Horrormeister Barker Turns Imagination Loose on Canvas : Art: The maker of movies such as ‘Hellraiser’ and ‘Candyman II’ finds visual art more liberating than writing or directing.

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 the airy living room of his Beverly Hills home.

“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 somehow 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,” which opened Aug. 14 at the Laguna’s satellite in the South Coast Plaza mall in Costa Mesa.

Laguna museum director Naomi Vine says the curation of the exhibition was a “group effort” by staff members, prompted by the quality of Barker’s art and a desire to give it broader exposure. “We felt his work was very strong aesthetically and I was very interested in the way the books and the movies and the paintings all got at the same thing--this incredibly inventive imagination.”

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.” His new film, “Lord of Illusions,” starring Scott Bakula, opens Friday.)

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: Max 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 exhibition is no display of unbridled gore and depravity. No cringing necessary.

“Different media call forth different things in you,” Barker 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 describe several major oils in the show that 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.

“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.”

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 New York prior to this exhibition. Barker 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.”

* “The Imagination of Clive Barker” continues 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.