The Official Clive Barker Resource - Revelations - Exclusive Interview 13

Next up were questions concerning upcoming signing tours from people, including Veronica in Sweden, Scott Rodgie in Scotland and David Lynton in Australia, as well as tackling the final longer written questions we'd left with Clive.

Clive Barker : "Page 2,307... [Regarding Pinhead], here's been this essentially two-dimensional being... taking this character that has been denuded of any elegance that he may have once had and coarsened over a period of movies and putting him into a book in which Christ appears and Lucifer appears has been quite a challenge... My hope is that a little way into this book people will almost entirely forget the cinematic incarnation of this fellow and start to think of him as a literary character again.
"I'm beginning to be smarter about seeing the patterns in my life and because I'm very close to my work, because my nose is practically upon the page I'm writing on - I was thinking about that today; I write with my nose about four inches from the paper which is strange, when you think about it, almost like I'm cutting out everything laterally, yes?"

Revelations : "You were talking about blacking out the painting studio as well, weren't you?"

Clive Barker : "Which is done - it's now absolutely black. It's a black box and it's marvellous. The curtains are 30-foot Abarat - currently untitled

curtains surrounding three walls and the Mexican tiles have been completely cleaned and... sorry to sound Californian for a moment, it has a completely different energy to it now: it's an eerie, dark, beautiful box. I have five or six canvases up now and much, much prefer painting in the darker space. What it does is it totally eradicates lateral information. When the room was full of light, you could see the trees outside, the light changed of course, which now it doesn't. It's a sealed unit and the images hang in darkness, so it's much more like being in a dark room looking through a window, do you see what I'm saying? And so there's about six easels up now, including a couple of Abaratian tarot cards and some stuff for Abarat 4 and a couple of things for Abarat 5 and an erotic piece. It's a very different feeling and when you come over next hopefully you'll have some time to sit with me while I paint and you'll see how different the experience is; it seems to give each brushstroke a new intensity, each colour you use a new intensity. There's no colour around you except the painting to complete."

Clive Barker : "Completely - and that was exactly my point: I wanted to go from yin to yang, yeah?
"I think we got through Christopher's question yesterday? So to Mark, let me just read this again..."

Mark Tallen : "Clive, would you consider the possibility of writing/painting the 4th and 5th volumes of Abarat (after writing/painting volume 3, which I assume follows The Scarlet Gospels), rather than writing the 3rd (and final?) book of The Art? I know the 3rd book of The Art has been a long time coming but surely with the Abarat being a priority then it would be better for both projects to wrap up the Abarat? Thus allowing you to concentrate fully on the huge book of The Art 3. On a selfish note, even though I'm a huge fan of both your mythologies I'm addicted to Abarat (my 9 year old son is also!!) and would love to see completion to it in a bittersweet way."

Clive Barker : "Nothing is certain, Mark, I think that's the first part of it, you know referencing my answer to Christopher's question, I just follow my gut and my gut sometimes comes up with surprising answers! But certainly one of the things that is waiting for me at the end of this very dark descent, not just into Hell but into the history of Lucifer's fall and why he fell and its consequences, one of the reason I'm taking this journey and allowing it to be the scale that it will be is because I really want to be able to then free myself to take a really big bite of the three Abarat books that remain to be written. Now, whether that means that I write 3 and 4 and then break off to write a short piece just as a palate cleanser before I really dig into the last big, big, big book, or whether I just go helter-skelter through all three, I don't have an answer for Mark; it would be unfair for me to pop out some answer which may or may not be true. All I know for certain is that I have the material and it continues to gather and, while it continues to gather - I'm particularly thinking of material for Abarat 5 now - I'm sort of loathe to be too smart about this. Part of the point of this is to let my imagination percolate on this material and resolve the narrative in all its complexities - there's a lot of stories that need to be resolved at the end of these five books. I want to do that properly. I will never write about Abarat again after these five books, I think I can very certainly say that will be the case, so I really want to make sure that these five books really do the job. That may mean it's best for me to take a little break between 4 and 5."

Revelations : "But in either route that you're talking about, the 'little break' does not involve the third book of The Art..."

Clive Barker : "No. It can't. It's just a little break and I think that would be unfair both to myself and to the Abarat readers."

Theo : "Clive, when will you finally finish or at least begin trying to finish The Book of the Art 3? Please don't lose sleep over what I'm about to say, but I was very perturbed when this Abarat project popped up out of nowhere and suddenly took precedence over The Art. Some of us don't enjoy the child-like atmosphere of Abarat and would prefer you write for adults again."

Revelations : "What's your response to that adult section of your reading audience when they hear that it's likely to be Abarats 3, 4 and 5 next?"

Clive Barker : "Well, I don't think that it is just writing for children; I think it's writing. At signings now, the most vociferous fans of Abarat are adult! Just to add a little rider to that, a sort of P.S., there's a certain kind of reader who's taken great pleasure in the fantastic elements of my fiction but has never liked, or never been comfortable with the sexuality of the characters or the freedom with which their sexuality is stated or explored, nor have been pleasured by the intense violence. Abarat, of course, gives them the best of both worlds. They get the fantasy and I think adults are enjoying the paintings as much as the kids are, that's the sense I'm getting anyway. So I'm not really thinking... Thief of Always - yes, Thief of Always is a book for children. As you will see as Abarat goes on - one of the reasons why I need that fifth book is because I realised how much deeper I was going to need to dig into my feelings about the need for the fantastic in our lives, and I needed that space of the fifth book to be able to do that.
"Onwards. When will I be coming to various places? You know, it's hard to say. I come at people's invitation is the first thing to say, I mean the reason I'm coming to England in September [for FantasyCon] is that Paul Kane was kind enough to invite me. It's harder for me to make the long journeys to Australia and Japan and so on. My greatest hope is, honestly, that when the five Abarat books are done, we will organise something that will be the Abarat World Tour, that's my hope. I would take a couple of months, maybe even three, four months, probably broken up by returns here but certainly that would be something I would like to do.
"But I really feel the work I have to do is here right now. And though it would be lovely seeing people and signing and drawing in books - I never get tired of that, I really enjoy that, I really get a buzz out of that - I think that if I take that time out, if I were to to do that this year for example, it's basically a month out of your life by the time you've prepped for a week and then you're a couple of weeks out and then a week to get your shit together when you get back. I think, I'm assuming people would prefer that I have my nose to the grindstone, writing words and painting pictures... yeah?"

Clive Barker : "Well, I'm sort of greedy too, I'd like both. It just ain't possible. I think the next big development that I think we - Sarah, Phil and Clive - should look at is finding some sort of live video link-up so that we can look at everybody. That's never going to be quite the same as being in the same room as everyone but it's getting more sophisticated by the day so I think we should look very closely at how we can make the global village a reality..."

Clive Barker : "I am, it's for Demonic Sex 2 which I'm doing at Meltdown. There's a magazine called Instigator which is a very 'out-there' gay magazine about what they call 'edge-play', people who play at the very edge of danger, and there's where the first Demonic Sex comics appeared and then they were collected. Sean Platter who drew the comic is a very dear friend of mine and they reproduced an image of mine - Demon in the Blue Grass - in the magazine. The painting is a new one, it's what, seven weeks old... And this news can go, this is hot news, I'm going to write something for a future issue.
"We are doing the signing with the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence - Sister Erotica, Eddie, is one of the guys I painted at the Bert Green exhibition, so he and his fellow Sisters will be with us and they essentially do good works, they're marvellous, it's all good camp fun but under the camp fun is actually a lot of very important fundraising for AIDS issues and the important stuff which is not being funded by the government here. And so when Sister Erotica said would I do the signing, how could I refuse? I haven't met Sister Erotica, I've only met Eddie; I'm told Sister Erotica is quite a handful...
"Onward. I will not direct any of the stories for TV in the foreseeable future simply because 'see above'... That is to say, I haven't thought about it, there just isn't time. There's barely time to do the things I've said yes to, you know?
"David Anderson asks about Valerie on the Stairs..."

David Anderson : "I was just wondering what the process is when someone is writing a script based on one of your treatments. Were you in contact with Mick Garris while he was writing the script or did Mick just have at it after he got the treatment? Also, is there any chance that Mick could talk you into setting aside some time to direct an episode for season 3?"

Clive Barker : "This is a joke - Mick finds this incredibly funny - I wrote a 45-page closely-typed treatment for a 60-page script, so Mick said it was the easiest job he ever had in his life! It's a story I've wanted to write for a very long time and suddenly I realised, 'Ah, this is the place to put it.' It's a very, very heterosexual story, centred around an obscure object's desire for this exquisite woman, Valerie. And then David says, was I in contact with Mick Garris... Well, Mick is still writing so we talk to and fro once in a while but I trust Mick, I've known Mick many, many years and, when you give Mick a treatment that's 45 pages long - "

Clive Barker : "Exactly. And also, if Mick wants to manoeuvre, going back to our conversations of yesterday, then it's always a pleasure. On a Season 3, I think it would be a bad use of time to step away from the desk and the studio.
"I just want to pick up on something you've said before, you said something very interesting, Phil, which haunted me after we spoke yesterday about the thought that the paintings were consuming me and very much making demands on me. I've thought a lot about what you said, or what I construed from what you said and I sort of wanted to agree with you. It's interesting, you put the writing down, you do your pages and you pretty much know where the demands have been. I've been working for three hours today - I started early, knowing we were going to have a conversation which would shorten the morning - and I am surrounded by trashed pieces of paper, just because it's a very difficult passage. But I can sort of compute that and it's fine, I can sort of live with the fact that the passage is difficult. The thing which is more problematic is the demands the paintings make are more surreptitious, much more insidious. I don't realise firstly that they're difficult; I mean I contrived to paint through a flu attack earlier in the month and I lost eleven pounds. The painting is a physical business."

Revelations : "And does it come partly from the fact that you don't have any idea how much is going to come through you and onto the canvas; it's an unknown quantity?"

Clive Barker : "It has everything to do with that, Sarah, sometimes you're just going in there and you don't know what's going to meet you. Here I am on 2,307 and I know what's going to be on 2,308 and actually I know pretty much what's going to be in this novel pretty much to the end - it may probably be another 900 pages but at least I know what those 900 pages are - I mean, obviously not word-for-word but I have the broad stroke. I go into my studio and, I don't know how to describe it really, it's both very exciting and very intimidating."

Revelations : "Do you think there's any benefit to be had by changing your media to something less demanding than huge oil on canvas pieces? You said yesterday how much you loved going back to basics with just brush and ink."

Clive Barker : "Well, yes, I've actually started to work - you know there's a number of illustrations in Book 2 which are actually on paper - I say a number, not a lot, but a few like for instance the triptych of the Twilight Forest and the waves going into Chickentown; those are all acrylic and oil pastel on paper and I started working with oil paint on sheets of canvas, literally, that you can get like a sketchbook and I got a couple of nice things out of that too. But the truth is for the large things, the events of these books are going to escalate...."

Clive Barker : "No... I had a long conversation with myself yesterday to make sure that is not going to happen, it can't, it simply can't. Because firstly I'm just simply going to be out of room, I am perilously close to being out of room, and so no, but I think what I think it will be about is me making informed judgements about, well, which pictures need to be... Do I really need to do this on a huge piece of canvas, can I do this on a piece of paper, can I do this on a canvas from the sketchbook?"

Revelations : "Especially with individual character portraits where you don't often have a lot of detailed background but they still take a long time to paint."

Clive Barker : "Right. You know it's weird, Sarah, sometimes a vignette like, if I paint a vignette like that on a 48 x 60 canvas, with an inch-sized brush, which is my preferred size of brush, I can often do that faster than if I work on a much, much smaller scale because there's a looseness, the scale gives you energy. We need to resist this, it's a huge subject and in a way we almost need to re-visit it in front of the pictures; it will become a lot clearer..."

Revelations : "And you know from previous discussions, a lot of people are fascinated by this side of your process."

Clive Barker : "I think, invite people to ask more specific questions and I'll see if I can give them more specific answers, yes? I'm very happy as part of my mentoring function, to share my own methodologies and I extend that, I can usefully extend that to people who come to Revelations; I'm very happy to do that and as I say, the more specific the questions - by specificity I mean if someone can reference a particular painting in Visions or a particular painting in Abarat, I could be a lot more useful in my response than speaking in generalities."

Revelations : "Next up is Don, with an art question, and maybe speaking from personal experience of his own gallery exhibitions...!"

Don Bertram : "How does Clive feel when at his art show someone says something like 'I would buy that piece but it really doesn't match the couch?' "

Revelations : "This goes to the kind of conversations we've been having about why we bought The Man in the Trees rather than The Earth Martyr and why the latter painting might not have found its buyer yet."

Clive Barker : "Ah, poor Don, yes, I absolutely have this damn feeling about people - I always remember Barbra Streisand's person going into a friend's second-hand bookstore and saying, 'Barbra wants 5,000 books,' 'About what?' 'Doesn't matter, they just need to be brown.'

"You know, and this again is another huge question - you know Earth Martyr has not sold although we've had a lot of people close to it. It's a very interesting question we have here - part of it's about the scale of the image - as we've said before, people don't have massive walls and it tends to be the pieces that have very graphic erotic material that will tend to go in very private spaces and private spaces, by their very nature, tend to be small. I would love, again, to get more into that so, again, if people have views on that - I mean the dialogue that we were having about the paintings, I'd love to extend that to everybody because I think I can learn."

Revelations : "But there's only so far you can go because the paintings come from within - you're not going to sit down and start painting apples because someone's ordered them."

Clive Barker : "Right, and Earth Martyr is unthinkable as a smaller picture, I couldn't make it as a smaller picture; my temperament doesn't allow me to paint in the fastidious way I would be required to paint if it was a quarter that size."

Revelations : "And no-one should suggest that you shouldn't be painting Earth Martyr - I think it will find its place. I think it's a very important piece from your imagination and, as we've said, we love the painting - the image and it's texture up-close - and for it not to exist because somebody had said, 'Oh we don't think that's the stuff you should be spending your time painting,' I just couldn't contemplate that."

Clive Barker : "And God bless Bert Green who has been supportive as a man can be, you know, 'Paint what you wanna paint'. There are no easy answers to any of this. The only thing I can do is get up in the morning, do my writing with a relatively clear sense of where the journey is going to take me and then, once I get up from the desk, sort of head into terra incognita!
"One more question: Jos�..."

Jos� Leit�o : "To me, Abarat is very Blake-like, as the writing and paintings create a total vision. I can see something of you in the character of Imajica, Gentle, who finds a way to recover from his amnesia by taking up some chalks and start drawing the people and landscapes that he's seen in the Dominions, letting the images and stories pour out of his head, and teach him how to connect it all together again. Drawing parallels with the Abarat project, was this the way you let Abarat bloom out of your brain? The paintings taking you by the hand to travel in a bestiary of the subconscious? And did the paintings surprise you, influencing the story into certain directions visually?

Clive Barker : "I love this question, I really, really love this question. 'Abarat is very Blake-like, creating a total vision,' he's so right, it's so much of what I wanted these books to be and, as I move through 3, 4, 5, he will see and everybody will see me pushing hard to make those connections between the visual and the literary tighter and stronger and more significant. And he makes this gorgeous analogy with Gentle which is a beautiful point, it's just a beautiful question; I almost feel every part of the question is rhetorical, he's answered himself really - correctly. The only real question is do the paintings surprise me and the answer is damn right they do. I'm producing pictures at quite a rate now and I have the experience of of going through paintings as they are taken away, I say 'Take this away before I fuck with it, just take it away,' and I will not go to the gallery house for maybe a week or ten days and I will say, 'What is that?' Obviously I know it's my handiwork, I have a vague sense of where I was when I was making it, but when a gentleman was here recently talking to me about Prometheus not only stealing fire of course for humanity, but also his blood producing flowers from the earth which was something I didn't know, it turned out both images were included in this painting that I had finished two weeks before I met him..."

Clive Barker : "This process has been very rewarding for me because I feel not only are we talking to each other, which is always a pleasure, but we are talking to another audience as well which needs answers and hopefully we are satisfying them."

Revelations : "We'll we see what sort of comments we get when this interview goes up and in the questions for next time."

Clive Barker : "Exactly, give me a sense of this and please invite people to dig deep. These were great questions, these were all great questions and I am very ready to talk about spirituality and metaphysics and symbology and whatever else, I mean we don't always have to be talking about when's the next book out, so this to me is really great!"

Follow these links across Revelations for more of Clive's thoughts on :

Scarlet Gospels
Abarat (Book One)
Abarat (Book Two)
Abarat (Books Three, Four and Five)
Upcoming Films
Valerie on the Stairs
Jump Tribe
Photographs of Clive in his studio
Clive at FantasyCon 2006

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