Quentin Blake: In the Theatre of the Imagination

by Ghislaine Kenyon

  For children who will already have identified with the little cast-off creature, seeing him being tossed in the air is to feel with him a sense of the rejection that they (and we) can all recognize – and so the flying that started out as a comedy gag has, by the time of Clown, become something altogether more profound.

  This links us to the way in which Blake takes his human or animal characters off the ground for metaphorical purposes. The cover for the Bologna Children’s Book Fair (2003), for example, where in a sunset-yellow sky, children read books in the air, as if lofted by their own imaginations. In Patrick, an enduring favourite, the beauty of Patrick’s violin-playing encourages fish to ‘jump out and fly about in the air’, for sheer joy, it must be assumed.

  In Blake’s series of pictures commissioned for the Kershaw Ward in the South Kensington and Chelsea Mental Health Centre, there is also metaphor in the way the older people represented have found their way into trees. In this in-patient diagnostic unit the patients were mainly older adults with one or other type of dementia. Blake’s brief was to provide works for the communal spaces in the unit, including the dining room, corridors and day room. The mood is light, ‘whimsical’ as Blake puts it, in inverted commas; the characters are engaged in various pleasurable activities familiar to the patients themselves, either because they still perform them, or because they once did. The conceit of having these benign souls eat, drink, sleep, read or play music (as in this image) in trees works on several levels: humorous in its improbability, it also (and more vitally) transports patients from a difficult present to a place which connects them with the people they were, and in some respects often still are.

  The set proved such a great success with staff and patients that the commissioners decided to ask Blake for more, and he went on to make another series of images for the patient bedrooms – he had only been asked for 20 but, as almost always with Blake, once he set about drawing, he found it hard to quell the torrent of ideas, and he went on to produce 60. This allowed patients to pick an image of their own choice, choices often being in limited supply in NHS mental health facilities. The range included images of birds, cats and individual figures reading, painting or eating; but there were a few, such as this one, that wandered into a different territory, even surprising Blake. Here a solid-looking older woman (not a habituée of the Blake female canon) in a grey belted raincoat stands holding a thin golden thread, which is attached to something hovering in the air beside her, and to whom she addresses a quizzical smile. The drawing of this something is light touched and blurred by grey and gold colour washes, which invite us to look more closely. When we do, we can make out another woman, who perhaps flies down to meet the grey lady, and smiles back at her. What are we to make of this figure? Is she a friendly ghost, a kind of angel, or even an ‘alter’ or former ego? Blake himself does not have an answer to this question. And so, again, we are invited to participate, to bring our own understanding and interpretation into the picture.

  Many more hospital projects have followed this one and are described elsewhere in this book, but there are two related ones that should be included here, although the related element is water rather than air.

  For the Gordon Hospital in Victoria, again for adults with learning disabilities, Blake made some drawings of individual or pairs of figures. These people are fully dressed, but apparently swimming underwater, since they are accompanied by fish, other indeterminate aquatic creatures and sometimes by dogs or shopping bags, other things from the safe world of home. Blake has said of this series, which he calls Life Under Water, that he came to realize that the figures were ‘everyday people finding themselves in an unusual situation, but unfazed’2 – again it is interesting that he was not conscious of what the result would be when he set out on this project. In common with the angels, birds and other flying things, these swimmers are free. They make their own way through the water and, although unsuitably clad for the situation, and surrounded by strange animals, these swimmers appear to be in control, calm and with a sense of purpose. This seems to be some kind of metaphor for an ideal hospital stay: the patient knows why she is there; it may be strange, frightening, uncomfortable, but the people who work there accompany you.

  Blake’s images of mothers and babies which give such character to the walls of the maternity hospital in Angers (south-west France) are also apparently under water – also in a space of liberty, that unparalleled physical freedom experienced by many mothers in the moments after giving birth. In Blake’s words:

  The mothers and babies are drawn with a reed-pen, in Indian ink, and coloured with watercolour, mostly a non-naturalistic watery colour, blue or green. After a certain amount of experimentation I realized the thing not to do is to paint the water. Moved about only on the bodies, watercolour is able to suggest the human forms and the movement of the water at the same time. That there is no other presence of water takes the picture further into a parallel reality – there’s more of a sense of a celebration in the mothers’ and babies’ liberty of movement. They might almost be flying.

  Then there is another kind of flying in some work that Blake produced for Cambridge University. As sometimes happens with people who don’t have families themselves, Blake has a well-developed sense of loyalty to the people and institutions who have supported him professionally and in his private life. Cambridge was important for him in many ways, but he is not umbilically attached to it, in the sense of needing to return to college dinners, or keeping up with contemporaries. He had a reason, though, to be in contact with Downing College when he was given an Honorary Fellowship, became president of the alumni association one year, and produced, as we have seen, drawings to be used on college merchandise. So, when Blake was approached by the organizing committee of the Cambridge 800th anniversary celebrations, to produce a sequence of pictures of famous Cambridge alumni, he accepted readily, feeling naturally reconnected to his alma mater. The drawings he produced for this scheme became what he calls ‘an informal panorama’ which included Milton pondering Paradise Lost, with the biblical cherub wielding a sword and dismissing a Masaccioesque Adam and Eve, Darwin comfortably installed on the back of a giant Galapagos tortoise, Byron and even (slightly against Blake’s better judgement) Henry de Winton and John Charles Thring, inventors of the rules of football. The last image in the series was different though.

  Here Blake interpreted the strapline of the 800th anniversary ‘Transforming Tomorrow’: the image shows a group of gowned and book-toting students and dons, some on foot and others cycling. Starbursts of pink, orange and green explode over their heads, and they look up with amazement at those in front of them who joyfully leave the ground, and cycle or fly off into a golden dawn. There is a multitude of them, and they have flown high and far, like a flock of pre-roost starlings disappearing off the edge of the page. In its context of course it is meant to suggest the rich benefits of a Cambridge education, the starbursts standing perhaps for intellectual inspiration and the student take-off as the successful career-launch.

  But this image also seems to have a much more universal appeal. Carl Jung: ‘good old Carl’ Blake teases me, and other interpreters of dreams have seen the bicycle as representing independence and balance; for most it is the first vehicle we learn to ride. Those impossible bicycles in the sky can also speak of the way good education works for every learner, in any situation: a chance to defy expectations of parents or teachers, to take off and soar in your own direction.

  This is a very limited selection of the things in the air that Blake has drawn from the very beginning. With a few exceptions, the white page is his air, perhaps his oxygen too, and air is for flying through, either literally or metaphorically. Angels, birds and things that shouldn’t be able to fly, all of these can be found making their way, joyfully free of gravity, through the Blakean air – he has even drawn himself as a hovering artist (rotor-blade assisted).

  One can speculate a little on Blake’s strong preference for the airborne condition. A
s a human being, Blake might be described as grounded. Friends, acquaintances and colleagues, both those who know him very well and those who have met him once or twice, when asked to characterize his default state, choose, almost in unison, words such as considered, cautious, calm, unassuming, slow-moving (though, they added, exceptionally quick-thinking) – and this doesn’t sound like a conspiracy; the words seemed to come fresh from the reliable source that personal experience can be. Blake does not fly off the handle or into a rage. He does not fly off the ground if he can help it, avoiding air travel wherever possible, although he has forced himself to cross the Atlantic a few times. He has never willingly practised the kind of sports where speed or obstacles force the athlete to take off. Cycling and some (not so gentle) table tennis have been as active as he has wanted to get – he did learn to swim, ‘but it’s only wallowing’ and he has never really relished it, even though he is in many ways a man of the sea. So why does he seem to return so often to ‘off the ground’?

  Might these recurring angels, birds, flying people and objects represent Blake’s own world-view? As suggested above, Blake says that when he is not illustrating a text where the images need to work closely with words, he is mostly unaware of the origins of the drawings that flow or splutter from his pen. The drawing of these things, the visible thinking as it could be described, is unconscious, but it is an insistent return to the theme.

  Three thoughts occur here: one is the idea about the creative person using his art vicariously to live a life he doesn’t/can’t/won’t do in reality. It is the vehicle which has taken the man away to places and situations he hadn’t been to before, but which he can represent imaginatively on the page.

  The second is closely linked to this one: the idea of flying as a metaphor for the imagination more generally. Here imagination could be seen as the way in which the creating person comes upon content, freed from the gravity of prescription of any kind: what one of the other famous Blakes (William) called ‘threefold vision’, which arises from what he called Beulah, the place of poetic inspiration and dreams. This mirrors the way that birds might be free to take any compass direction and choose how low or high to fly. It might be useful at this point to hear Blake’s own take on imagination, which is actually all about the way that it is misunderstood, even by his faithful and appreciative public:

  A chance acquaintance observed to me recently: ‘There is a little hairy dog that appears in your drawings sometimes . . . Do you have a dog?’ The answer is no; but it serves as a brief tidy example of how some people seem to think imagination works. Another version which I encounter from time to time is the same though in reverse: how can you work in children’s books if you haven’t had children? That, I am afraid, shows small notion of what might be going on in the creation of a book for children, a novel, a play, a performance. I was pleased to discover from something he had written for a newspaper feature that Barry Humphries had had a similar experience. In his case it was the mistaken assumption that the incentive for him to become Dame Edna was that he was a transvestite already. A bit, he observed, as if you wanted to play Hamlet because you were Danish.

  There is a problem for some people to imagine imagination – that it could actually exist without practical explanation. Is it perhaps reassuring to feel you are keeping in order something unsettlingly alive and various?

  An observation from Hilary Mantel might be appropriate here. It is from a recent discussion between Mantel, the actress Harriet Walter, and the playwright Timberlake Wertenbaker, about imagination and theatre. Mantel’s reaction is rather to those who think of the exercise of imagination as lightweight, fanciful. ‘It’s not like that: to imagine properly, you have to imagine strenuously – it has to come from the depth . . . Imagination, properly understood, is a physical process.’ It is something that a little dog can offer you very little help with.

  So here is evidence of how wide open Blake’s imaginative mind is to possibility, to the ‘unsettlingly alive and various’; and this is true as much with commissions as with self-initiated projects. His early training as an illustrator for Punch, the Spectator and Radio Times, where ideas had to be summoned, sometimes from nowhere and always on time, must certainly have helped. As he says, ‘It was a bit like being an actor in a repertory company, playing a different part every week, and each week in a different style.’ The span of the work he has undertaken since the age of 70 is huge: it ranges from large-scale exhibitions to building-wraps and schemes for hospitals. For charities he has decorated deckchairs and designed scores of logos and marques; away from commissions he has come back to lithography, has invented new book-forms (Woman with a Book, for example) and has produced a torrent of new works which occupy a fresh and indefinable artistic territory, something between illustration and ‘fine art’ (a term which to Blake’s mind begs many questions). They are all on paper and they share a sense of narrative, but they are drawn with different tools, and their subjects are varied and various, including anthropomorphic insects, large women, heads emerging from the ground, and lumbering vehicular creatures. It is this kind of openness to inspiration that seems to have a parallel with flight, that multidimensional form of travel. And perhaps it is because he is operating in this sphere that he is able to ‘give to airy nothing a local habitation and a name’, as Theseus puts it so exactly in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

  The third symbolic idea about flight is one that focuses on the process of drawing itself: we have seen how Blake can treat his paper as a page of air, through which his hordes of flying things make their way; and so the passage of the pen across it is another kind of flight. It is free, bound only by the paper’s edges. Watching Blake at work, either on the many public occasions where he performs, or at work in the studio, it is clear that three-quarters of a century of daily drawing have given him this freedom. There are habitual traits such as the dots for eyes, the retroussé nose, the feet, flattened though also always in motion; but then there will be a sudden change of direction, a new burst of lines, an unexpected colour flush, which will surprise even him in the act of drawing. And this is true flying. In the words of another poet, the Victorian Robert Browning, in Paracelsus:

  Truth is within ourselves;

  It takes no rise from outward things . . . .

  To know, rather, consists in opening out a way whence the imprisoned splendour may escape.

  Part 2

  Why the art of Quentin Blake can make you feel better

  Blake’s diary of World Parrot Day 2004 for The Spectator

  6 Giving

  C’est fou comme Quentin a le pouvoir de rendre heureux [It’s crazy how Quentin has the power to make people happy].

  Catherine Meurisse

  It’s a scene Quentin Blake might himself have relished drawing, and of course I later discovered that he had in fact done so: in a photograph in the Daily Telegraph he is seen framed by the black door of Number 10 Downing Street1, Blake stands face to camera, shoulders uncharacteristically braced, a concentrated, brave smile in his eyes. Also eyeing us directly, Gizmo, a blue-and-yellow macaw, is stiffly perched on Blake’s shoulders (‘That jacket had to go to the cleaner’s’, he remembers); man and bird both apparently determined to endure the mutual discomfort in the interest of the cause they are both there to support: in his right hand Blake holds a fat volume – a petition ‘to ban imports of wild birds’.

  Blake’s presence at this event, World Parrot Day 2004, a Trafalgar Square demonstration followed by a march which he and Gizmo led to Downing Street, is one example among very many of his disposition to support. Great artists have a reputation for self-absorption (often justified) but Blake has an unusual ability to look out of the studio and see further than the next commission. Over many decades and without any fuss, he has been giving his talent and his time, not to mention works and money, to charities whose needs he sees and wants do something about.

  These are charities which are mainly unrelated to the arts, and with which
he has no obvious connection, but he and the charities both appreciate that a tailor-made drawing is worth as much or more than a financial contribution.

  The seriousness with which he approaches these gifts is striking: he might produce something relatively small-scale, such as these images for Christmas cards sold in aid of Survival International (the charity which helps tribal peoples defend their lives), and pay the job the same respect as he would to a much more glamorous project. Blake’s dislike of global travel has prevented him from ever visiting, say, the Canadian Arctic or Amazonia, so he has never seen or got to know the peoples there. But, as with every other experience he has never had, he knows how make it up. He will have done the necessary research – he will always be able to make a mobile phone or pair of trainers, or Inuit-wear for that matter, look up-to-the-minute, but, every time, it is the authenticity of the situations and their contingent emotions that really make us believe in them. Here it’s the way that the smallest Inuit child tugs eagerly at the hand of the older one, which in a few pen-strokes describes her (and so our) delight at the vision of the Northern Lights displayed above her.

  In the Survival International Annual Report of 2010 he wrote of the charity:

  For me, Survival is important for two reasons: one is that I think it’s right that we should give help and support to people who are threatened by the rapacious industrial society we have created; and the other that, more generally, it gives an important signal about how we all ought to be looking after the world. Its message is the most fundamental of any charity I’m connected with.