Clive Barker and Mervyn Peake in Carlisle, Home of the Fantastic

Clive Barker wrote and Illustrated ‘The Wood On The Hill’ around 1966. The story can be read in Douglas E. Winter’s biography of Clive Barker’s life entitled The Dark Fantastic. The two images can be seen within Phil and Sarah Stokes exhaustive biography of Clive Barker’s early works entitled Memory, Prophecy and Fantasy, Volume One: Liverpool Lives.

What draws me to start my ‘Blog’ on Clive Barker’s artwork with these two wonderful detailed pieces is my belief that all of Barker’s work is symbiotic in its nature and that I believe that the writing would not exist with images and vice a versa the images would not exist without the writing.

We are all the sum of our influences and never more so at the beginning of our journeys into a creative life. These images show the same flair and beauty of the work of Mervyn Peake an artist and writer in his own right. This fact has become much clearer after visiting ‘Lines of Flight Mervyn Peake, the Illustrated Work at Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery in Carlisle follow this link to see more http://www.tulliehouse.co.uk/lines-flight-mervyn-peake-illustrated-work .

How ironic that the first exhibition of Clive Barker’s work would be held at the crown gallery in Carlisle at the same time as a retrospective of the illustrations of Mervyn Peake. This makes Carlisle the home of the fantastic in the UK right now. All of the work in the Clive Barker Imaginer exhibition can be seen here http://www.crowngallery.net/clive-barker-catalogue.html .

Looking at these two early Clive Barker drawings you can see detail and story with character and pure storytelling. They are small and beautiful and come from a grouping for the ‘Wood On The Hill’ within the exhibition you can see characters from 1978 to 2011. They belong to books like Abarat, Cabal and Books of Blood. There are images from films like Nightbreed and characters from Halloween Costumes for Disguise. There is even an Image to La Bete created in homage to Jean Cocteau and his Beauty and the Beast.

Come and visit Carlisle and see the work of these two masters who share so much yet are so different. Carlisle is the home of the fantastic, at least for the next two weeks.