Cutting Art
The ‘journey’, as an observing layman might put it, begins with a notebook, a spiral-bound ‘visual diary’. There are shelves of them in Barry Cleavin’s studio. He may go through one in a couple of weeks, or over months or days, but what happens with any is much the same, while each is vastly various. There is a pen and ink drawing on the recto of each page. With some there is no necessarily thematic drift, with others there may be a spate of attention to one object or motif. Most pages are dated, some have a word or two, or a sentence that seemed important to jot down. As there is usually no determining visual sequence, each turned page comes as a surprise. A recent notebook I pick up at random begins with an ox, made of tied-up bundles of plaited straw, like a Cornwall harvest dolly—a sketch that loops one back, as a Cleavin aside often does, to a distant work, in this case the aquatint etching, The Straw Ox, of 15 years before. The next page shows a hunched homunculus figure, with two long sticks raised above a kettledrum. The lines of the drawings are clear, with never the hint of a revising second-thought. Figures are often flecked with tiny pen strokes, or stippled from the pen-tip. And so the variety show keeps on, and among landscapes and the lovely grotesquerie of Japanese netsuke, a tender variation on what has become a signature motif—a wide-mouthed bottle with a single flower stem, embraced by a tiny stylised human skeleton.
But nothing is as obvious or simple as at first it may seem. What so persists in Cleavin’s flow of inventiveness is his sheer sense of play, his imaginative brio, the dark carried by delight in masterly technique, even if the image of the print we look at is the anatomically perfect display of a throat-to-intestines opened rat, its intact paws at the sides of its pelt as if holding open a flasher’s overcoat. And of course what one expects from a sardonic Cleavin title: . The uniqueness of his images, the integrity of the thinking that leads him there—these seem to me the defining qualities of a Cleavin work. Those, and the constantly demonstrable importance of sheer craft,
