Quentin Blake: In the Theatre of the Imagination

by Ghislaine Kenyon

  It seemed to me that Blake’s philosophy of living and working is most perfectly expressed in his work, both in words and in pictures: in Part 3 we will dive a little more deeply into two children’s books from different parts of his career, Patrick and Zagazoo. There is a postscript too, where I have handed the microphone to Blake, for a first-hand account of the projects that are keeping his drawing hand and drawing brain occupied for the next year or two.

  What motivated me to write about the UK’s best-known and best-loved illustrator? Like many people, I got to know Quentin Blake through his work, first as a primary school teacher in the late 1970s when I used his illustrations to animate my own teaching, and then re-discovering it with my own children. In that sense I am an audience member. But I also have a working friendship with him, ever since I once impulsively asked him to illustrate a children’s guide to the National Gallery, where I was then running the education programmes for young people. Although I didn’t know it at the time, it was entirely typical of the ungrand person that Blake is universally agreed to be that he took my phone call personally and agreed with little hesitation to work with someone he didn’t know, even if the institution (at the time directed by Neil MacGregor) was a venerable one.

  We followed that with a more ambitious project, a jointly curated exhibition called Tell Me a Picture: this was a venture that Blake decided would be the centrepiece of his year as the first Children’s Laureate (1999–2000). Thanks to his practical inventiveness and his imaginative approach to the National Gallery’s collection, it proved to be highly successful and popular, with over 250,000 visitors. It was also a bold move (and one that reflected my own views about the way that people see art) to set children’s book illustration alongside iconic examples of ‘fine art’. Over the last few decades Blake has promoted the value of illustration in its primary context; that is, to enrich text, or to communicate a message or a narrative without text. But in this and other exhibitions he also made the important point that people’s engagement with the everyday art of illustration can be a bridge to their understanding of more apparently complex or demanding works.

  Very early on I became aware that working with Blake involved me in much more than carrying out my curating role efficiently. In addition to the formal progress meetings, there would be the long phone calls whose initial subject might be the exhibition, but which would then roam off, delightfully, into other realms of mutual interest: art or literature or France. In those days the fax was a preferred method of communication for Blake, but his were never the dull documents that the office machine normally served up. They would be hand-written, of course, but also elaborated with cheering drawings and flourishes. I would come away from these exchanges with the sense of a person whose life and work is an indivisible unit, full of complementary, singing colours.

  Other projects followed, notably in France where Blake – continuing in the vein, which he terms ‘beyond the page’ – produced work for hospitals in Angers and Paris, and also curated an exhibition for the then newly refurbished Musée du Petit Palais in Paris, Quentin Blake et les Demoiselles des Bords de Seine. My role was as a consultant/producer: I dealt with the organizations, acted as a sounding-board for ideas, and occasional interpreter, though Blake’s French is excellent. We often worked on the projects at Blake’s house in the Charentes-Maritime in south-western France but the work was somehow always interleaved with activities that seemed equally important: walking, cycling or driving to favoured nearby spots, shopping in the market, or visiting local friends. I was able to observe the work/life co-operation at close hand and for sustained periods and, slowly, I began to see a connection between this process and the art that he makes. I started to understand that here there was a kind of commitment to the art of living a full life in the moment, which is not the same as living an exciting one. This I saw matched and fed into his absolute dedication to the art of drawing. I wondered whether this might, at least in part, be because Blake does not have a life-partner (although he does share his large West London flat with his friend and collaborator John Yeoman), nor children. As someone deeply rooted in the earth of large-family-with-career I have watched Blake’s different, untrammelled situation and have found the opportunities and insights it seems to offer his art both intriguing and illuminating.

  Another aspect of Blake’s life-work to which I was drawn is his profound involvement with what educationists today call learning and teaching, but which he would probably still think of as education. We were both trained as teachers but both see that it was not so much the training that formed us, but rather a deep-rooted understanding of the role of first-hand experiences in effective learning. Good teaching can facilitate this, and like many fortunate people, we have both experienced such situations. But real learning can also happen much more independently, from early childhood onwards, when a person is encouraged or at least allowed by family to follow a consuming interest; sometimes, as in Blake’s case, an interest that seems to come out of nowhere. Blake did have what would normally be described as a very good formal education (grammar school, Cambridge, the Institute of Education) but all along he never stopped doing the thing he most wanted to do: to draw. And he didn’t go to art school, so, artistically, he is something of an autodidact.

  In researching this book I have interviewed a wide range of people who have come into contact with Blake over the years: ex-pupils, students, artists, colleagues, friends, relatives and acquaintances. In some ways I was hoping that I might meet a different Quentin Blake to the one whose portrait I hold in my own mind. Here I was disappointed, although perhaps also slightly relieved. The opinions on and stories about Blake and his work are remarkably coherent – my interviewees overwhelmingly describe a gentleman with immense, original talent, and a person of great generosity: to family, friends, colleagues, students, fellow illustrators, schools, charities and untold numbers of worldwide fans. As the critic Julia Eccleshare told me: ‘I’ve never heard anyone say anything unpleasant about Quentin, EVER!’ In this single sense, then, perhaps Blake is uncontroversial. But as my interviewees all also confirm, the surprises are always there: Blake the hilarious thesp, especially as mimic, witnessed by only a few lucky people; Blake the artist of the sensual, of work which has nothing to do with children or children’s books; Blake the scholar, quoting aptly from nineteenth-century works in English and French; Blake occasionally bad-tempered and depressed when caught in unpredictable situations, mainly connected with travel; Blake the most individual of dressers, with a taste for white shoes . . . and so this book is also about his capacity to startle, both in life and in work.

  The other arm of the research, reading what has already been written about Blake, has yielded a similar (in some ways frustrating!) consensus. Academics and journalists in the fields of children’s literature and the visual arts, who write about Blake’s books or exhibitions, or his place in the canon of children’s literature, pay him great respect, (although interestingly he is less visible on the other side of the cultural divide that exists between the UK and the USA). In general, illustration as a reported-on and reviewed art form has only a small place, and the amount of press space generally devoted to children’s books is equally restricted, as is a common critical language around book illustration; but the number of laudatory column inches dedicated to Blake over the last 40 years is evidence of the great regard in which he and his work are held. It could be argued that what appears in the press, especially the book reviews, show an understanding that Blake’s work is powerful, but there is often very little attempt to analyse the reasons why it does what it does so well. I hope this book will begin to rectify this situation.

  There is one significant exception to the general enthusiasm, though, which I mention, firstly, because it appeared in the London Evening Standard and so may have been relatively widely seen, and secondly, because it claimed something very fundamental about Blake’s work, which needs a response. The waspishly literate art critic Brian Sewell in r
eviewing an exhibition of Blake’s work at Dulwich Picture Gallery in 2004, found ‘sameness’ in his work, and ‘calculated comedy’. Sewell did concede that there was accomplished draughtsmanship and admitted that he himself was an ignorant critic of the work, having graduated directly from Beatrix Potter to ‘the trashy novels’ that his mother read. However, this entertaining but unsubtle tirade could not have got Blake more wrong, both factually and critically. This book is de facto a reply to such misapprehensions.

  So, in sum, here is neither the biography, which someone else will write one day, nor the artist’s monograph, which an art historian will produce when Blake has eventually completed his work. It cannot be dispassionate because there is in it admiration both for the work and the person. But there is I hope a genuine understanding of Blake’s creative spirit, based on many conversations and observations, a grasp of the work’s unique content and execution, and also of its singular effects (and the effect that he himself has) on people and environments outside the studio. It is a not uncritical view of a snapshot portion of Blake’s vast output: the illustrations to over three hundred books, including his own texts, the paintings, the prints, (even one or two sculptures), and thousands and thousands of drawings, some published but many not. As such I hope it will contribute to a proper evaluation of the place of Quentin Blake in the canon of artists whose work has made a difference in the world.

  Part 1

  Art in all directions

  Book cover for The Birds by Aristophanes

  1 Drawing, drawing, drawing

  Drawing is “a way of reasoning on paper”.

  Saul Steinberg

  The heart has its reasons that reason knows nothing about.

  Pascal

  To get to know the real Quentin Blake we must begin with a visit to his studio – artists’ workplaces often seem to reflect and reveal character and work in a way that few other rooms can do. For example Peter Blake (they are not related) , works in a highly organized and categorized space, surrounded by his life-collection of objects and works of art. The space seems to echo both his neat appearance and his quiet, concise way of speaking, as well as the eclectic sources for his art. Quentin Blake’s studio could not be more different.

  First, the studio is there in the middle of his home – unlike many artists, Blake doesn’t go out to work. When he started out as an illustrator he couldn’t afford for the studio to be anywhere but in his flat, but even after he could, he realized that it had its advantages: he often revisits work in the studio in the evening, or even, exceptionally, at 5 a.m. And because he has at various times so often also been working away from the studio, giving talks, visiting schools or hospitals, for example, coming back to the studio-at-home is part of the pleasure of being home again. This is the first and perhaps most important example of his undivided approach to work and life. The studio itself is a high-ceilinged, south-facing room on the second floor of a late Victorian mansion block. It looks out onto a peaceful and spacious private square in south-west London; French doors lead onto a narrow balcony where, when you visit, you may sometimes catch sight of Blake, contemplating from amid the flourishing pot-plants, and then beaming and waving when he catches sight of you. Back inside the room two entire walls are taken up with shelves and boxes holding many of the 300 books Blake has illustrated so far, including disturbingly unfamiliar copies of Roald Dahl’s Matilda in Japanese or Dutch. The other walls are blank, apart from an overmantel mirror into which are stuck personal photographs, postcards and drawings; on the opposite wall, some aged ink splodges, which skitter across the white expanse much as Blake’s own drawings do on paper. But most of the surfaces are covered – the floor with boxes of his newest books, or with piles of less new ones, or with the many plan-chests which hold his current work. There is also a trestle table, a long low table, and three seats for working and meetings: a barstool, a wooden chair and an ancient Eames chair, its white seat-cushion bulging like a hernia out of its leather cover. Most of the surfaces are covered too: the low table with yet more books, this time other people’s, the chairs with documents, letters, magazines and drawing ‘failures’, as he terms them, which also spill over on to the plan-chests. The reassuring (the drawings, his own books, the postcards) mingles with the more uncertain, the yet-to-be answered letters, unread books, decisions still to be made, projects-in-waiting.

  But there are two highly ordered and purposeful spaces here. The trestle is home to the artist’s tools: the pens, brushes, delicious little blocks of watercolour paint and water jars are all exactly where Blake knows they will be when he turns from the light-box on which he works and which sits on another plan-chest, at right-angles to the trestle.

  Today, pale blinds keep out the worst of the sun, and, amid the jumble of surfaces and things, the focus is on a figure in a navy-blue cardigan standing hunched over the light-box. For a few seconds we hear only two sounds: a breathing, heavy with concentration, and a scratching, the contact between a possessed pen-nib and the uneven surface of watercolour paper. An act of drawing is taking place and we hold our breath.

  This chapter will watch Blake drawing, because, in his mind, this is where his life-story begins: his earliest memories are connected with either looking at drawing, or doing it, and drawing is something he has been doing practically every day of his life since childhood. This chapter will explore what, how, when, where and why he draws. Drawing is of course the vehicle for his kind of illustration – he doesn’t paint much or photograph or collage or make film or animations – but, alongside book illustrations, Blake has always made drawings, which do not answer a professional brief. These range from phone doodles (although he doesn’t like or use that word because it’s what fans always ask him to do) to large works which inhabit a happy kind of artistic noman’s-land, somewhere between illustration and fine art.

  Let’s return to the studio where he spends part of every day, to the man and to his light-box.

  This is a technique he has been using for over thirty years and this choice of it as a working method is key to any understanding of his work. He stands at the light-box – it is a way of keeping alert, in charge of the activity, really seeing what is going on. As he says: ‘I’m fairly sluggish and inactive, but everything, pretty much everything I draw I draw standing up . . . and in a way it’s like some kind of sport.’

  If his drawings are for a picture-book, the process is, briefly, that he starts by creating a chemin de fer, a storyboard for the whole book, which then gives him a clear sense of how each double-page spread is going to work, both on its own and in the context of the whole book. For each of these spreads he will make a rough. The way Blake usually approaches these is to start with ‘the situation’; how a character is reacting to an event such as this encounter from Russell Hoban’s How Tom beat Captain Najork and his Hired Sportsmen, perhaps with a surprised expression, or one full of expectation or disappointment. Impressively, right from this moment, and probably also because he has done it for so long now, he always seems to have an instinctive knowledge of how everything is going to fit on the page.

  Having settled on the rough that works best, he places it on the light-box, followed by a sheet of watercolour paper, by preference the French Arches Fin (cold pressed) brand, which he buys in great bulk, sometimes from Green & Stone’s in the King’s Road (‘but they never have enough!’ he sighs). The light from the box allows just enough of the rough drawing to penetrate the watercolour paper, so that Blake can use it as a kind of cue for the final drawing: as he puts it, ‘You’re drawing it as if for the first time, again’. There will be some connection to the original idea, but to Blake this process preempts the deadening effect of direct copying. He has a great need for the constant twoway engagement between hand, brain and imagination to be clear and unobstructed. This in turn produces in the drawings a spontaneity, which people who don’t know read merely as rapidity. Yes, the final drawing may have taken a matter of minutes, seconds even, but this definitive vers
ion is the result of the ten others that preceded it, and, in a broader sense, of the 75 years of constant practice that came before those. Of course, not everything works every time. Blake is highly self-critical, he knows how to ‘slaughter (his) darlings’ as the composer Benjamin Britten once described the process of rejecting favoured ideas that do not ultimately serve the final form of a work. ‘Sometimes’ he says, I spend all day doing a drawing and at the end I think that’s not right and I do it again, and I realize that one is better. But sometimes the second version tells me what’s right about the first one. If the less good one is good enough I can sell it at my dealer’s, Chris Beetles, but there are still some that are so bad that I have to tear them up. My studio has a very big waste-paper basket!

  Blake’s ‘mistakes’ are always where the line has gone wrong somehow, and this has to be right because lines are his medium: a sequence of lines that create the actions and set the scenes, to which colour is then added; somehow where colour is concerned though, he uses it unerringly and spontaneously:

  I don’t have a set of rules about colour and how you use it, I don’t think leaves are green, or tree-trunks brown. Colour can add depth, emotion and atmosphere. I don’t know how I do it, it’s instinctive; some people do roughs in colour for books but I only ever do black and white – I busk the colour.

  This sense of busking is also involved in another kind of drawing, unrelated to books, which Blake calls his ‘discoveries’.

  These are works whose origins Blake claims often not to know: ‘it’s like encountering somebody for the first time; you come to know them as you draw them . . . you arrive at the edge of their story . . .’ Here he works directly onto the watercolour paper, often using, say, ‘dangerous’ and ‘unpredictable’ media such as watercolour pencils and water: ‘You draw the picture and then you go into it with water on a brush and then you’ve got a minute or two to bring it off, or not.’ Or with pen and ink, where all erasing is impossible (though Blake does admit that in some cases he administers a white paint ‘plaster’ to an accidental blotch, when the drawing in question is to be reproduced). In both these types of drawing it is clear that operating in the uncertainty of the moment is the only safe way for Blake: it is only when he has a sense of not knowing the ending that his self-willed pen can get going.