Offering and Hello David??

Today is the last day of the Clive Barker Imaginer show at Crown Gallery in Carlisle. For many reasons it has been a great success. The main reason it has been a success is that many people have seen Clive Barker’s art in a gallery for the first time. It is a wonderful thing to walk into a space and see creations going back in time to the 1970’s. Studies in black and white for Nightbreed and Books of Blood are on the wall next to characters for Abarat. Works in glorious colour hang in a room for Universal Mazes, Halloween costumes for Disguise Costumes hand next to characters both new and old. The canvas with their distinct and powerful oils, are in the entrance to the gallery, each one telling a story to the viewer.

The central image to the Imaginer show has been a canvas entitled ‘Offering’ which is pure Clive Barker. The figures in the hand are being offered to us as a way of seeing imagination. Each figure is a little shy, just like small children meting new people for the first time. Each of the figures has their own personality. A yellow man with his hands in his pockets, a woman in a old fashioned dress with vibrant hair that is somehow regal in the tradition of Elizabeth the first and shy creature which is almost childlike in its offering of a silhouette. The hand is that of someone we will never see but is perhaps, one of us, one of the few that would fall in love with these innocents.

Placing the figures and the hand against a sky of swirls and clouds also gives the painting a hypnotic quality as the background seems to be moving as the figures stand still as the hand that we presume to be human offers the figures to us.

When you look at the black and white image you can see something playful and simple. It is easy to see that the black and white ink is a starting point for the oil on canvas. The original image has five figures of the imagination, in basically the same position. They have changed over the 20 years or so between as has their creator. But at the same time there is no doubting the relationship between the two works.

‘Hello David’ refers to Clive Barker’s close friend and original personal assistant David Dodds and was most likely created as a piece of fun between friends. Offering is a fantastic example of Clive Barker’s imagination and the fact that relationships between work never stops. Sketch to painting, character to story, book to film Clive Barker never stops being an Imaginer.