The Self Sufficient Man

I remember the day in 1990 when I opened the Clive Barker Illustrator book for the first time. The images became tattooed in my imagination. Some of them challenged the twenty two year old who had bought the book. The Self Sufficient Man was the image in the book the provoked the most thought for me.

Back in 1990 I had escaped my job in a factory making shoes and started to develop my aspirations to work in the music industry and make films. I had met a girl who was at University from my adopted town of Burnley in Lancashire and moved to Newark. She had a job during her sandwich year at Loughborough University and I went back to college to get some GCSE’s and A-Level’s. Money was so tight we could afford to go to the pub once a week for 3 drinks each. So Clive Barker Illustrator at £10.00 was a large amount of money, but in retrospect it was worth every penny.

The book and all the wonders inside somehow made me see Clive Barker more clearly and well for me at least it all started to make sense. Books led to Films, which then led to Artwork. The circle was starting to look like a whole or as my academic language would later suggest I could see Barker’s work in a holistic fashion.

So I now show The Self Sufficient Man as often as I can when I am giving papers on Clive Barker’s work at Oxford University or in Warsaw Poland, I even showed him in all his glory at Trinity College in Dublin. One thing is for sure people always remember him.

I think that Clive Barker has always created iconic imagery and he has always explored his sexuality. As a man who now writes about Barker’s artworks and creates books, curates exhibitions and wants the world to see the amazing works Clive Barker has created, it matters that Barker explores his own sexuality in all his artistic mediums. But at the same time I don’t care that Clive Barker is a gay artist because to me what matters more is that we have Clive Barker, because he is the greatest living Imaginer of our times and I love everything he creates.

It is just that sometimes we are drawn back to those early links so that we can see the deeper developments now. Enjoy The Self Sufficient Man and never forget him.