Clive Hicks–Jenkins is a Welsh artist whose work ranges from still–life paintings and landscapes to images rooted in Welsh folklore and Christian iconography. Clive's mythic/iconic work was featured in "Angels and Night Mares," an article in the Summer 2005 issue of Endicott's Journal of Mythic Arts -- which included images of the Green Man, the spectral Mari Lwyd, and other creatures of legend.
The year and a half since Clive appeared in the Journal has been a time of change for the artist and his partner as they moved from Cardiff, the capital city of Wales, to the countryside by Cardigan Bay. As a result of the move, Clive has a large new body of work which he has recently added to his website, in a new section of the site he calls Views from Two Studios.
He writes: "This has been a year of two studios -- a spacious and airy purpose-built space at Llety Caws in Cwmerfyn, once the workplace of the great painter Heinz Koppel and loaned to me by my friend Pip, and a tiny makeshift studio at Penparc Cottage in Aberporth, where the furniture has been pushed back to accommodate a small painting table and chair. Both of these are rooms with views. The former is set in hill-farm country outside Aberystwyth, all high horizons and vaulting skies. The latter overlooks our brick-pathed cottage garden, with the beach and the wide expanse of Cardigan Bay beyond.
"The landscapes are engraved on my mind's eye, and have come out in the paintings in forms that heighten and confuse concrete reality -- for me they echo those strangely transformed and potent dream landscapes that one regularly visits in sleep. It's been an unsettled year, and I've absorbed myself by arranging and painting familiar objects as though on a stage, engaging them in a sort of visual dialogue with each other in these locations. Vessels and sculptures that I have made with Pip in her ceramic workshop have migrated with me between the studios, and taken on central roles in many of the paintings. I've found the order and calm of the resulting still-life dramas oddly comforting at a time of disruption and change."
Clive was born in Newport, Wales in 1951, and grew up close to his family’s farming roots in Monmouthshire. He did not fit in at school, but found escape in acting with the Monmouthshire Young Peoples Theatre 
and studying dance at Rambert and the Italia Conti School in London. This led to a career on stage, first as an actor and dancer and then as a director and choreographer with such leading companies as the Vienna Festival, the Almeida Theatre, Theatr Clwyd and Cardiff New Theatre. He was also a stage designer and mask maker during these years, with a deepening interest in visual art. In the late 1980s, finding himself disillusioned with the unsettled life of the theater, Clive returned permanently to Wales to devote himself to art full–time. Since then, his paintings, drawings, prints, and artist books have been extensively exhibited in museums and galleries in the UK and abroad.
You can see more of Clive's work on the Clive Hicks-Jenkins website, as well as on the Endicott Studio website ("Angels and Night Mares"), the Martin Tinney Gallery website, the Attic Gallery website, and the Old Stile Press website. I also recommend his beautiful illustrations for The Mare's Tale by Catriona Urquhart.
I live in Wales and I've benn familiar with CH-J's work as a book artist through his books for Old Stile Press. (I own love The Mare's Tale!) I haven't seen his paintings before. Wonderful!
Posted by: Margot Jones-Sokis | March 01, 2007 at 11:33 AM