Angel and demon at either hand

CLIVE BARKER wants to illustrate a point about the varied and unfettered nature of his painterly imagination, which at this moment has him surrounded as he sits in the Beverly Hills house he’s turned into a do-it-yourself gallery.

“Well, let’s look. Here we go,� says Barker, as he rises from the long wooden dining room table that appears to be the only surface -- kitchen counters included -- that isn’t covered with paintings. The walls’ upper reaches are hung with some of the smaller and medium-sized artworks made during an almost daily painting spree that stands at eight years’ duration and 540 pictures produced, give or take. The lower walls are lean-tos for double-stacked layers of Barker’s biggest canvases.

The writer of graphically violent horror stories (and, more recently, of gentler fantasy novels) grabs one of the big ones with both hands and moves it aside. It shows a corpse reduced nearly to bones, a smorgasbord for perching crows -- one of which has a stringy morsel of flesh in its beak. This is more or less what you’d expect from the author who arrived as a commercial force in 1984 with “The Books of Blood,� then clinched brand-name recognition with the “Hellraiser� and “Candyman� slasher-film series. But wait a minute. Out from under the gory scavengers appears a hidden canvas, and a revelation: a bright vision of wonder, in which a garden of lavish, green growth springs from a beatific woman at the picture’s center.

“There’s heaven and hell, I guess you would say,� Barker says before picking up his cigar for another puff. “They’re both parts of my imagination, and they come at various times, fairly unbidden and beyond my control.�

“Visions of Heaven and Hell� is the title of Barker’s new coffee-table book, which collects 342 of his ink drawings and oil paintings with a brief essay by the artist for each of its 10 chapters -- “Devils and Demons� and “Memento Mori� on the horrific side, “Lovers� and “Perversities� giving occasional rein to Barker’s sexually explicit interests, and “Seas and Lands� and “Beasts and Forests� glimpsing less tortured and carnal imaginary realms, including paintings compiled in “Abarat,� Barker’s half-finished series of four books of fantasy for young readers.

At age 53, the scruffy-bearded transplanted Liverpudlian sees painting as the compulsion-cum-discipline that orders his evenings after he has spent a chunk of his days writing. (He says he is almost done with “The Scarlet Gospels,� a return to horror in which he promises to drop the final curtain on Pinhead, the monster of “Hellraiser.�)

He works in a high-ceilinged downstairs studio in one of the three adjoining houses he owns on a narrow hillside street. The middle one, “the Big House� between the studio and the gallery, is where he and photographer David Armstrong, Barker’s spouse of 10 years, live with their teenage daughter and many pets. It contains a Matisse drawing, a gift from Armstrong, that Barker says is the only work he’s collected rather than created himself.

Painting has held rewards beyond self-expression for the self-taught Barker, who cites William Blake, Francisco Goya and Belgian James Ensor as influences he admires as “fantastical painters, painters who used paint to express extremes of emotion.�

He has a particular affinity for Blake, the reverent but highly unorthodox Christian pre-Romantic poet and painter whose “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell� (1790) imagined Satan as a force with creative as well as destructive potential, and derided the traditional Judeo-Christian paternalistic God as a false deity, “Nobodaddy,� who suppresses human freedom.

Five years ago, the Walt Disney Co. looked at Barker’s first series of illustrations for the “Abarat� books and paid him $8 million for the rights to base movies and merchandise on his fantasy world -- before he had even turned the images into accompanying stories. Now he has a gallery show, a selection of 57 works at Bert Green Fine Art in downtown L.A. The pictures flit across Barker’s range, starting with 14 sexual works, cordoned off by black curtains in a room for adults only. But there’s also room for “A Zethek,� a big-eyed, snaggletoothed feline with a suspicious expression who looks as if he might be on loan from Dr. Seuss (in fact, Barker has his own line of fantastical stuffed toys for kids, the Jump Tribe).

Several images are Tolkien-esque landscapes adorned with anthropomorphic trees and mountains. “Ghost Tree� offers a bit of humorous, homespun philosophy: As a playful female genie emanates from one side of the golden-leafed tree, a grumpy little man faces in the opposite direction, too self-involved to look around and see the wonder at hand.

Gallery owner Green expects half the paintings to be sold by New Year’s, making Barker one of the three fastest-selling artists in his gallery’s six years. He estimates that half the people buying or looking are fans of Barker’s books and films; the other half are Green’s regular clientele.

BARKER planned to go to the same art school that John Lennon attended, until his mother, Joan, who still lives in Liverpool near his younger brother, implored him to attend a university. He studied English literature and philosophy, and spent his 20s and early 30s as a semi-starving playwright with his own small theater company before making it big with macabre fiction.

He began painting seriously in the early 1990s, as a less complicated creative substitute for the film directing and producing that had begun to wear on him. Barker’s first gallery show was in New York City in 1993. He says he was still feeling his way as a painter in 1995 when the Laguna Art Museum organized his only museum exhibition to date, “The Imagination of Clive Barker,� at its then-satellite gallery in the South Coast Plaza mall in Costa Mesa. Times reviewer David Pagel administered an impaling worthy of Candyman: “If this exhibition is any indication, the imagination of Clive Barker is a claustrophobic space jampacked with creeps and cliches ... [looking] like a pricey extension of a souvenir shop.�

Barker says he learned long ago to follow Kingsley Amis’ advice that it’s OK to let a bad review spoil one’s breakfast, so long as it doesn’t carry over into lunch. “There are people who will come after me for these paintings, I’m sure, and will slash me every which way they know,� he says amiably in a raspy voice made scratchier by the remnants of a cold. “And I will be back at work that night in my studio, making more pictures.�

The blank canvases nearly always take form without planning or preliminary sketching, Barker says. Sometimes what emerges hits close to home. A stark image of a man sitting on an egg-shaped rock, his head buried in his hands, was an outpouring of grief over the death of his father, Len Barker, from leukemia four years ago. Barker had suppressed his emotions at the time so he could fulfill a scheduled book tour -- carrying with him a portion of his dockworker dad’s ashes during the book-signing trek through Britain.

On another night, several months ago, Barker felt overcome with a rapture of thanksgiving, squeezed black paint onto one of the white paper plates he uses in lieu of palettes, and adorned the white wall of his studio with words: “Art is my addiction love is what keeps me in this dimension. My husband has healed the past, made sense of the present, and is laughing the future alive.�

But has Barker ever felt spooked by one of his own creations? That elicits a slow, sideways shake of the head and a stage-whispered answer: “No, never in a thousand years.�

“These are my beasts,� he adds, “and it’s hard to imagine being frightened by the beast, because the beast is part of me.�

*

Clive Barker

‘Visions of Heaven and Hell (and Then Some)’

Where: Bert Green Fine Art, 102 W. 5th St., L.A.

When: Noon to 6 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays. Closed Dec. 29 to Jan. 3. Ends Jan. 28.

Info: (213) 624-6212, www.bgfa.us