl sits self-absorbed. Symbolic items like a maze are placed in the paintings in a style reminiscent of David Jones. 

 ‘Elijah and the Raven’, ‘Kevin and his Sheep’, ‘The Blind Boy and his Beast’ and many other paintings convey a world where humans and animals are configured together in attitudes ranging from love to antagonism, but always with an essential sense of relationship. Wolves often appear as pet dogs, but without losing any of their fierceness or wildness. Clive Hicks-Jenkins’ work is characterised by Damian Walford Davies as ekphrastic, underlining the interactions between his art and literature. Given his own inspiration by literary texts, and the number of poems inspired by his paintings, it seems appropriate to offer my own brief commentary on one of his works: 

 The Mari Lwyd Approaches 

Barely contained, the man-horse or

Horse-man who is also

The Night Mare from Midwinter’s

Darkness strains at a leash

That hardly reigns him in

As the white sheet falls away

Revealing no ghost but

Bare flesh rampaging

Through the hard edges

Of habitations defensively protruding. 

The Ballad of the Outer Dark

from Clive Hicks-Jenkins' 'Mari Lwyd' Series

Come to me, Mother of God, come down as the old year ends,

Frost-Mother, Mother of the Stars, and the white, wave-beaten sands.

I hear the seawave fall like a knife, dividing exiles and friends.

So wrote Vernon Watkins in his Ballad of the Outer Dark, a sequel to his Ballad of the Mari Lwyd. Written in the 1960’s, more than twenty years after the earlier ballad, it was never published in his lifetime. The later ballad in one sense picks up where the earlier one left off, the inmates of the house going out into the night bearing the horse’s head, taking the interpretation of the custom a stage further as if the Dark itself needed to be confronted for a full resolution of the traditional appeasement of that which is outside the circle of Light.

The fire we loved, the hours we lived

Are snatched away by thieves.

says one of the voices. While another voice responds:

We are ourselves the shafts of white

Those men of firelight mock.

And we must drift like flakes of snow

That know not where to rest,

So soft upon the night they go

Whom none will take for guest.

The final lines of this ballad:

Who bears the midnight Mari

Has Poverty for Bride.

suggest a consequence of the lack of resolution of this struggle between Light and Dark as the New Year is born. The horse’s head is, in fact, brought in and prosperity assured, but the later ballad in some ways completes the earlier one in transcending the rejection of the ‘Outer Dark’. This seems a much more plausible application of the custom of carrying the head of the Mari Lwyd  from house to house at New Year while the earlier ballad seems to fit better the coming of Winter in November.