"Fearful Symmetry:" Clive Barker Discusses the Art of Fantasy

ALAN Review, Winter 2005 by Blasingame, James

JB: Is your imagination visual or verbal or both or something else?

CB: Both. I think I've always drawn little pictures beside it ... I handwrite. I don't have a typewriter. Often I've drawn little pictures of the way I think creatures or other elements of a story should look like, often just for consistency. If you're writing Weaveworld, an 800-page book, you want to be sure that you've got a really fixed, clear idea in the same way a piece of geography might be. So, I will use a sketch for that purpose. In Abarat, however, I reversed the system. I began by painting pictures. I painted 250 paintings before I showed them to Harper Collins, and some of these are very large. One of them is twenty-seven feet long.

Because there had been some anxiety, and I think, legitimate anxiety, on Harper's part, that Clive Barker, the inventor of Hellraiser and Candyman would easily turn his hand to children's fiction. The way that I actually dealt with that with Thief of Always was to give it to Harper Collins for a dollar so that they didn't have any concerns about me being paid a massive amount upfront. I said, "I don't know if this is going to work any more than you do, but I'd really like to see this published. Let me give you this for a small amount of money." I think we have a million sold now here in the U.S.

Everybody felt great about that, but then when I came back and said, "Ok, now I want to do a lot of books with lots of paintings, lots of color paintings," which is a big project. There were some doubts, and so I just got on with it, and for four years I painted pictures without saying anything to Harper. Cathy Hemming came out to L.A. and, most importantly, Joanna Cotler came out to L.A., and what she saw at that point was about 250 oil paintings. She said, "Oh, I get this. I see what you're doing here. I understand." So, when I wrote, in that particular case, I was writing a text, which illustrated the paintings rather than the reverse where you would turn in a text, and someone would paint pictures to match the text.

The interesting thing about illustration or picture making is this: roughly eighty percent of the brainpower we use on our senses is given over to the eyes. So, in order to take in Jim and the Snapple machine and the colors and the light and the distances takes a huge amount of brainpower, never mind something as massive as the Grand Canyon, you know? So, what I am liberated to do when I write a text that goes with, as in the case with Abarat with 125 oil paintings, I'm liberated to tell a whole bunch of other things in 120,000 words in that book. I don't need to bother with the pictures. I don't need to do that thing that young audiences hate most of all: describe. I don't have to have big chunks of description, the painting does all of that for me. Now I am free to move the narrative along which, again, young readers like. I think that young readers are very, very smart about pictures now. They go to movies, and they can decode visual images. They seem to have a new means of comprehension. Nicole, our daughter, can go to a computer and pop through it and get everything she wants out of the computer in two minutes. I sit there a little dumbfounded by the whole thing. I have a much simpler idea of technology than she does. Something happened between our generation and the generation of our children. I see it in lots of places. I see it wherever complicated visuals are concerned. They are picture smart, but 1 don't think they are necessarily what I call fact smart. In fact, Nick says, "Why would I need to learn that when I can find it on the computer?"