Less unpredictable in terms of the technique, but with an equally unknown outcome, are a series of drawings Blake has called ‘Characters in Search of a Story’. These are made with a chinagraph pencil and Blake describes the process:
I may start off with a general sense of what the next character may be, though sometimes I have no idea at all. I begin by drawing the eyes, the nose, one side of the cheek. As the drawing proceeds I begin to get a sense of what kind of person this is and what I should emphasise: they may get older, or younger; just occasionally they change sex. And it’s also possible I suppose, the nature of drawing being what it is, that I may put in characteristics that I’m not even aware of. Later on I may realise that some of them have elements of people I know or have met, though I don’t put them in consciously . . . they are invented on paper and it’s there that I get to know them.1
I think Blake is genuinely surprised at the way his visual memory and his unconscious operate for him – perhaps for an illustrator used to working to the brief of a text or something else, the contact to his inner world that these kind of free drawings permit is even more immediate and powerful. There is another telling manifestation of the way that his whole being works unconsciously through his hand and pen: Blake usually works alone in the studio but when, on a rare occasion, he was observed drawing some little characters by a friend, she said afterwards: ‘Did you know you were making all the faces?’
Since Blake is mainly drawing in his studio and not on the move, in cafés or stations, streets or countryside, it is also clear that most of what he draws must emerge more or less fully formed from the imagination. As we will see in the chapter on learning, one of the few situations where Blake has actually drawn from life was when he attended life-drawing classes in Cambridge and then at the Chelsea School of Art. Even then, it was the drawings that he did ‘away from the model’, when he got home from the class, that he felt more satisfied with. He does carry around little books with blank pages, but these are not so much sketchbooks in which to draw what he sees around him, as notebooks, where ideas for drawings might be recorded, alongside to-do lists and other work-related thoughts. Comparing these early ideas with their final expressions in books or other forms, it is astonishing how little they change – this is another highly practical example of what Blake calls ‘the instinct to do the right thing’.
He seems to have operated away from the model from the very beginning: in the 1944 issue of his school magazine, the Chronicle of the Chislehurst and Sidcup County School for Boys, there is a drawing by the 11-year-old Blake called ‘After the Game’. Blake now feels a certain embarrassment about his early output: even though seeing these drawings in print was an important stimulus to his career as an illustrator, he doesn’t want any words or pictures which don’t make the Blake grade to be in the public realm and so it is not reproduced here. Of this one he says: ‘It’s not a good drawing – I wasn’t interested in football, and I got the studs in the wrong place!’ But let me describe it instead: it is small, drawn with what looks like a soft pencil and shows three boys in the school changing room. It has a classical feel, with each boy monumentally and separately engaged in a different activity; the central figure taking off his shoe is almost an updated Spinario, that Hellenistic sculpture-type of a boy removing a thorn from his foot (a version of which is in the British Museum). The drawing is divided by the horizontals of a bench and the verticals of the coat stands, roughly at the pleasing ratio known as the Golden Section (the ratio of the longer side to the shorter side). At the age of 11, Blake was not aware of this ratio, nor, he says, had he ever looked at the work of Piero della Francesca or Georges Seurat, both of whose works these silent, sculptural figures recall.
The smooth drawing style (which Blake now describes as ‘wooden’) is most unlike the dynamic one that he was soon to develop, but there are many elements in this childhood work that have become as important and characteristic as his spluttering pen and animated dramatis personae. This changing-room scene was not drawn from life – Blake thinks he probably did it at home with the basic materials available there, and that he was recalling something which was memorable, perhaps because it made an impression: boisterous team sports, new football kits, smelly changing rooms. Second, it is a scene of ordinary life, the stuff of the art of illustration. In 1944, when most boys of his age, if they were drawing at all, would probably have been doodling fighter planes or soldiers, Blake chose to draw an everyday event. What this drawing also shows is that Blake was interested in figures in movement – at 11 he could already do this with Blakean accuracy, which is not so much anatomical correctness as physical authenticity: the way in which he knows how to capture a pose such as a boy balancing unsteadily on one foot to undo his shoelace, or a boy easing his football shirt over his head, cautiously, because it is still buttoned up, in the way of lazy 11-year-olds. Both movements suggest an artist recalling how it feels to be doing them himself, while in the act of drawing them. This drawing also has a precocious sense of composition.
Although, according to Blake, he is never thinking about organizing his drawings while doing them, he realizes when he looks at them afterwards that he has in fact composed them. In this work the figures are placed in a line, frieze-like, but not in a straight line, and at different depths in the picture space. The group is also broken up, by the vertical of a coat stand, with one boy to the right and two to the left of it. Balance and harmony are achieved by the height of the bench crossing the verticals at the Golden Section, and by the pleasing echoing of the angled legs of the central and right-hand boy. Finally, and this is a strong Blakean trait, he includes a few details, very carefully selected from his memory and placed to suggest the essence of the scene, in this case 11-year-old schoolboys in a school setting: the discarded goalie’s glove in the foreground, where we notice it; the open book, dropped face down on the bench; the wrinkled sock; and the satchel propped up against the wall. Not many, but each one articulate and additive, helping the viewer to imagine being there too. The studs on the boot may be inaccurate, but we totally believe in the scene . . .
All the elements of this early drawing tell us something important about an activity (if it can be called that) that is absolutely central to all Blake’s work: something that the literary critic James Wood calls ‘serious noticing’. Wood applies this term to the way that really skilled novelists manage to look at the world and see and select the details that will most aptly tell the story. As Wood says, ‘the details are the stories; stories in miniature.’2 I sometimes think I see Blake consciously ‘noticing’, watching these details of life, on a train, say, or in a café, but he would say that the process was completely automatic: it seems that noticing and selecting in order to imagine and create is just Blake’s default state.
Where he draws
This naturally gifted draughtsman drew first at home, then at school in the art-room, and then, when he was able to buy a home of his own, in the studio, and most of what he drew came from his head. But there was one period when he did draw from life, proof that he could really do both. In his Punch days in the 1950s he would occasionally stand in for Ronald Searle, as theatre illustrator, working alongside the critic Eric Keown. Searle had taken over this role from G. L. Stampa in 1949, and, in Blake’s view, he had complete mastery of the genre, magically combining caricatured physical likeness with the actors’ attitudes from the production in question, making them instantly recognizable to the readers. (Blake’s favourite eightieth birthday present was a Searle drawing of Bud Flanagan.) Blake did a few three-week stints of this kind on occasions: ‘They were a bit of a nightmare,’ he says, as they usually involved working late at night after a First Night at the theatre in order to deliver early the next day. Blake enjoyed the process, though he feels that his own efforts were less successful than those of his hero, Searle.
This drawing, made on the first night of the London production of the musical Annie in 1978, shows Stratford Johns as the soft-hearted
Oliver Warbuck, Andrea McArdle as the orphan Annie, a well-captured Sheila Hancock as the devious Miss Hannigan, and Sandy, the stray dog. The drawing has all the fluency that Blake had acquired by this time and he could obviously achieve likenesses, but there is something perverse about him having to reproduce a situation created by another director. It is worth remembering that in 1978 Blake was also producing illustrations for Roald Dahl’s The Enormous Crocodile. Somehow it is as if, when freed from the need to stay close to reality (unlike in such theatre drawings), and liberated from the tiny spaces of cartooning, a wellspring of movement, colour and humour is released which gives rise to drawings such as this one and many thousands after it. It is interesting that in the end it was not the reportage aspect of illustration that most excited Blake, even in the field of theatre, which, as we have seen, he felt very close to. Instead, first in book illustration and then later in works that Blake calls ‘off the page’, such as his projects for healthcare settings, he seems to have found the proper outlet for his natural inclination towards creative story-making.
Ironically it is now on the stage where Blake is often to be seen drawing. For the last 15 years he has been using a visualizer, a video camera which displays documents onto a screen, allowing large audiences to watch his hand magically bring forms to life onx the page. Of course Blake has drawn in public in many different settings for years: his approach in these situations is always generously pragmatic. He has drawn on all fours on the floor when there was no easel, on white- and blackboards in schools, on flipcharts and on glass; he famously once used a friend’s lipstick to draw with when his own dip-pen went missing just before a performance at the Cambridge Union.
But by far his biggest audiences for live drawing were for the BBC TV’s children’s storytelling series Jackanory. The 31 Jackanory seasons (September to March) ran uninterruptedly from 1965–96, five days a week for 15 minutes, and the programme was designed to encourage children to read (though early critics panicked that it would deter them from doing so). Blake would have appreciated this aim, as he did the roster of all the best-known actors of the period who appeared on the programme, and who told stories ranging from fairy-tales to classic and contemporary children’s books. Children of all ages and abilities were catered for, so that 600-word picture-books alternated with minimally illustrated ‘chapter’ books. Imaginative actor/book combinations included Alan Bennett/Winnie the Pooh, Bernard Cribbins/Alice in Wonderland, Margaret Rutherford/The Tale of Mrs Tiggywinkle. And, in a rarer slot, there was Quentin Blake/the Lester stories).
A clip from 1976, now on YouTube, shows a slim young man with dark, longish but receding hair and a serious face (he only smiles twice, fleetingly, once at the beginning and once again, almost with relief, at the end. Blake says that this was mainly because his intention was to tell the story, not to perform it.)
A chunky black marker pen in hand, he moves across a screen-filling stretch of paper, simultaneously drawing and telling the story of Lester, a spiny creature with big eyes – a cross between a dragon and a dog was Blake’s idea – and his friends, the flap-eared and hopeless Lorna, and Otto, a toad-like thing, who doesn’t move about much. Blake looks very slightly ill at ease, as if unsure who or where the TV-land audience is, but his delivery is clear and direct. It is only as his hand starts to move that we relax, finally reassured that a performance is in fact taking place. As the pen makes contact with the paper we have no idea, because he often doesn’t tell us, what he is drawing. He might start with a foot, or a circle that could become either an eye or a roller-skate wheel, and so he keeps us watching and waiting for each denouement. The lines flow unerringly, and Blake has an implicit understanding of the space on the page and how each figure relates to the next one – it is only when less experienced illustrators try drawing like this that it becomes clear how much skill is demanded.
Blake was in his early forties by the time these Jackanory programmes were made, and they demonstrate how sure his drawing technique had become by this time. When, in the studio, or with the help of the visualizer, we watch him at work today, 40 years later, we see the same gestures, and of course we recognize what has become his unmistakable style, his rapid visual ‘handwriting’.
What he draws
What is not the same, though, are the subjects he is now drawing and their potential audiences. Of course he can and still does produce amusing hybrid creatures when drawing in front of family audiences at events such as the annual launch of the Big Draw, of which more later. And he is still illustrating books – a couple of projects a year at least. But up until about fifteen years ago, the vast majority of his work had been light-hearted; indeed, people who are mainly familiar with his greetings cards and, perhaps, the Dahl books, often refer to him as a cartoonist. I started by wanting to make people laugh,’ he freely admits, and even the work not aimed at children – his sixth-form drawings for the school magazine; his work in the Army Education Corps; the early Punch cartoons and covers; the Spectator and Radio Times work; the ephemera such as designs for menus made for the Royal College of Art – these are essentially drawings in the major key. So are the book covers and illustrations for adult fiction and non-fiction, the titles such as Patrick Campbell’s How to be a Scratch Golfer and Brewing Up in the Basement, or Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One; Malcolm Bradbury’s clever first novel Eating People is Wrong and the companion volumes to the BBC’s Popular Gardeners’ Question Time programme. But Blake also adds tellingly, ‘Waugh’s Helena [his only historical novel] was an exception and I was glad to get it.’
Increasingly over the last few years, though, Blake has been developing another side to his art, which has called for a different kind of drawing, often larger in scale and in an emotional register that is very far from those cover images, greetings cards and children’s books: the ones he calls ‘discoveries’. Some of these newer works have been part of commissioned schemes for hospital and other healthcare settings and we will look at these in Part 2. But there are others, which are not commissions, which seem to fit no category and which are not strictly speaking illustrations. These are sets of drawings whose origins are often inexplicable to Blake, although sometimes after he has completed a few in one set, he does begin to have ideas about them. Looking back at them as a group of works, they do have threads in common. They are often drawn on A2 or even A1 sheets, and the figures are sometimes quite large, taking up much of the picture space. There is usually a pair of figures, humans or perhaps a human with an animal. These are spare images, almost without incidental detail, and the scenes are set either in a barely suggested landscape, or in unspecific interiors. Let’s look at a few of them a little more closely.
The first is a lithograph from the Girls and Dogs set, which was made for an exhibition at Marlborough Fine Art in London in 2012, and followed a series he had done called Children and Dogs, which were included in an exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery (though interestingly rather ignored by the critics of that show).
On a bare hillside, with a suggestion of urban decay on the horizon, we are confronted with two figures: a scruffy, adolescent, barefoot girl, her hair in her eyes, sits on the ground beside an oversized hairy dog, with blank eyes and a panting tongue, whose pose echoes the girl’s. At first we notice their sprawling limbs, messily, beautifully drawn with the lithographic pencil, the girl’s arms lightly echoing the contour of the hill. Then, at their feet, we notice pens and sheets of paper strewn about. The dog has his paw on one page with some orange splodges and the girl fingers another, perhaps peeping at a drawing on the other side of the paper that we can’t see. It feels as if we are inside a moment in a story, because we want to account for the situation: where are they? Is the ruined building a bit of picturesque decay, or the result of some conflict? Is the girl dressed so lightly because it’s warm (the orange glow on the horizon might suggest that)? Or are these the clothes she has been left with after some disaster? Is the dog’s size symbolic, and if so of what? And how does the
art fit in? Such questions invite us to take part in the experience; the picture’s oddness won’t allow us to be detached. So we attempt some speculative answers, which might help us to construct a meaning for ourselves: perhaps, on the whole, the atmosphere suggests disquiet rather than summer holidays. The dog is potentially a threat, but actually its attitude is rather companionable and the girl doesn’t seem to be afraid. And they are both apparently artists, or at least art is a connective factor. Perhaps they have even drawn each other, or perhaps the scene is related to another Blakean trope, that of the young woman pondering an artistic career. There may also be something about art’s ability to confront the things we don’t do so easily in real life. This theme seems to be one that underlies much of Blake’s more recent work. Perhaps that is exactly what his art has done for him.
The second image is an apparently more straightforward one from the series Companions, also made for the Marlborough exhibition
Here are two figures again but this time, at first glance, as if posed for a double portrait. The work is made using a chinagraph marker, a kind of greasy wax pencil, and the lines are soft and lightly executed, very unlike Blake’s more usual scratchy engagement with paper; this gives the work a ghostly fragility which also demands our attention. On the left is an older woman with arms folded across her broad chest, who seems half to address the audience, while at the same time casting a sidelong glance at the boy next to her. He sits stiffly, his torso slightly inclined towards the viewer, whom he looks at uncertainly. There is a sketchy indication of a bench or sofa behind them, but this is all the information we are given about who or where they are. It is more puzzling because two figures posed facing the viewer normally suggests portraiture; and the work has the quality of a snapshot, in which the photographer has captured a fleeting moment, which is expressive of the relationship between the two people. The woman, perhaps the boy’s mother, with her folded arms and the dark shadow behind her, seems disapproving. But maybe also uncomprehending. Is the boy a confused adolescent? Is he almost asking the audience for help? Is this an autobiographical picture, we might wonder? Even if it isn’t, we may sense that the artist has a great empathy with the situation.
Quentin Blake: In the Theatre of the Imagination Page 3