Quentin Blake: In the Theatre of the Imagination

by Ghislaine Kenyon

  So whether in early professional works such as the freewheeling magazine covers Blake drew for the Spectator or Punch, or in the first picture-books he illustrated, mainly texts by his author friend John Yeoman, the presence of birds is striking. ‘I can’t seem to keep birds out of my books,’ he says in a Guardian interview in 2007. And, ‘because birds can fly, [you can] make them appear anywhere on the page’.1

  Is it a man or is it a bird?

  It is not therefore hard to see why, in 1971, already a successful children’s book illustrator for 10 years, Blake would have found the prospect of Joan Aiken’s Arabel books appetizing. These stories first appeared in the BBC’s Jackanory programme, read by Bernard Cribbins, in his wonderfully memorable, low-key way. To those unfamiliar with the series, four-year-old Arabel’s taxi-driver father brings home an injured raven, which Arabel names Mortimer. The raven turns out to be a crazy character whose favourite food is staircases and who has a single word of human language, ‘Nevermore’.

  Perhaps Blake was tickled by memories of the Rahtz jackdaw, or by the literary association (‘Nevermore’ is the word spoken by Edgar Allen Poe’s raven in his 1845 narrative poem of the same name), or by the fact of the bird’s breed being correctly identified by a policeman, who knows his ravens from his rooks. Whatever the reasons, the drawings of Mortimer manage to be, in their sketchy way, fully raven-like in anatomical detail and behaviour, while also possessing the human emotions necessary for the reader’s empathy. Birds can’t smile, but in this illustration (Arabel, p. 79) the placing of the pupil in the eye and the angle of the beak are enough to persuade us that they sometimes do. Blake went on to illustrate all 18 of the Arabel and Mortimer series and the collaboration with Aiken was an extensive one.

  Mortimer, as Blake says, is really a person, and there is no doubt that the same thing can be said of the birds that appear in both Featherbrains (1993) and The Heron and the Crane (1999), both texts by John Yeoman.

  In Featherbrains the theme of the friendly jackdaw returns when Jack guides two accidentally released battery-hens to a confusing new life out of doors. These hens are puny, hopeless characters, and because of this, the way that Blake makes these benighted birds soar joyfully towards their new freedom is both ridiculous and moving at the same time – a perfect example, incidentally, of Blake’s ability to represent the emotional complexity of a situation, even in a book intended for very young children. In The Heron and the Crane, a Russian folk-tale, the bird disguise is very thin indeed. Herons and cranes do look human anyway because of their long legs, but the story is really about a couple trying to work out their very contorted relationship; again, Blake’s loose brush drawings improbably combine the exquisite poetry of Chinese-style brush-painting with the slapstick of the birds’ hopeless comings and goings across the marsh.

  Metaphor is also at work in Blake’s latest picture-book with a bird hero. In Loveykins (2002) Angela Bowling, a single woman of uncertain age, rescues and adopts an unusual baby bird, blown from its nest in a storm.

  The bird, which she calls Augustus, is treated like the baby Angela never had, until he starts to grow alarmingly and destructively and eventually flies away, as he must, though he does occasionally drop in on his foster-mother with a present of ‘a dead mouse . . . or a few beetles’. ‘She never eats them’, runs the last line. This is a book with the kind of strong simple narrative that small children need and enjoy. But, as in Zagazoo, and with the airiest of touches, it tells adults a story they need, in this case the one about children flying the nest. And as in the best kind of picture-books, it does this with an eloquent and lyrical pairing of text and image. This joyous image makes me wonder whether flying the nest is something that Blake might have wanted to do earlier than he actually did.

  So in these books, the birds look like birds and fly and perch and walk like birds, but they sometimes find themselves in human circumstances. This sequence cannot end though without a mention of two other books, both aimed at adult audiences, where birds are mainly on the ground and behave in fully human ways.

  The first of these is The Birds (in which yet another jackdaw appears, though with a walk (fly?)-on part only). This is a work with double significance in the Blake oeuvre: it was his first ‘through-illustrated’ book for adults and, as such, is the precursor of the line of wonderful productions for Folio editions. But it is also relevant for being the text of a play.

  Blake happened to have read and enjoyed The Birds, a comedy by Aristophanes first performed in 414 bc, which imagined an ideal state in the sky, CloudCuckooland. Blake’s copy of the play was a 1958 Faber edition, described as an ‘English version’ by Dudley Fitts, its American translator. In 1971 Blake, by then teaching illustration at the Royal College of Art, was asked by Richard Guyatt, Head of the Department of Graphic Design, to choose a text to illustrate for the Lion and Unicorn Press. This press had been founded by Guyatt at the RCA in 1953 and it published a few volumes each year, in limited editions, which reflected the highest standards of book production in typographic design, illustration and binding. In this way the Press could discover and foster new talent and ideas in each of these fields, among both the staff and the student body, and the volumes were in fact often collaborations between a student and a member of staff. The titles were pleasingly eclectic and included illustrated texts such as Vallans’ sixteenth-century poem, A Tale of Two Swannes, and text-only books such as a sixteenth-century handwriting manual and Five Speeches by Kenneth Clark; some of the volumes were collections of images such as a set of wood engravings by Eric Ravilious; others were texts illustrated by artists who are household names today, such as David Hockney, David Gentleman and Hugh Casson.

  Blake’s choice of The Birds had good design and artistic reasons behind it. He recalls that up until then the Lion and Unicorn volumes were rather formal things, with heavy and elaborate bindings; they seemed unmodern, and unsuited to Blake’s own loose and playful drawing style. The Birds, however, in Fitts’ contemporary but poetic version, seemed to him an ideal vehicle for his work. In contrast to the previously published volumes, Blake planned a large-format paperback, with back and front covers free of all text, but decorated with inky feathers floating haphazardly in the air.

  The play’s characters, which are largely either birds or men-birds, are unencumbered by settings or background; they skitter or fly in and out of the text, which is set in a sans serif font, and the whole book has a feeling of lightness, which echoes that of the text. Compared to the previous output of the Press it must have seemed a very fresh and up-to-date production.

  The importance of Blake having illustrated a play at this stage cannot be overemphasized. Illustrating The Birds, Blake now remembers, gave him an early opportunity to explore the idea of birds as people. They are not individual portraits but Blake worked out a way of manipulating the bird’s anatomy to create human poses, which remind us of nothing more than actors on the stage. Take this messenger bringing good news to the birds, for example.

  She (the angle of the knee somehow suggests female) prances in with outstretched arms (wings) and announcing beak. Her tail feathers curl up absurdly optimistically and the whole effect is one of pure pantomime. So here, with this Ancient Greek comedy, in part attractive to Blake for its bird theme, Blake was embarking on two new activities, which he continues to revisit today. He was turning birds into people and, crucially, he was turning those characters into actors in a play: in his words, ‘acting without scenery’. These figures occupy the page in much the same way that actors do a stage, and Blake is their director, in the way that he constructs each page layout, using drawing, line, composition and space to tell the story around the text in the most communicative and effective way.

  In the second work, The Life of Birds (2005), the birds wear clothes, go to schools and offices and the hairdresser, they paddle pensively by the shore, smoke and drink, behave like teenagers, businessmen or circus performers, but/and they are birds: they use their wings as
hands and they don’t wear shoes.

  What Blake does so cleverly in this series of drawings without a text is to combine the bird anatomy that his pen knows so well with the situations and behaviour he has observed in his fellow humans, to create moments and characters that we recognize. For a moment we believe them as birds and then we realize they’re really us.

  Blake has clear sympathy for his fine-feathered friends: they appear in almost every one of his 300 books, and they are almost always benign: optimistic in Mr Magnolia, where owls perch on Mr Magnolia’s bed, learning to hoot; intelligent and wily in Cockatoos, where they manage to outwit Professor Dupont at every opportunity; cheerfully mad as in Blake’s prints for the Museo Luzzati; or solicitous and caring in The Life of Birds.

  But the fact that there are so many other winged or flying things on Blake’s pages suggests that the idea itself of being airborne is an appealing one. Angels seem to be especially useful to him as they are both winged and as benevolent as the person he is himself; they keep appearing, especially in the most recent part of his career.

  Angelic creatures

  Quentin Blake et les Demoiselles des Bords de Seine was, as described in the last chapter, another opportunity for Blake’s drawings to become airborne. The challenge of putting on an exhibition of largely small-scale pictures, as these were, in the Petit Palais was that the walls are 15 metres high. Blake’s solution was to create a cast of small angels (the museum called them ‘angelots’, but, as Blake says, that word means ‘cherubs’ in English and what he had drawn were really ‘modern children with wings’). These images were drawn and then enlarged and printed on transparent acetate and attached to the walls, occupying the heights of the rooms, and guiding visitors around the exhibition. These characters were not only useful space-filling and visitor-guiding devices; they are also there because Blake always takes note of the context he is working in: winged beings were already all around the Petit Palais, neoclassical gilded or stone figures to which Blake’s airy creatures provided a clever light counterpoint. As with all Blake’s drawings, these characters are active – the flying movement is especially free, with wings and four limbs all articulating away. Blake felt that the figures in motion were also the perfect foil to the stillness and smaller size of most of the framed images below; they would transport visitors from one section to the next and then encourage them to stop and contemplate; something which did seem to happen. These exuberantly free figures somehow embodied the sense of exhibition, the idea that the framed pictures below them were, as with Pennac’s description of books, ‘gifts not exams’. In Blake’s view, works of art in galleries are there to be enjoyed for what they are – the finding out about the facts behind them can always be done later and elsewhere.

  Angels must have been in Blake’s mind in 2005, because in the same year he produced the children’s book Angel Pavement we met in the chapter on drawing. If the name sounds familiar, it’s because Blake borrowed it from a novel by J. B. Priestley, published, as it happens, in 1932, the year of Blake’s birth. As we saw, the book is about the uses of drawing, and Loopy and Corky, the two benevolent angels of drawing, fly with wings drawn in a multicoloured pencil. Though delicate, these wings are well able to carry them on a flying-drawing journey around the city. Blake seems to use this journey, so full of freedom and delight, as a kind of metaphor for drawing: both the physical act, and the pleasure it provides for the viewer. As the last line puts it: ‘But then, when you start drawing you can never be sure what is going to happen next, can you?’

  Other striking angels appeared in the following year in On Angel Wings, written by Michael Morpurgo. This is a retelling of the Christmas story from the perspective of a shepherd-boy who gets left behind to mind the flock while his companions visit the newborn Jesus in the stable. He is rescued by the Angel Gabriel and this image of the angel in full flight, with the shepherd-boy on his back, is a marvellous instance of Blake’s ability to convey multiple layers of meaning through simple colour and line. The angel’s power and strength are suggested by the deep vermilion of his wings, by his great, outstretched arms, and by the watercolour vapour-trail behind him; his gentleness, by the boy’s arm tightly clasped around the angelic neck, and by the underlying warm yellow wash. At the same time the look of surprised wonder on both faces hints at the image we, the readers, don’t yet see, of the baby in the manger.

  If we were in any doubt about the importance of angels, or angelic creatures, to Blake, we only have to look at the cover of his latest book about his own work, Beyond the Page: here, the unmistakable figure of Blake, at the bottom of the page and coloured in a modest grey wash, gazes in open-armed astonishment at his own creations: glowing yellow and orange, and at the characteristically large scale of the images Blake has been designing in the period covered by that book, a (female) adult angel looks back at the little boy-angel flying alongside her, followed on the back cover by another male/female pair with a winged dog bringing up the rear. Flying flowers complete the image. This picture seems to me to do two things in a pleasing parallel of answer and question: the answer is Blake’s certain and warm view of humanity (and animals), and the question he is asking himself is where in earth or heaven his inspiration for drawing it like this has come from.

  Lastly, to come back to earth, we can’t leave angels without a mention of a book Blake produced much earlier on, in 1969. A Band of Angels is a sequence of humorous drawings without texts. The angels are men, women and children, on the ground as much as off it. And like his anthropomorphic birds, these have decidedly human behaviours.

  But Blake also uses the white spaces of the page to allow the angels to play their own brand of badminton or develop a successful pancake-tossing method.

  The book was eventually published by Gordon Fraser (after being been turned down by another publisher, who thought there were too many naked women in it). It did not sell well – Blake remembers that ‘it was almost immediately remaindered’, but he bought 100 copies himself, and it can still be found on second-hand booksellers’ websites. It’s a slight thing – 32 pages of A5 – but turning its pages is like being given privileged access to somebody’s imagination at play.

  Weightless

  Blake’s love for flying things may have started with birds, but over the years his white pages have become the air through which people, animals and vehicles are also propelled.

  A Sailing Boat in the Sky is the English translation of a book first published in France, as the outcome of the collaborative education project involving 1,800 francophone children (described in the chapter on France), where Blake created the story and illustrations from ideas supplied by both himself and the children: he began with three drawings of a sailing boat which could sail, drive and fly. The children ignored the sailing and the driving and focused their story fully on the flying version, and it is not hard to see why. The image of the boat in full sail ploughing through the sky, piloted by its child crew, was the ideal vehicle for the children’s own imaginative flights.

  Of course the notion of children in the air is an elemental one: freed from gravity and from the constraints of the adult-controlled world, it offers children the sense of autonomy they often lack. The theme appears persistently throughout the history of children’s literature: J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, Mr and Mrs Smith’s The Long Slide (1977) and Oliver Jeffers’ How to Catch a Star (2004) to name a very few. Russell Hoban, with whom Blake collaborated many times, wrote three texts involving magical flight which Blake was delighted to illustrate, Ace Dragon Ltd (1980), The Rain Door (1986) and Rosie’s Magic Horse (2012). Each of these books involves a creature flying through the sky with its human rider, and the latter two offered Blake the opportunity to make extraordinary coloured skies, the landscapes of flight, which set the emotional scene so readily, as in this page.

  These two flying horses are more magical for not needing wings, as Pegasus does.

  In Ace Dragon Ltd, Ace flies with John on his back, and performs
feats of sky-writing. This section gave Blake three double-page spreads, each with less text; young readers become freed from words so that they can effortlessly enjoy the dragon-powered flight; the last one has no text at all, save for the name ‘John’ scrawled in watercolour over the sky, to the boy’s utter delight.

  People in Blake’s world can also become airborne for other reasons. Great speed can lift them, such as in his many images of Mrs Armitage, a fearless woman, constantly seeking to improve the performance of the various vehicles she finds herself in charge of. The better the performance, the more the speed lifts her and her bicycle/car/surfboard into the air, and the more thrilling the story becomes for the child reader. Or there are the moments when people are literally thrown into the air: the best known being in Roald Dahl’s Matilda when the appalling Miss Trunchbull launches an unfortunate sweet-eating child out of the classroom windows. Here the flying perhaps comes closest to cartooning and this takes us back to Blake’s earliest works in print, those cartoons for Punch. There are many other similar moments: the delightful one when Zagazoo’s new parents chuck their newborn son across the room to each other, or the two heartbreaking ones in Clown.