Clive : "I decided to paint a tryptich, so that is a painting that is twelve feet long, five feet tall and, 'Am I going to be able to do this?' Well, I took one piss-break and after three hours it was finished. It was immense fun, it was immense fun - I felt like a cross between Rolf Harris and, I don't know, Maurice Sendak - but it was very fun and I like the painting that came out of it which was nice. And all those paintings are being given to children's charities, the Starlight Starbright charity, so that's good, that's nice... "I wanted to make something that went along with the feeling in the room - it was a kind of party; people were drinking champagne and buying books and I wanted to make a celebratory painting and it was, I suppose, partly my mood and partly the mood of the room which dictated how it was going to work. It was a very interesting experience, I had great fun."
The Hellbound Art : Memory, Fantasy And Filigree
By Phil and Sarah Stokes, 10 February 2005 (note - full text here)
Clive : "The other thing we did was this 'paint-in', shall we call it, in Chicago, where I was teaching I suppose about thirty-five kids,
ranging from the youngest was probably six, the oldest was probably sixteen. And I was thinking, 'How am I going to teach
this range of very smart people something useful about art in an hour?' What I ended up doing - some of the parents joined
in because they thought it was going to be fun, which it was - so we had about forty people in total and I took forty pieces
of paper, I numbered them and then I drew a huge drawing on the forty pieces of paper laid out on the floor so everybody
knew which piece of the puzzle they were going to take away. I then passed the pieces of paper around to everybody and
said, 'OK, here's your piece of the puzzle, go to it. Make it as weird or as strange or as bright or as dark as you want
then we'll put the whole thing together at the end. And it was very fun because it was like a jigsaw and each of them
was making a separate piece of it and at the end - I wish we'd had more coverage of this - we only had a couple of parents'
cameras there, but unfortunately I hadn't the sense to bring a camera of my own - but it was kind of wonderful to watch the
kids as I called out each number, look at their painting and come and lay it down next to each other. So eventually, there
was this huge painting which was painted by diverse hands and could not have been more diverse in style but still had the
unity of design.
"And then, of course, everybody got to take away their own piece of the painting with, hopefully, the memory of having joined
collaboratively in the endeavour. It was very successful, it was very fun; I had a great time and I think the kids did too. I mean,
I think nobody was allowed to feel any better or worse than anybody else at Art. It wasn't a question of, 'Oh, you can draw a
house and I can't.' It really was about, 'Let's have fun with colour and go do whatever you want to do with your piece and don't
bother what the person next-door is going to do.' And then the assembling of the jigsaw, as I say, was just tremendous fun."
There And Back Again: Touring The Abarat
By Phil and Sarah Stokes, 30 November 2004 (note - full text here)