Puppets, Birds & Wycinanki: Clive Hicks-Jenkins Talks to Anna Zaranko

beauty_and_the_beast.jpg, default, Endpaper by Clive Hicks-Jenkins for ‘Beauty and the Beast’, forthcoming from Design for Today, photo: Design for Today, Puppets, Birds & Wycinanki: Clive Hicks-Jenkins Talks to Anna Zaranko

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Exhilarated by Polish folk art, the artist Clive Hicks-Jenkins talks with translator Anna Zaranko to reveal the sources and approaches that bring his theatrical cornucopia of methods to life.

Born in Wales, Clive Hicks-Jenkins spent the early part of his career as a choreographer, stage director and designer, actor and dancer. In the 1990s, he decided to concentrate on painting. Since then, Hicks-Jenkins has had many solo exhibitions and his paintings, prints and private press books can be found in public collections around the world.

On a personal level, I found him to be the most gracious and generous human being. It was such a privilege to talk to him and be given so much of his time. Hopefully, this comes across in our conversation, for which I am very grateful.

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Clive Hicks-Jenkins in Yorkshire, photo: Joanne Crawford

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Anna Zaranko: You recently worked with Simon Armitage on Hansel and Gretel: a Nightmare in Eight Scenes, published by Design For Today, which won the V&A Illustrated Book Award for 2020, and you’ve just produced an astonishingly beautiful little picture book called The Bird House. A reader interested in things Polish might detect something very familiar in your work!

Clive Hicks-Jenkins: Though it’s probably evident how much I love and am influenced by Polish folk art, I’m not an expert on it, and so my attachment is more by way of an artist’s admiration. I grew up in the days when European illustration was everywhere in UK bookshops, and the aesthetics have stayed with me, particularly in my work as an illustrator. What you absorb as a child stays with you.

In terms of paper cuts, I’m strongly attracted to the Polish tradition, though I also love the unique paper cuts of Hans Christian Anderson, the shadow puppets of Lotte Reiniger, and the silhouette cuts of itinerant early American folk artists. My style – such as it is – has all these threads weaving through it.

AZ: Can you remember where you first came across paper cut-outs? There’s a passage in a Polish classic, Władysław Reymont’s The Peasants, where the villagers have gathered together one winter evening in the presence of a storyteller who is telling the kind of tale they like best, full of phantoms and wonders, and the most beautiful girl in the village is making extraordinary paper cut-outs illustrating the tales as they progress, but she does it so quickly that I initially read it with some scepticism.

CHJ: When I was 15 and a half, I went to work for an internationally touring puppet company. My mentor there was the director of the company, Jane Phillips, who when young had been an assistant to Lotte Reiniger, and she described how the great animator cut her figures straight from the card, with no guide drawings. Reiniger was an extraordinarily influential creator. She had a multi-plane camera, devised I believe by her husband, way ahead of the Disney studios. These days her reputation rests mainly among those in the animation industry, where she’s held in the highest esteem.

But the craft she practised had its roots in the folk art tradition. She took folk art and elevated and reinvented it into cinema. Before her there had been silhouette-cutting and there had been shadow puppetry. But she put them together with stop-motion, and created an entirely new form.

AZ: I believe you’re also familiar with a Polish book in verse, from the 1950s, by Wanda Borudzka, which introduces folk crafts to children?

CHJ: The Caricature Theatre workshops housed a magnificent library of books that Jane Phillips had built covering all aspects of the performing arts, including puppetry. And because puppetry is so closely aligned with folk art, that too was amply represented, as was book illustration and stage design. The company members were encouraged to use the library, and I buried my nose in accounts of the great European animators: Trnka, Norstein, Ivanov-Vano and Starewicz.

From those shelves I learned about the Russian, Czech and Polish traditions of illustration, folk art and puppetry, and began to compile an acquisition list of book titles I’d thereafter hunt down for my own shelves, among them Wanda Borudzka’s Malowane Domy with illustrations by Zofia Czasznicka, and Folk Toys: Les Jouets Populaires [by Emanuel Hercik]. Malowane Domy was a treasury of Polish folk art, and the aesthetic found fertile ground in me. My love of paper-cuts has been formed by many traditions, including German Scherenschnitte and Mexican Papel Picado (delightfully translated as ‘pecked paper’). But my practice has undoubtedly been principally shaped by the Polish form, wycinanki.

AZ: You also have a collection of toys which appear in your work – some Polish ones among them – can you tell us something about those?

CHJ: I’ve collected toys for many years to use as inspiration in my work. I have quite a weakness for Russian tinplate, vintage marionettes and glove-puppets, Polish carved and painted birds and Krakow crèches. I’ve just produced a little picture book for Design For Today, The Bird House, in which I’ve used painted wooden birds from Poland and toy buildings from the Erzgebirge toy-making region of Germany.

AZ: The birds all come from village artisans in Poland – are you conscious of which bird comes from which maker?

CHJ: I occasionally make enquiries of my friend Zara, who imports Polish folk art that she then sells through her website, ‘Frank & Lusia’. I don’t know the names of all the makers who have work in my collection – there are a good many – but I do know of Zak. Zara has placed special orders for birds from him for me as I particularly love what he makes.

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Clive Hicks-Jenkins’ desk with Polish birds on it, photo: courtesy of the artist

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AZ: Much of your work is distinguished by intense colour – can you tell us something about the palette you’re drawn to?

CHJ: It’s rather hard to explain where something as deeply embedded and intuitive as the use of colour comes from. As an easel painter, my heart lies in the Renaissance, and the fingerprints of my early artist heroes are all over my work. However, in terms of my illustration portfolio, I can see the threads of attachment more readily lie in the vibrant palettes of European folk artists, though of course many other elements come into play. While an ardent colourist, I have to admit that I often begin an illustration project with only the haziest idea of what the colour for it may be. In fact, I can state definitively that there is never a plan. I start the work and I try to keep everything fluid. Form and composition come first, and somewhere along the line I begin to see how the image will coalesce in terms of palette.

AZ: Do you paint directly from nature? Looking at the figures in your drawings, I’m intrigued by their joints! Again, there is a strong correlation with toys and puppets, as though a sense of theatre is never far away.

CHJ: I do and always have observed and painted from nature. But these days it’s less a goal than a method of gently easing my way into a subject. Whenever I draw or paint something new, I go back to the source. Whether that’s from the natural world or a man-made object, it’s where I’ll begin. But having familiarised myself, I’ll move on.

The worlds I want to build are not intended to be real. They’re constructs that hold elements of the real, but are expressed in ways that are more about what I feel, than what I see. So the human children of Hansel & Gretel (Design for Today, 2018) are expressed as wooden puppets, and the birds that eat Hansel’s trail of crumbs are clockwork. This is not because I’m trying to be cute, but because these stand-ins are better at expressing universal truths. Paint the house down the road, and it will just be the house down the road. But paint a toy house, and it will become the essence of a house. It becomes more real than the real thing.

I was from the earliest age a puppeteer. Just 7 when I was given my first marionette, I understood it from the moment I laid eyes on it, almost like a musical instrument that I already knew how to play. Some musicians play almost from the beginning ‘by ear’. I did the same thing with puppets. They were a conduit for expression. I could pour energy down from a control-bar and through the strings, and a puppet would live for me. Later, as a young actor, I was always aware of a level of self-consciousness in my performances. But with puppets, never.

As a painter, I work from a starting point of drawing a person or animal known to me. I find a model right for my project, and then draw obsessively. At that point, I have all the material I can glean from life, then I begin ‘creating’ a maquette (or maquettes), and after that, begins the drawing again, this time using the maquette as the model. It’s quite a round-about way of getting to my destination, but it suits me.

Selected Works by Clive Hicks-Jenkins – Image Gallery

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AZ: The brightness and luminosity, the joyfulness really, of the colours you use never quite overshadow what seems to be an underlying melancholy. The paintings give so much visual pleasure and yet the faces of all your creatures are sometimes puzzled, there are flashes of sadness.

CHJ: It would be fair to say there’s a melancholic side to me that I feel comfortable expressing as an artist. I think of it as perhaps being ‘bitter sweet’, and an acknowledgement that life can be difficult. I feel more in balance when I acknowledge rather than ignore it.

AZ: Do you have a different approach to painting animals, humans, the natural world or objects?CHJ: No. All subject matter springs from the same soil. People, animals, even the ceramics I use in still-life paintings. To me all these things have outer, but more importantly inner lives. This is why I’m as likely to choose a Staffordshire flatback or a puppet to express a human condition, as a person.

Thumbnail — Poster for a 2020 lecture by Clive Hicks-Jenkins at Worcester School of Art featuring a Polish-style szopka, photo: courtesy of the artist

AZ: You mentioned your love of Krakow crèches, so-called szopki – can you tell us something more about this?

CHJ: The crèches were the beginnings of the tradition of modern puppetry in Poland. Carried from house to house at Christmas by their artisan makers, they were the stages on which puppet dramas were played. Later on, the state supported puppetry as an art form, and some of the most exciting puppetry I saw in my teenage years was performed by Polish companies that came on subsidised tours to the UK.

AZ: There is another character in Reymont’s The Peasants, a boy, who makes little wooden birds with moving parts, and also extraordinary larger creatures which are paraded during village festivities, so ingenious that even his friends exclaim over them. There’s a very real sense of amazement among the peasants, then largely illiterate, at these creations, as though, as you say, they are: ‘more real than the real thing’.

CHJ: Automata and clockwork may have latterly been claimed by toy-makers to create entertainments, but it’s believed the earliest practitioners were temple priests using clever mechanical figures to conjure awe in worshippers. These were ideas that later found purchase with congregations eager to believe that statues of the Virgin Mary could shed tears, or that representations of Christ’s wounds actually bled. It’s interesting to consider that the complex animatronics on show today at Disneyland have a history that stretches back to the temples of Memphis. When audiences in the early days of cinema gasped at the moving images created by the phenomenon of ‘persistence of vision’, the art form was a new expression of what creatives had been trying to perfect for thousands of years: the illusion of life.

I call myself a painter, an illustrator and an animator. For me, theatre underpins all those disciplines. I take ideas and ‘present’ them to an audience, and that is always going to be rooted in notions of theatre.

AZ: There is also the desire to be amazed: when a boy in The Peasants who has been sent away to be educated tries to read to the girl skilled at paper cut-outs, she is bemused and bored by the descriptions of nature. Every child in the village knows water flows in the river and there are trees in the forest, she says, where are the dragons? Where are the phantoms?

CHJ: Because always there’s that craving for what lies outside the everyday. Isn’t that what’s made us sit round fires listening to storytellers since the dawn of time? As a painter, I’ve been criticised for making images of boy saints and annunciated virgins, dragons and miraculous events, rather than using the material of the everyday. But for me those things are ‘everyday’, residing in my inner world and making the prism through which I view the outer one.

Interview conducted via email, Dec 2020

Language English