Beowulf, Folk Horror, and the art of Movement
Artist Clive Hicks-Jenkins, whose latest project was illustrating the Seamus Heaney Beowulf for the Folio Society discusses growing up in Newport, creative influences, and the art of collaboration.
In the latest of a new series of Q&A’s with some of Wales’s leading artists, musicians, performers, and writers, Clive Hicks-Jenkins discusses growing up in Newport, his creative influences, and the art of collaboration.
Where are you from and how does it influence your work?
I was born in Newport in Gwent. Hard to say exactly how it’s influenced my work as an artist. Countless ways, probably, if you trace all the threads back to source. I loved the place as a child, and there’s a sort of ghost version of Newport in my head, which is how it used to be. I realise at this distance how rich Newport was architecturally back in the 1950s, and how the character of the place and its topographies of streets and hills and contrasting neighbourhoods have stayed with me. There was a fine covered market, a handsome and thriving high street with diverse businesses scattered about the town, wonderful old cinemas. There were the docks and the transporter bridge. In the small neighbourhood of Maindee where I lived, there were several small parks, a pint-sized library, a picturesque police-station complete with Dixon-of-Dock-Green blue lamp, my primary and junior school, a public baths and a cinema, all within an area you could circle on foot in thirty minutes. Later so much that was lovely was shamefully destroyed by ham-fisted planning and craven building developers. I remember my mother weeping when the bulldozers moved in on the old Lyceum Theatre at the bottom of Bridge Street. (Take a look at photographs to compare what was once there, to how it is now.) Both my parents were from the area and had deep attachments to its landscapes, so most weekends our family would go walking in Wentwood, the stretch of woodlands between Newport and Chepstow, having picnics and enjoying the views from the summit of Grey Hill. My dad had started his career as a land agent working for Lord Tredegar on the Tredegar Estate. However after the war he hated the way the tenant farmers were being treated as his employer sold off the land, so he left to become a wayleaves officer with the South Wales Electricity Board. During school holidays I’d accompany him as he criss-crossed the county and beyond, negotiating easements with farmers and landowners. That informed my eye. He informed my eye. He was a countryman through and through.
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You might like to look at my new book, A CURATE IN LOVE, about the first two years of my curacy at Mold. I'll send you a copy if you like.