"The great imaginer of our time," Clive Barker also likes his tea, Shane Gilchrist discovers as an exhibition of works by the British writer, film-maker and artist opens in Dunedin.
Clive Barker has been described variously as a film-maker, poet, painter, novelist, director, screenwriter and dramatist. In other words, he’s prolific.
Film-maker Quentin Tarantino puts it another way. Barker is "the great imaginer of our time," Tarantino once wrote.
"He knows not only our greatest fears, but also what delights us, what turns us on, and what is truly holy in the world. Haunting, bizarre, beautiful. These are the words we can use to describe Clive Barker only until we invent new, more fitting adjectives."
In a twist not quite as strange as one of Barker’s various dark fantasy novels (which include Weaveworld, Abarat and The Damnation Game) or horror films (including Hellraiser and Nightbreed), Dunedin’s Fe29 Gallery is hosting an exhibition comprising more than 30 drawings and paintings by the Los Angeles-based Englishman.
The exhibition has an interesting back-story: former Otago Daily Times photographer Sam Henderson met Barker in 2004 and worked for him for a time, photographing and archiving his extensive artistic output. As a result, she and her former husband established a longstanding friendship with the auteur.
Having returned from the United Kingdom to Dunedin in July for family reasons, Henderson is now offering her collection of Barker works for sale. They range from paintings, to detailed drawings to seemingly off-the-cuff sketches, some of them touching on characters from his various books or films.
"Not all of it appeals to me, but because I met him there are stories to each piece," Henderson says.
"It is quite personal. I watched him draw some of this stuff. He’d sit there and just start drawing. A few lines later and this creature would emerge from the page.
"Some of the images became characters in his books. It’s almost like his art and writing feed each other," Henderson says, adding she wasn’t particularly familiar with Barker’s artwork before she met him.
"I’d read Abarat, a fantasy which I think is a cross between Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter. He’s quite a wordsmith. We used to have great discussions about the use of the English language.
"He would often talk about his motivations, about how sometimes the good guys weren’t so good, and vice versa. A lot of his ideas challenge us to question who we think are monsters. His drawings have a real playfulness about them, whereas his paintings are a bit darker."
Barker has often depicted fantastic characters who inhabit worlds that are strangely familiar. His books or films start with ordinary lives, yet his characters are typically transformed, both physically and mentally.
In exploring the idea of the secret self through motifs established in the Gothic fiction tradition, using a framework of horror, fantasy and sexuality, Barker invokes a range of artistic influences, including Hieronymus Bosch, Herman Melville, Jean Cocteau and William Blake.
Henderson says ill health means Barker (64) does less art these days.
"He also doesn’t travel so much. And that’s part of the reason for the exhibition, to enable people here to see his work. His work has been exhibited in galleries across the world.
"My husband was very much into collecting his work and still has a large collection. We have separated and I no longer have a big space for some of the works.
"My husband was a lifelong fan of Clive’s work. We communicated with Clive, who is very generous with his time and said to visit if we were ever in Los Angeles. So we did. That was in 2004. I’ve now been to stay with Clive several times," Henderson says, recalling times when Barker would pick her up in Hollywood in his Hummer vehicle.
"I had to pinch myself sometimes. Here I was, this woman from little old Dunedin, hanging out in Hollywood with Clive Barker.
"He has three houses: a personal residence, a guesthouse and a huge triple-height studio stacked full of paintings. He used to do these big paintings; he was quite visceral. He’d be stripped to the waist, playing music, flinging paint at these giant canvases and drinking tea"
Ah, tea. Henderson says when she visited Barker in Los Angeles it would often be with a suitcase of Yorkshire tea in hand.
"I also took him British chocolate and Tunnock’s Tea Cakes and things. Over the years we spent a lot of time with Clive. He came to visit us in Carlisle and popped in for tea and cake."
The exhibition
• "Clive Barker: A private collection" (offered for sale) opens at 10am today at Fe29 Gallery, 30 Sandringham St, St Clair, and runs until December 14.
• Sam Henderson will attend the exhibition opening and be available to chat to people interested in knowing more about Barker and his varied work.
