Quentin Blake: In the Theatre of the Imagination
Page 1
For Nick, Anna, Tom, Will and Joe, and for Christopher.
Contents
Timeline
Introduction
Part 1 Art in all Directions
1.Drawing, drawing, drawing
2.Learning, teaching, learning
3.Speaking, reading, writing
4.Calling on France
5.Flying (and swimming)
Part 2 Why the art of Quentin Blake can make you feel better
6.Giving
7.Including/cheering
8.Healing
Part 3 Art and Life
9.Patrick, Zagazoo and new-found lands
10.Something happening
Notes
Author’s Note
Acknowledgements
QUENTIN BLAKE TIMELINE
16 December 1932
Quentin Saxby Blake born, second son of Evelyn and William Blake, in Sidcup, Kent.
1943–50
Attends Chislehurst and Sidcup Grammar School. Writes and draws for the school magazine and while still at school has cartoons published in Punch.
1951–3
National Service in the Royal Army Educational Corps. Illustrates English Parade, a literacy textbook for army recruits.
1953–6
Reads English at Downing College, Cambridge (Exhibitioner). Illustrates two editions of Granta, then a student magazine.
1956–7
Postgraduate Certificate in Education at the Institute of Education (London University).
1957
Studies as a part-time student at Chelsea School of Art under the guidance of Brian Robb.
1959–60
Becomes an illustrator and cover artist for Punch and the Spectator, and produces book jackets for Penguin Books.
1960
Publishes his first illustrated children’s book: A Drink of Water written by John Yeoman, published by Faber & Faber.
1965
Appointed part-time tutor in the Illustration Department of the Royal College of Art.
1968
Patrick, the first book of which he is author and illustrator, published by Jonathan Cape.
1972–6
Four exhibitions at Mel Calman’s Workshop Gallery: Invitation to the Dance, Runners and Riders, Creature Comforts and Water Music.
1974
Begins first collaboration with Russell Hoban, illustrating How Tom Beat Captain Najork and His Hired Sportsmen. Also begins long-lasting collaborations with Michael Rosen and Joan Aiken.
1977
Appears on BBC TV’s Jackanory, narrating and illustrating his Lester stories live.
1978
First collaboration with Roald Dahl, The Enormous Crocodile, published by Jonathan Cape. Their collaboration, which includes The Twits, The BFG and Matilda, lasts until Dahl’s death in 1990.
Becomes Head of Illustration at the Royal College of Art.
1980
Mr Magnolia published, which wins the Kate Greenaway medal. Appointed RDI (Royal Designer for Industry).
1982
Publication of Roald Dahl’s The BFG by Jonathan Cape.
1983
Awarded the Dutch Silver Paintbrush for the illustrations to The BFG. Dahl wins the Silver Slate Pencil for the text of the same book.
1984
Retrospective of his work as an illustrator mounted at the National Theatre.
1991
Becomes trustee of the newly established Roald Dahl Foundation (now Roald Dahl’s Marvellous Children’s Charity, of which he is the President).
1994
Commissioned to illustrate the early Dahl titles which had been published before the Dahl/Blake collaboration began, including Fantastic Mr Fox and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
1999–2001
Appointed first Children’s Laureate for a two-year term.
2001
Curates and produces illustrations for Tell Me a Picture at the National Gallery, and A Baker’s Dozen, thirteen contemporary children’s book illustrators, at Bury St Edmunds Art Gallery.
First Quentin Blake cards produced by Woodmansterne. Children’s book Un bateau dans le ciel, produced in collaboration with 1,800 French-speaking children in six countries. This was subsequently published in English as A Sailing Boat in the Sky by Jonathan Cape.
2002
Wins the prestigious international Hans Christian Andersen Award.
2002–5
Curates Magic Pencil, an exhibition of contemporary British children’s book illustrators, for the British Council. It tours to Newcastle and London and internationally. A facsimile version of the exhibition tours to over a hundred venues in more than thirty countries.
2004
A major retrospective, Quentin Blake – Fifty Years of Illustration, opens at Somerset House, London, and then tours in the UK.
2003
Illustrates Michael Rosen’s Sad Book, which wins the 4–11 category in the English Book Awards.
Wins the Bologna Ragazzi Prize.
Appointed Patron of the Prince of Wales’ Charity, Arts & Kids.
Created Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres in France for services to literature.
2004–5
Exhibition Quentin Blake at Christmas: Four Aspects of His Work, at Dulwich Picture Gallery.
2005
Curates the exhibition Quentin Blake et les Demoiselles des Bords de Seine to celebrate the reopening of the Musée du Petit Palais, Paris.
Curates an Arts Council touring exhibition, In All Directions: Illustrations and Transport, in collaboration with the House of Illustration.
2006
Exhibition The Theatre of the Page at the Eric Carle Museum, Amherst, USA.
First commission for work in a healthcare setting. Invited by the Nightingale Project to make pictures for a ward for older adults.
Curates Frabjous Beasts: Strange Creatures in the Work of Ten Contemporary Artists at the Holburne Museum, Bath.
Produces mural illustrations for South Kensington and Chelsea Mental Health Centre; St Charles’ Hospital, Ladbroke Grove, Mental Health Unit; Alexandra Avenue Health and Social Care Centre, Harrow; and Beatrice Place, Kensington and Chelsea.
2007
Creates a five-storey-high wrap for a building in St Pancras, part of the King’s Cross development in London.
Appointed Patron of the Nightingale Project.
2007–8
Exhibition Snozzcumbers and Frobscottle: The Roald Dahl Illustrations at the Seven Stories Centre for Children’s Books, Newcastle, touring to the V&A Museum of Childhood, Bethnal Green in 2009.
Exhibition Quentin Blake in Kelvingrove at Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow.
2008
Illustrates The Boy in the Dress, the first of two book collaborations with David Walliams.
2009
Produces An Informal Panorama – a giant frieze for the University of Cambridge’s eight-hundredth anniversary, showing its greatest alumni.
Produces mural illustrations for the Gordon Mental Health Centre, Vincent Square, London; Northwick Park Hospital, Harrow; the maternity wing of Scarborough Hospital; and the ArmandTrousseau Children’s Hospital, Paris.
Collaborates with the House of Illustration on a programme for the Teachers’ TV series Inspirations: Quentin Blake: The Power of Illustration.
2009–10
Exhibition Il Mondo di Quentin Blake at Museo Luzzati, Genoa, in collaboration with the House of Illustration.
2010
Mural illustrations for the Unicorn Theatre, Southwark.
A collection of fabrics and wallpapers based on
his illustrations designed for Osborne & Little.
2011
Awarded the (last ever) Prince Philip Designers Prize.
Installation of a large scheme of work to illustrate a new maternity hospital in Angers, France.
The exhibition Quentin Blake: As Large as Life, a celebration of his work for hospitals since 2005, opens in Compton Verney, Warwickshire and tours the UK until 2014.
2012
Wins the Eleanor Farjeon Award for his outstanding contribution to the world of children’s books.
The exhibition Quentin Blake: Drawn by Hand opens at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.
2014
Quentin Blake: Inside Stories is the inaugural exhibition at the new London home of illustration: the House of Illustration in King’s Cross.
Quentin Blake is an Honorary Doctor of Cambridge University, the Royal College of Art, University of the Arts, London, London University Institute of Education, the Open University, the University of Northumbria, Loughborough University and Anglia Ruskin University. He is a Senior Fellow of the Royal College of Art, an Honorary Fellow of Downing College, Cambridge, the University of Brighton, the University of Cardiff, and the Royal Academy of Arts, and a Freeman of the City of London. He was appointed Officier des Arts et des Lettres in 2002, and Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur in 2014. In 2013 he was knighted for his services to illustration.
‘And what else were we born to do, but imagine freely?’
Howard Jacobson, Guardian, 20 June 2015
Introduction
‘Clever, shy, delightful, but . . . also uncontroversial,’ said the Observer reviewer describing the Quentin Blake who was cast away on the BBC’s Desert Island Discs programme in 2006. Perhaps this critic, like most people, expected the man whom another newspaper called ‘beyond brilliant’, the man who gave such vibrant life to Roald Dahl’s extraordinary characters, quite apart from his own supremely inventive creations, to have a similarly colourful personality and back-story (as Dahl undoubtedly did). And yet the man on the radio, and also the person described by the timeline above, does not have such a past. Yes, you read the names of the many distinguished authors with whom Blake has collaborated, the dates of key publications and important exhibitions, and a large number of national and international awards and honours, which recognize all these achievements; and yes, all these are evidence of a phenomenal work-rate. But apart from the birth-date, the Blake CV is unpunctuated – because they often have never taken place – by the kind of life-events found in most such documents: there are no marriages, separations, births of children; no serious illnesses or sudden deaths; no tough menial jobs; no exotic foreign adventures or any veering from the metaphorical (and literal) line that he started to draw for himself at a very young age. And as far as personality goes, in an untypical excursion into autobiographical description, Blake said of himself: ‘I’m a very detached sort of person. All the whoopee! goes into the drawings.’1 At the beginning of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the heroine wonders ‘what is the use of a book . . . without pictures or conversations?’ This book has plenty of the former and even some of the latter, but the question could legitimately be asked: what is the use of a book about a person whose life is one, as Blake once described it to me, ‘where nothing much happens’?
At first encounter Blake may indeed seem uncontroversial: there is a kind of self-protecting containment hiding the surprises, but when you watch him on a stage, catch his quiet but hilarious and oblique asides, you find a person who is as many-hued and unexpected as his work; the colours are sometimes subtle, but definitely worth examining. The most extraordinary things about him are of course what is going on in his head, what he sees, imagines and thinks about, what he says, and above all what he produces. And what is also so striking is how seamlessly his life seems to weave through all this creativity. So this book is broadly about some of the things that go to make up Quentin Blake, artist. It is a book which often takes place in the present, or even in the future tense, because he is alive and his diary and his head are full of projects – I do not want him to say to me, as another cultural figure once did to the producer who made a surprise seventieth-birthday radio programme about his life and career: ‘Well, that’s the obituary then’. As with artists of all kinds, Blake is a person for whom the work he is doing today is paramount – he has never been satisfied with a successful formula, and his limitless capacity to reinvent, to seek and find in his imagination new answers to new questions, is also a strong theme of the book.
Perhaps it is partly because of this (there may be other reasons too) that Blake’s distant past seems to be much less interesting to him; somehow it is less attached to his own story of becoming than is often the case with successful people. The roots of a starry career may be found in a combination of genes, family circumstances and environment, as well as education, and success can come either because the child grasped hold of the opportunities offered, or, if these were few, found others further away from home – Blake does speak a little about the latter route. But although he has almost perfect recall of most of his many thousands of drawings, he claims only a few childhood memories and talks about those that he does have very sparingly, and not in a causal way. There are no early stories such as that found in a recent book about Blake’s creative contemporary Sir Harrison Birtwistle, where the composer connects his creativity both with his father (‘a dreamer, full of ideas and fantasies’) and with a childhood spent above his parents’ bakery: he was given dough to play with in his high chair and ‘the idea of turning raw material into something else was part of the appeal’.2
Being the age he is, Blake lived through the Blitz, played with shrapnel, has a vague memory of distant burning on the London horizon, and was evacuated to Devon, which he didn’t enjoy, apart from walking on the beach collecting the fish discarded by the fisherman (this started a lifelong interest in eating fish, he thinks). In some ways he is a very typical product of the 1944 Education Act: he had a decent primary education and went on to a grammar school where he was taught by one or two teachers he still talks about with fire in his eyes. But, on the whole, his accounts of his early life are laconic and, ironically for a visual artist, almost without colour. It’s as if the images that keep emerging from Blake’s head have overrun these memory spaces: as he says, he often doesn’t know where his ideas for his drawings come from. And in any case, he is not interested in biography: as the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips says of Freud, he knew that ‘biographers (speak) on other people’s behalf’3, and I have respected the fact that Blake doesn’t want this. There is something about any attempt to analyse a person’s life that he feels is both intrusive and likely to fail: as he said approvingly in a Mail on Sunday review of a biography of fellow-illustrator E. H. Shepard4: ‘The charm of the book rests in the untreated [my italics] nature of the firsthand evidence’. One purpose of including as many illustrations as I have in this book is that they often are the first-hand evidence. They have their own life, and they I will, hope, speak to the reader in a language that is quite separate from the text.
The life in Blake’s work is out of the ordinary: something the writer and former Punch archivist Amanda-Jane Doran has described as a ‘diffident magic’. Blake has always retained his highly recognizable drawing style – research carried out with young readers in the 1990s and early 2000s showed that he was both the illustrator whose style was most familiar, and the one whose name was best known. But the style can wear so many guises: contemporary – as it did when he made designs for the designer David Mellor’s cutting-edge kitchen shop in Sloane Square in the 1960s, in the work for an Eating Disorders Unit in a hospital in 2013, or the project at Angers Maternity Hospital in 2009 (as a midwife described it in an email to Blake: ‘so pure and modern’) – or traditional, in the context of some of the Folio Society volumes which he has illustrated over the last decade, or just timeless, as in the greetings cards and many of the non-illustrative works
which he has been making recently. And with this style he has established a career quite unlike that of most of his peers in the illustration profession. He has moved in a long, unbroken scratchy line from simple cartooning to category-defying works to be seen in galleries, hospitals and other public places. All these things happen in contexts, and through interests that often take him away from the studio (even though he draws there every day), so the first part of this book looks at the man and his work in a framework of the big recurring themes of his life. These are, alongside drawing literature, education and France, and:the largely metaphorical topic of flying.
Over the last 15 years Blake has described his creative output in books which he describes as a three-part ‘running commentary’.5 What he has not written about very much, however, because he is either too modest, or because he really doesn’t know about it, is the effect that he and his work have on other people: his readers, the visitors to his exhibitions, the people who go to his talks or see his work in hospitals or health centres; and so the second part of this book, which I call ‘Why the art of Quentin Blake can make you feel better’, attempts to fill that major gap.