Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Clive : A Downright Polite Hellraiser Shows His Artistic Side in Costa Mesa

At 42, Clive Barker has the open, zealous grin of a Boy Scout with a new merit badge, and a warm, gracious manner to match. Birds chirp outside his airy living room.

“Those are my parents sitting in the garden,” he says as he nods toward them with affection and pride. He goes on to quote the likes of William Blake, and talks of repeated visits to world class museums.

Can this possibly be the horrormeister himself? The author and filmmaker who gives us close-ups of fish hooks ripping into human flesh, sex-obsessed demons and graphic movie violence that politicians love to hate?

On a side table sits a model of Pinhead, the sadomasochist of “Hellraiser,” the film Barker wrote and directed in 1987 that helped earn him a cult following around the world.

But there is no further evidence of terror here.

Why should anyone expect any, he wonders, noting that his work reflects his imagination, his dreams, not his lifestyle or personality.

“We never think, do we, that the [actor] who plays Macbeth has to have committed murder? But you’d be amazed at the number of people who come into this house for an interview and say ‘I didn’t think you were going to be like this.’ And I say, ‘What do you expect, that I’m going to be totally corrupt, that some how the imaginative journeys that I’ve taken have left some terrible scar on me?’ ”

Barker also is a visual artist whose output isn’t necessarily what one might expect. The Laguna Art Museum has organized a show of his work, his first museum show anywhere. “The Imagination of Clive Barker” starts Monday at the Laguna’s satellite in the South Coast Plaza mall in Costa Mesa (see accompanying story).

An advance screening of Barker’s new supernatural horror film “Lord of Illusions,” starring Scott Bakula, will be shown at the Edwards South Coast Plaza cinema Sunday at 5 p.m., after which Barker will discuss the film. Tickets are $35 to $50; proceeds will benefit the museum.

Barker says art was his first love, and although he’s had no formal training, he has been drawing since childhood. His large, figurative paintings and ink drawings explore death, sexual desire, heavenly visitations and other themes common to his best-selling fantasy-horror books (“Imajica,” “Weaveworld”) and films (he has churned out nine--producing, directing, writing or a combination thereof--including last year’s “Hellraiser IV” and “Candyman II.”)

The books’ and movies’ eerie hybrid creatures--part human, part animal, part unearthly--populate the artworks too. Barker’s palate is muted and the influences he cites include artists known for darkness: Beckmann, the German Expressionist whose visions reflected Nazi tyranny; Goya, the Spaniard fascinated by man’s capacity for evil; John Martin, an 18th-Century English apocalyptic.

But this exhibit is no display of unbridled gore and depravity. No cringing necessary.

“Different media call forth different things in you,” he says. “Paintings are a relatively passive experience, whereas with movies, modern audiences are combative. They say, ‘I dare you, scare me.’ ”

Indeed, melancholic might best describes several major oils in the show which feature somber male faces with thin lips and hollowed eyes.

“It’s a part of the calculation I can’t quite figure because I’m not a melancholy guy,” says Barker, noting that he had a happy childhood in Liverpool. However, he adds, “I think things are going from the world which will not be again.

“Obviously I feel that in relation to my friends who have died of AIDS, which is a big injection of elegy into my life. There’s that ongoing sense of, ‘Well, there’s a whole bunch of people I thought I’d know for the next 30 years who are dead,’ and I sort of feel it would be irresponsible of me not to say that, not to speak that, not to put that down.”

Two of the sorrowful tableaux portray torments and trials of sexuality. In “Sanborn in Adolescence” (1993), the youthful figure wears a face mask with an sharp, elongated, phallic nose over his genitals, and an expression that, as Barker puts it, says “ ‘I don’t know what the [expletive] to do with myself.’

“It’s not a comfortable, even pleasant image of what sexuality is. But at the age of 15, I think that’s pretty much what’s happening.”

In “Sanborn in Middle Age,” Sanborn’s body has turned thorny, like a centipede, and he is hemmed in by bars that symbolize what Barker calls “a new kind of limitation” brought on largely by advancing age. “He’s no longer quite as human as he was, and the woman who clings to him is faceless--he has no connection with the subject of his lust, the thing he’s delving into.

“In the loosest possible sense I think of myself as a narrative painter. If you want to find a story in any of these things, you can, and the story of sex fascinates me, the story of desire fascinates me. It comes up in the books constantly, and it feels to me like a subject that’s so central to our lives, but is so marginalized, and in painting it’s remarkably marginalized.”

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Barker says he was headed for art school until his parents persuaded him to get a college degree, for fear that he’d be penniless otherwise. He obeyed (studying English literature and philosophy), then went into theater, then writing, then movies, drawing all the while.

He began painting 2 1/2 years ago and had two one-person shows at the Bess Cutler Gallery in the New York prior to this exhibit.

He says he finds visual art more liberating than writing or directing.

“Movies are the least freeing. You’re spending a lot of other people’s money, so you’re responsible to them, and you’re responsible to holding onto a vision which is now being interpreted by many other people and is probably being diluted in that process.

“Books are next on that rising scale of freedom because once you’ve started a narrative line, if you want to be a convincing storyteller, you’ve got to go where the narrative is leading you. The great thing about the paintings is that it’s practically entirely an unintellectual business. In a way, they don’t answer to anybody.”

He approaches all three media, however, with a commitment to letting the imagination--”our way of communication with what is profoundest in us”--flow uncensored, even if that means films filled with bloody internal organs and books replete with morbid, erotic tales.

“Very often that flow is about forbidden things,” he says. “It’s about taboo, it’s about saying the unsayable, it’s about celebrating the thing you thought you should hide behind the drapes. Because there’s liberty in that; energy comes from saying the unsayable. Blake said the thing that you hold in unspoken, the fear that you hold in unspoken, becomes this massive, tumorous thing inside you.”

Though this philosophy has won Barker legions of fans, it has alienated some people, including at least one longtime Laguna museum supporter.

The woman, who wouldn’t give her name, told The Times that she canceled her museum membership after reading a Times article in which Barker said his new movie has more graphic scenes and genuine horror than any he has done before. She said she is a grandmother concerned about what her grandchildren can see at the movies.

Barker says he doesn’t bother to defend his work against the charge that it is harmful to children because his films are rated to keep children away. (“Lord of Illusions” is rated R.)

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He does argue against the idea that his books and films distort character, however.

“Just because you allow in the human body, just because you allow in the facts of death, just because you allow in the possibility that we all like to get scared once in a while, does not remove morality. It does not remove the notion that I know the difference between good and bad.”

He further defends an artist’s right to “completely, unapologetically pursue whatever is his instinct” and puts the former museum member among those who would censor art.

“As long as she says ‘Well, I’m drawing the line there,’ as long as she finds a place to draw the line, she is siding with the idea” of censorship, Barker says.

“If she truly was interested in the arts, then she certainly wouldn’t be so moved by a single statement read in the newspaper that she would say, ‘Well, I’m sorry, it’s all over.’ She’d go look at the paintings. She’d make a judgment based upon what her imagination said. She didn’t give us a chance to connect.

“I will debate art with anybody, happily. It excites me. I want to talk about that, I want to make painting accessible to people. It’s a passion of mine.”

* “The Imagination of Clive Barker” opens Monday and will continue through Oct. 29 at the Laguna Art Museum’s South Coast Plaza satellite, 3333 S. Bristol Ave., Costa Mesa. Mondays through Fridays, noon-9 p.m.; Saturdays, 10 a.m.-7 p.m.; Sundays, 11 a.m.-6:30 p.m. Admission: free.

Barker’s “Lord of Illusions” will be shown Sunday at 5 p.m. at the Edwards South Coast Plaza theater, Bristol Street and Sunflower Avenue, Costa Mesa. Barker will attend and will discuss the film. Tickets, which also cover admission to a gallery reception with hors d’oeuvres, are $35 to $50 and benefit the museum. (714) 494-8971.