By the time he did go to Cambridge, Blake had of course already embarked on a career in illustration: he was a published cartoonist, his drawings having appeared sporadically in Punch for several years. His reputation had even preceded him in Cambridge: Nicholas Tomalin, a couple of years ahead of Blake, and later a journalist and married to the biographer Clare Tomalin, invited him to draw for the Cambridge journal Granta. He did art-edit and illustrate a couple of issues, but Blake isn’t sure these drawings were ‘very good’ and when he was at Cambridge he seems to have kept his drawing self largely hidden. ‘We didn’t know he drew, he never talked about it,’ two of his contemporaries, Jean Gooder and Ann Newton told me. Perhaps Blake was unsure about how the humorous, light-hearted drawings he was producing at the time would be viewed:
I think I thought that going to Downing was a bit like going to a monastery or something, because things were taken seriously, to a disadvantage, the atmosphere invited you to take things seriously [and] the drawings I was doing in Punch weren’t at all [serious]; it wasn’t hard to feel embarrassed about them because they were small and superficial . . . I thought they would think they were frivolous.
(The tables were turned 60 years later though. In 2012 he was invited to speak to an international Leavis conference at Downing; his interviewer, Downing Fellow the Reverend Bruce Kinsey, told me that he thought that most of the Fellows were ‘totally in awe’ of Blake, and shy even of asking questions . . .)
Blake carried on with these ‘superficial’ efforts, anyway. He seems to have had a strong sense even at this time of how his own particular learning-style worked: he started with simple cartoons and magazine vignettes and, because he was strongly self-critical as well as able to take criticism from others, he learned how to make them better. At the same time he was also clearly ambitious to develop his drawing skills. He began to take life classes at the Cambridge School of Art (now part of Anglia Ruskin University). Life-drawing was the one element of artistic training that Blake undertook semi-formally and its effects are key to the way his art works, a continuing theme in other chapters. Life classes have been almost the only drawing situations in which Blake has worked from a living model. Until well into the twentieth century life-drawing, from nude models and, before that, the plaster cast, was the beating heart of an artist’s training. At its most effective it developed in the learning draughtsman the ability to represent a subject which is both the best-known image but at the same time the most complex to represent: the lines of a human body change direction myriad times, its proportions are always unexpected, and the subtleties of skin, hair and eye textures are endlessly elusive. These Cambridge classes, and, more importantly, those he later took at the Chelsea School of Art, gave him a fundamental understanding of the way the body is constructed and operates. Armed with this he was free to work away from the model, as we shall see later, allowing his figures to emerge fully formed from his imagination.
Blake’s literary imagination was of course also being stimulated by seminars with Leavis, and to a lesser extent the teaching of another tutor, Harold Mason (‘you felt it was a privilege to be there’), even if he had reservations about Leavis’s teaching style: ‘in a sense he was telling you the answers; I don’t think he was interested in the rest of us (who weren’t going to be literary critics); there was no interchange as far as I was concerned’. What he did get was the close critical engagement with the work of the Leavis pantheon such as T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence. The intense reading involved in these studies must have had an effect on Blake, but in fact Leavis did not introduce Blake to Dickens, the novelist no doubt most relevant to his future work. In the 1950s there was only one work of Dickens, Hard Times, that Leavis thought worthy of close attention. Blake comments:
there is a great chapter about it in [Leavis’s] The Great Tradition, but everything else is effectively marginalized. It wasn’t until 1972 that the Leavises [F. R. and his wife Queenie] together published Dickens the Novelist, which makes elevated and well-argued claims for his genius. Leavis’s stance tended to be that of putting the less perceptive to right, so that perhaps it was a little strange that he didn’t explain what had kept him so long, since by then Dickens in general was being taken seriously by many. There is even a chapter by Queenie about the illustrators of Dickens; extremely interesting even if she perhaps didn’t feel herself ready or perhaps wasn’t able to discriminate the particular genius of Cruikshank.
F. R. Leavis in Cambridge
Here Blake demonstrates his own deep familiarity with Dickens’ illustrators: Phiz (Hablot Knight Browne) working in the traditions of Gillray and Rowlandson and then Cruikshank, and he had already encountered them before going to Cambridge. It is understandable how the work that Dickens’ illustrators were doing for his texts might have appealed to Blake. Blake shares with Dickens a sense of character and situation, which is based on intense observation, and it’s here that he finds the contingent humour, pathos or tragedy. The capacity of illustration to dramatize or stage narrative on the page is what Blake himself claims for the art, and what most people recognize in his own work.
After Cambridge, the Institute of Education and the Lycée, Blake was getting enough work illustrating books and magazines to be able to leave schoolteaching behind. The Spectator, the Listener (the BBC’s weekly magazine, which appeared between 1929 and 1991), New Society, and covers for Penguin books, including the novels of Evelyn Waugh, Kingsley Amis and Malcolm Bradbury, these were all vehicles for his emerging illustration skills.
But the great variety of demands made by these commissions – he had to imagine and then draw subjects ranging from the Nuremberg War Trials to Lolita – made him anxious to refine the skills he had begun to develop at the Cambridge life-drawing classes. He had come across the work of artist and illustrator Brian Robb (1913–79), initially through his copy of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, which Robb had illustrated, and Robb, then a tutor at Chelsea College of Art, agreed to meet Blake and look at his work. Robb must have seen that Blake understood how illustration worked by this time so didn’t need to invite him to join his illustration classes. But, instead, Blake asked whether he might continue with life classes there, which Robb happily agreed to, and a couple of days a week for 18 months, Blake was to be found in the life studio, painting as well as drawing and making lithographs. Although, as Blake says, most drawings produced in the life class are ‘neither good nor attractive looking’8 and are not finished works, he feels that the exercise taught him above all that he could also work away from the model. He describes going home after life class and inventing ‘some more life-drawings (and oil paintings) from memory’.9 These were of two kinds – a type of pen-and-ink drawing that show Blake’s enthusiasm for Picasso at the time, and much larger oil paintings executed with decorators’ paintbrushes.
Blake seems to have a close relationship with these drawings and paintings from the 1960s.
Illustration by Brian Robb from Tristram Shandy
They do contain several persistent and key elements of his work: the sure but free, scratchy lines, the emotional rather than naturalistic use of colour, and, above all, a sense of narrative created by small but articulating details. In this image the model poses, poised; but, at the same time, her attention (and so, ours too) is claimed by the two purple birds, fluttering in the right-hand corner. It’s the slight turn of the model’s head, immediately legible from the scantest of pen-strokes, and the splash of purple, which miraculously ask us to become involved: we understand in a second that sitting still is demanding and imprisoning, while the birds are delightfully free. It is clear, then, that setting up a situation was something that Blake was naturally drawn to, even at this early stage in his career.
Brian Robb had led Blake to these classes; this mild, pipe-smoking man with a waistcoat and bow-tie was not obviously heroic, but his opinions seem to have defied his appearance and he does seem to have been a kind of hero for Blake.
Says Blake,
&nb
sp; Brian was most immediately and evidently a gentleman, and so he was.[This is what most people also say about Blake.] But not only that, it was no doubt easy for some to imagine that he had the limitations that went with the suit. He had taught with Graham Sutherland, Henry Moore, Ceri Richards, Prunella Clough, and was a member of the London Group. Perhaps it is better simply to record one or two moments that have stayed with me: we were looking at portfolios before [RCA] entrance exam interviews, and in the young woman’s portfolio [there were] drawings of mid-air crashes, people falling out of aeroplanes and (do I remember this right?) also a photo of male genitals. We liked the work and even we must have been a little doubtful of Brian’s reactions; we turned to him for his comment: ‘Possibly the most gifted student we have ever interviewed.’
On one occasion, when he was shown some illustrations by the Quay twins to the Marquis of Sade, quite sufficiently explicit, with the enquiry ‘What do you think of these?’ (This was in connection with Ark, the RCA magazine, and the question clearly meant: ‘Can we print them?’) Brian looked at them for a moment. ‘Charming drawings, charming drawings.’ He was answering an art question.
Blake’s discovery of Robb as a person he could learn from is one demonstration of Blake’s wide-ranging intelligence: one side of it is exemplified by what he calls ‘the instinct to do the right thing’.10 This seems to be based on a good degree of self-awareness combined with an unflinching sense of purpose; he knows how to analyse the proposition in front of him, looking both at its intrinsic value and at how it might serve his own project, and he often does this with rapid certainty. Robb’s career showed Blake how his own skills might develop, how illustration can live a fruitful and symbiotic life with fine art, and this has become one of Blake’s principal concerns over the years. The teaching opportunity that Robb offered Blake also provided him with a beneficial learning process for himself as well as for his students.
Teaching
Teaching in (and out of) the classroom
Before Blake embarked on his teaching career at the Royal College of Art, he had already tried out schoolteaching. Blake feels that his short spell as a schoolteacher was not a significant stage in his life. He did not especially enjoy his teacher-training year at the Institute of Education (1956–7), finding the experience ‘disappointing’ in the sense that the ideas he met there were not at all new to him. He acknowledges that his tutors at the Institute were strong and influential: they included James Britton, Nancy Martin and Frank Whitehead, and he remembers that Harold Rosen was also around (father of author and Blake-collaborator Michael Rosen). These tutors were in the vanguard of post-war secondary English teaching, whose ideas about curriculum were that it should start with the experience and culture of the learners, that language was the means by which meaning is constructed, and that effective learning is a collaboration between teacher and learner, and between learner and learner – principles that Blake certainly did adopt in his own teaching.
Perhaps Blake felt that he wasn’t learning anything new at the Institute, because he had already experienced such teaching at school and at Cambridge: in the same way that the four-year-old Blake had a sense of what made a good drawing through comparing the drawings in Chicks’ Own Annual, he knew what successful teaching looked like (and what it didn’t look like) through observing his own teachers. At Cambridge he had found Harold Mason’s way of fostering intellectual appetite, and his interest in engaging with students’ ideas, a more effective model than Leavis’s monologue seminars. He remembers Mason saying to him: ‘You got in by knowing nothing’ – I hope what he meant was that I didn’t get in by knowing the answers.’ This sense of learners being able to find answers for themselves, sometimes by unconventional routes, marks his own intellectual history strongly and is perhaps one of the reasons why teaching a rigid curriculum in a school setting was not, in the end, for him. At this young age he understood the theory that the educationist Sir Ken Robinson was later to describe, first in his 2006 TED talk ‘How Schools Kill Creativity’, and later in his book Creative Schools: Revolutionizing Education from the Ground Up11: ‘We’re all born with immense natural talents, but by the time we’ve been through education far too many of us have lost touch with them.’
Blake found the teaching practice in the Eltham (South London) school he was first assigned to ‘difficult’ and claims ‘not to have been very good at it’. Certainly he would not have been interested in or good at the authoritarian behaviour typical of many of his contemporaries and which guaranteed a relatively trouble-free classroom existence. By the time he did start to teach English at the Lycée, which he only did part-time, for a year (1964), he had already made the decision to ‘draw for a living’: in fact, while still at the Institute of Education he had been offered a job as assistant art-editor at Punch. He turned this down, because, with his usual self-awareness, he was sure he did not want to be exclusively associated with one publication and that a freelance career as a book illustrator was already beckoning. The schoolteaching was, he says only a steady back-up income which would allow him to do the illustration work in which he was more interested.
However, as we have already seen in the Julius Caesar memories of Gilles Dattas, the evidence of some of his Lycée students suggests that for them he had more talent than he himself remembers. Several speak of a teacher who stood out from his colleagues, who were working within a very formal French school curriculum. Julia Stanton remembers:
In those days Lycée teaching was all dogma and recitation, even at the youngest ages. We sat at our desks all day and listened to the teacher, did dictée after dictée, and learnt by heart all the little boxes in the textbooks. It was a very classical education; we learnt from our literary elders and betters, and we absorbed their lessons as ‘idées reçues’.Imagine then the amazement of our first class with Blake. He sat and read a short story (or perhaps a passage from a book?) by D. H. Lawrence, one in which a coal miner dies in the pit, and the wife is left to contemplate his lifeless body. He then asked us what our thoughts were about the piece he had read. Our thoughts? Our feelings? This was a whole new concept to me at the time, because I had been taught very categorically what to think and feel for the last eleven years, especially at school, and no-one, but no-one, had ever asked the students about their perspective on anything.
Charles Beauchamp, an artist specializing in carnival arts and self-confessed school idler, has memories of a teacher with a sense of performance:
He certainly made a mark on me as an individual and his way of teaching was unorthodox and most welcome because the Lycée was extremely academic in many ways . . . anything in the creative field . . . was slightly frowned on . . . there was always this element, ‘what’s Mr Blake going to do next?’ Once he made a dunce’s hat; it was just a simple cone but he’d decorated it and he decided he was going to use it in our class. We were supposed to have revised . . . but if you hadn’t, he’d ask you to come up, and he would say he felt that the hat ‘would suit you on this occasion’ . . . but it was done in such a humorous way, it actually helped to make a better atmosphere . . . these were real surprises . . . you never knew what was coming.
Are there perhaps distant little echoes of the decorated dunce’s hat in Beauchamp’s own playful carnival costumes and props?
Teaching at College
School teaching was not in the end a route for Blake, but his links with education began to strengthen in other ways. His connection with Brian Robb had a second important outcome: Robb had in 1962 joined the staff of the Royal College of Art, replacing Edward Ardizzone who had taught lithography, which was in those days based alongside illustration in the Department of Print Making. Needing extra help in what was a small but new and expanding Department of Illustration within the School of Graphic Design, he first asked Blake to set a project with his students. At the end of the project Blake gave what was known as a ‘crit’, an appraisal of each student’s work in front of the rest of the class, after which Robb
invited Blake back to his office, and on the spot invited him to join the staff as a part-time tutor. Blake recalls his reactions: ‘I didn’t know what that was . . . I didn’t know anything about teaching in art school . . . but I thought for about five seconds and said yes’.
So, indirectly, Blake became a teacher at the RCA because of a sense of needing to learn more – it was by chance rather than design that he ended up as Head of the Illustration course there. At the time there was, of course, no teacher-training for Higher Education so Blake would certainly not have been the only untutored tutor. He does have as keen a sense of his limitations as of his strengths and his comment sheds light on his decision-making process: he knew that it would be the right course to take, even though he knew he didn’t have skills he believed must be necessary. It is also indicative of something many colleagues and friends mention: a kind of courage that Blake has when facing situations outside his experience; a willingness to face the unknown, including the feared unknown.
The RCA in the mid-1960s must have been a curiously disjointed place: the old, predominantly male guard still in place, but confronted with a demographically and gender-mixed student body fired up with the counter-culture. As the design critic Rick Poynor puts it, the Department of Graphic Design, as it was then called, still bore many traces of its 1948 origins:
Quentin Blake: In the Theatre of the Imagination Page 7
