Page 3 - Clive Head

Cycle of the Jet Burlesque
oil on canvas
63” x 461/2”
surrealism. Head’s double and multiple images in this piece recall similar transitions to be found in Dali’s paranoiac-critical work.
Head has a fondness for Wales where he studied painting in the 1980s at the University of Aberystwyth.
To Henry Koerner, With Love recalls the particulars of a day trip to the town of Llangollen. Whilst browsing in a second-hand bookshop, Head found a Whitney Museum catalogue on American Realism with a colour plate of Henry Koerner’s Vanity Fair. Back in the studio, Head began to conceive of his drawing as a postcard to Henry Koerner, informing him of how important his painting had become in the drawing’s creation, most noticeably the relationship of the figures to the architectural spaces and more distant landscape.
To Henry Koerner, With Love pencil on tracing paper 163/4” x 20”
If Not When (cover image) began with a linear structure borrowed from the left half of this drawing. Head observed just one bather from the bridge over the River Dee which features in the distance, but this figure has become an assemblage of human life that scales the painting and culminates in a fleshy nude with outstretched arms. Reversible and in both ascent and falling, Head returns to his thoughts on the fragility of life. The owl in the top left corner, which originated in the shop window of a taxidermist joins the gulls in flight and lends its features to the head of the central figure.
The title refers in part to RB Kitaj’s If Not Not, a painting of similar size that recalls the railway trucks on their way to Auschwitz passing through a beautiful landscape. The poignancy of Kitaj’s painting underpins Head’s reconnection with the landscape painting of his youth. The configuration of faces in the top right corner creates the head of Anubis looking out towards the viewer and in profile. This patron saint of lost souls further establishes a human landscape of great joy and sorrow.
Head lives in a small village on the North Yorkshire coast in England. Although much of his work originates from being in the city, Cycle of the Jet Burlesque began with a visit to the seaside town of Whitby. On the headland overlooking the town, stands Whitby Abbey, which inspired Bram Stoker’s Gothic creation Dracula, and the town celebrates this association through goth festivals. Head is fascinated by the shops selling the local black gemstone, jet, and the costume shops with their window displays of bizarre and erotic masks. The black theatricality of this painting recalls this experience. This is a cabaret, playful, and Head has often spoken of his work as being somewhat tongue-in-cheek. But in the centre, a hand grasping an egg abuts what could be the head of a bird hanging languidly on a long white neck. Whilst working on this painting, Head’s old and much-loved tuxedo cat died.
Closer to home is the seaside town of Filey which is recalled in Morning Star (cover image). Though the climate proffered by the North Sea is far from Mediterranean, on a sunny summer’s day, the beach, cliffs and white Edwardian architecture connected Head both to the Riviera of Picasso’s interwar paintings and the Catalonian coastline in Dali’s crystalline
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