The third image, from the same series, shows two more figures who seem to appeal to us, only more directly this time.
Who are these two? A couple, perhaps, she hollow-eyed and perplexed, he, half-dressed and clutching what might be a few clothes, both staring out at us. This is almost like photo-journalism: one could imagine a pair of refugees, holed up in a camp, or victims of some natural disaster clinging on to their few remaining belongings.
And yet Blake has confirmed that these are not portraits of living people, but of characters which surface from his imagination. When these works were exhibited at the Marlborough Gallery, a critic said, ‘It is hard to believe that all of his works spring from unconscious ideas. More explanation from the artist would be beneficial’.3
Her words are interesting because they imply that artists do or should always work at a conscious level, that meaning should be obvious, and that if it isn’t, the artist has a duty to try to explain himself. Blake’s work, especially in this format, is more demanding of his viewers than that; it asks them to complete the work themselves, imaginatively. The nature of the drawing is sparse, the ratio of pen-strokes to expanse of white paper small; but at the same time all that whiteness also works as a kind of freedom that we, the audience, have to be part of the picture, to make our own stories in this beautifully allusive space. Such drawings work differently from book-illustration, but they can have the same inclusive effect.
Also called Companions but this time in French (Nos Compagnons), these animal–human pairings were shown at the Martine Gossieaux Gallery in Paris in 2014.
These are noisier and more provocative images, inviting the viewer in with their strangeness, and with a slightly unusual (for Blake) sense of materiality here: what it is like to touch fur and scales.
As Blake says in the introduction to the catalogue:
The interest for me lies in drawing the movements and gestures of the young women and their companions and suggesting their varied relationships. One of the attractions of drawing is that it lends itself easily to metaphor – so you might think of these beings even though scaly or hairy, as pets, children, brothers, boyfriends, perhaps even husbands. You will know best.
Blake is by no means alone in this interpretative generosity towards his viewers; the Portuguese painter Paula Rego is well known for her figurative work with a very high degree of implied narrative, which also invites viewers to improvise the story for themselves. In Rego’s case, she readily admits that her paintings are autobiographical in that they do relate directly to her own experiences, but this is at a remove, so that her characters are symbolic rather than portraits. I have known her to tell a different story about the same painting on different days, and so she makes the point that, in her work at least, there is never a single truth. Blake’s works in this vein, freed from text, are a real departure and he continues to have new ideas for them, which seem to have increasing psychological depth and insight. He is currently working on a set he calls Vehicles of the Mind.
These small images (A5 size) have often been drawn when Blake has been out and about, travelling or in a café, and there are over a hundred and twenty of them so far, so perhaps they are significant. Blake himself suggests that there are so many because they are a sort of game – he frequently produces two or three new variations to give to his friend Linda Kitson (who owns the originals) when he next sees her.
They are at first disturbing: Blake has used a thick-nibbed black calligraphic marker pen and the lines are much bolder and more aggressive than those we normally associate with him. The roughly drawn creatures might initially remind us of some of those monster-composites that have cropped up in Blake’s work at least since the 1970s: a piranha-like fish with horns, a dinosaurial head on the torso of a flying horse. But then we become aware of strange spindly lower excrescences, which often end in wheels, and we see that these monsters are also vehicles, menacing juggernauts, which are being driven by small figures.
Many of the drivers are female, but there are also some men, possibly even a few self-portraits among these (not by intention, comments Blake). Several of the vehicles have more than one driver, and, surprisingly, they all sit more or less confidently at the steering wheels, sometimes with hair or jaunty scarf streaming behind. There is a strong disconnect in size between these powerful bug-eyed creations and their small drivers, making the pictures bristle with meaning. In this case, however, when asked, Blake is more forward with an interpretation than he sometimes is: the vehicles may stand, as he first saw them, for the sick mind, or, as he has later commented, as situations that seem in some way unmanageable: many are great black ugly careering things (‘what does a psychosis look like?’ he asks), some seem themselves to be experiencing distress (so is the subject the vehicle or the driver or both?), but they are also capable of being controlled, or at least handled, by their drivers. In this sense they have a characteristic, hopeful, Blakean feel to them. But this kind of up-front personification of an illness or of serious personal difficulty is also new territory for him. The invention of these works, Blake says, comes from nowhere that he recognizes, but the drawing of them and the choice of drawing tools are confident and sure, and they seem to me to have unusual and powerful depth. ‘They may be’, as Linda Kitson once told Blake, ‘the best things you’ve done so far.’
Books: close-matching
The way in which Blake chooses and uses his tools and techniques to suit each work is always highly thought-out and has applied to everything he has drawn from early on. He realizes now that his first cartoons were made with a pen that was too smooth-nibbed for the kind of edgily articulated style that he was after. It was really only when he discovered scratchy Waverley nibs, and later, over the last 20 years, unique reed and quill pens, that his style adapted itself to the unpredictable nature of such tools and he was able to find the ‘handwriting’ which is so key to his recognizable style. His illustrations are often elaborated with watercolour or ink washes (many of his children’s books, for example, Clown, the Mrs Armitage trio, The Green Ship, the Arabel and Captain Najork books) and some work is purely colour; for example, the watercolour of Woman with a Book, the watercolour pencils for Big Healthy Girls, or the watercolour pastels of Punch covers, for Blake almost the most pleasurable tool of all.
When he is illustrating a book Blake always adjusts his drawing style and materials to the needs of the text: here his collaborations with the author Roald Dahl (1916–90) are revealing, because they demanded something new from Blake. Their first was The Enormous Crocodile (1979), Dahl’s first picture-book and a story which felt harder-edged than those Blake had worked on up until then.
At the same time Dahl’s characteristic ‘lack of introspection’ was also quite welcome (Blake thinks that Danny the Champion of the World is the only work of Dahl’s children’s fiction that has a different feel, and this is because it contains autobiographical elements). Blake describes the first collaboration:
It was very interesting as a task to do, because it’s a kind of caricature, and that’s where Roald and I met very much. In a sense, what he wrote was like what I drew in the degree of exaggeration and comedy in it. But it was a bit fiercer. And the character of the crocodile was interesting to me, because he’s a sort of embodiment of evil, and I thought [it had] a little bit . . . of Richard III in it somewhere, but [also] a lot of stage villains . . . The other thing that it reminded me of was the crocodile in Punch and Judy . . . it’s that kind of convention, I think. And of course the thing about it is that if you look at what I’ve drawn, I mean I started off drawing crocodiles . . . but it’s not a real crocodile . . . In Roald’s words, it says he had hundreds of teeth . . . Crocodiles don’t have hundreds of teeth, they have teeth here and there in a rather random sort of way. But mine has . . . And because it’s not a real crocodile, but it’s got a sort of evil look in its eyes, it becomes something a bit different . . . in a way, it becomes this sort of cartoon character . . . So it has its own life.
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Because I had to draw those teeth . . . I was drawing with a much harder pen-nib . . . Most of what I do is coloured with watercolour: I do a black-and-white pen drawing and then I colour it in watercolour, but in there you’ll find that there are inks as well, which are much brighter . . . more intense colours. So that in a sense the creatures become heraldic . . . not naturalistic . . . they’re part of a fable in a sense . . . the crocodile disguises itself as a tree . . . as a bench, and that’s why it can’t quite be a real crocodile, because they’re not so good at those things.4
A similar thing happened with Revolting Rhymes (1982) and Rhyme Stew (1989), Dahl’s attempts to restore the dark side to what he considered were sanitized versions of well-known fairy-tales (often from the Grimm brothers) familiar to most children. The text of both these books, but especially the second one, are, if anything, grimmer than some of the Grimm originals – for example in ‘Hansel and Gretel’, Dahl goes as far as describing the smell of the witch burning in the oven. Blake did however manage to mitigate Dahl’s graphic verse with illustrations such as these two on the next page:
Apart from some marginal illustrations in sepia, Blake chooses a framing device for the plates, separating the image from the text, and the pen contours are more precise than they often are in his work, somehow making the drawing seem less graphically real. These images were originally commissioned as black-and-white drawings, but there was a later editorial request for coloured ones. Faced with the prospect of doing them all again, and with typical practical inventiveness, Blake cast around for a quicker solution. Because they were already well known to him, Blake was able to turn to the hand-coloured lithographs of the nineteenth-century French illustrator Gavarni. Gavarni’s colours are pale tints, and when Blake added these to his black-and-white drawings, the images took on what Blake calls an ‘old-fashioned’ feel, and the shading is in an obvious, waxy black crayon, again distancing the reader from reality. The horrible decapitation in the text is shown in this picture in the most unnaturalistic way possible, where gravity and gore play no part – in fact, Blake says, the idea for the coup de grâce came from a New Yorker cartoon by James Thurber.
In Dahl’s gruesome reinvention of Goldilocks, where Baby Bear ends up reclaiming his porridge by eating the girl who has eaten it, the scene is at first sight rather charming and domestic, until we notice the discreet remains on the floor.
Much as we understand how children thrill to an element of nastiness, these texts today seem to me to cross the line into gratuitous horror, for the way in which they further distort tales which already have quite dark features. Perhaps Dahl’s blackness works best for children when it is more associated with the caricatural absurdity of books such as The Twits.
Sometimes the medium itself will even give rise to the book. Take Patrick, the first of Blake’s independent books, published in 1968. Up until then, apart from the Punch and Spectator covers, Blake’s commissions had all been for black-and-white drawings and he felt somewhat pigeonholed into this medium. He felt ready to do a book in colour and the moment was right because the 1960s was the decade in which cheap techniques for full-colour printing were being developed. So he came up with a story which had to be in colour. This wonderful early book, a tale about the healing power of music (and art), moves back and forth from the naturalistic world to the magical one. For the real world of markets and fields, Blake fills the pen and ink drawings with muted earth colours, using watercolour pastel and water; but when the hero Patrick plays his magic violin, everything changes from dull to bright: the colours must become intense and non-naturalistic. So the trees are soft watery green at the bottom, and at the top they are saturated primary colours.
The same idea applies to Angel Pavement (2003), a book which came out of a piece of exhibition merchandise. Magic Pencil was an exhibition of children’s book illustration curated by Blake and Andrea Rose as a British Council touring exhibition and which visited London’s British Library in 2002–3. The exhibition shop sold pencils with multi-coloured points, which Blake started to use himself and then, with habitual ingenuity, he found a way of making these new tools the star of a picture-book. In Angel Pavement the two angels, Loopy and Corky (who are based on two of Blake’s best friends), need to seem human so as not to alarm, and so they appear as all the other characters. But their wings are drawn with the multi-coloured pencil, as are the magical drawings in the sky that Sid, with their help, is able to produce. So the imaginative use of a new tool enabled Blake to suggest different levels of reality on the same page.
In Monsters, one of several powerful collaborations between Blake and Russell Hoban (1925–2011), and first published in 1979, the narrative centres on the child John’s drawings of monsters. Blake’s solution for this new challenge was for the story illustrations to be drawn in pen and watercolour, while John’s monsters are made authentically with basic felt-tips, on the kind of scraps of paper families have lying around at home. Because the sheets of sugar paper and torn-out pages from notepads are printed on the page, they have the effect of appearing more real than the other illustrations, which, without spoiling the book, is the point of the story. Blake says he had to relearn to draw like a child for this book (although I wonder if he ever did draw that way), even trying, unsuccessfully, to use the pen in his left hand to achieve this effect. As with Angel Pavement, the added message, which is delivered by the childish drawing, is to remind children, parents and, today, very much also primary-school teachers – who themselves increasingly lack confidence in this area – that children can and need to draw.
Lastly, there is the kind of illustration that Blake calls ‘more realistic’. These are drawings that are neither openly caricatural, such as most of the Dahl illustrations (although Danny the Champion of the World is an exception), nor as heavily freighted with symbolism as those that often give rise to his own texts, and that carry so much of the meaning of the book. Whether in full colour or with a more limited palette, in these realistic drawings Blake illustrates very specific moments from a story. These might be the more obvious ones such as the denouement of each of the La Fontaine Fables or the high point of individual adventures in Candide, and Blake makes them speak back to the text, echoing it in its detail but providing a context, both physical and emotional, which helps the reader to engage imaginatively.
The texts that have summoned this kind of drawing from Blake are mainly the picaresque-type works such as Voltaire’s Candide, and folk-tales or fables with stock characters (shepherds, kings, trolls, widows, merchants, misers or animals of various kinds). Usually nameless and without distinct personality, the characters operate inside plots with high doses of magic, morality and justice, and with the predictability that goes with these. These plots can be lengthy and intricate; perhaps, in times when they are no longer the only stories on the block, when they are read silently rather than listened to around a fire, they really do need a kind of realistic treatment that gives them flesh and colour. And they need illustrations that will help readers find their way, allowing them to rest a little on sometimes dizzying journeys through lands, time and even space. We can look at a few examples of these and meet a Blake who absolutely understands how to assist and encourage readers through this kind of text.
Quentin Blake’s Magical Tales (text by John Yeoman, 2010) is a volume of folk-tales from around the world, some of which previously appeared under the title The Princes’ Gifts (1997). The book opens with ‘The Blue Belt’, a Norwegian folk-tale, in which a young orphan boy finds a magic belt that gives him unearthly strength, enough to defeat 12 snarling lionesses. The boy eventually outwits some trolls, as well as the King of Arabia, the father of the princess who he marries, but who is locked up by her father in a house under the sea. The reader will now understand that this is an episodic rather than a repetitious tale, and Blake’s tactic is to punctuate the text with four images, each serving a slightly different purpose.
In the first, a three-quarter-page image, the
boy is shown as a tiny, blue-belted figure next to a brutish troll who has just roasted an ox outside his hut.
Here the boy has not yet discovered his strength so the drawing helps us identify with the powerless child, faced with potent adversity, in the fashion of fairy-tales. This is followed by more than two pages of text, during which seven different events take place, including the boy’s marriage to the princess and their two separate trips to Arabia. In the last of these the boy devises a plan to rescue the princess, which involves buying a bearskin and collar and chain – though we don’t yet know why. By this time the reader may need to pause for breath and so Blake obliges with a full-colour plate in which the boy, now convincingly disguised as a white flute-playing bear, is brought before the delighted king.
Quentin Blake: In the Theatre of the Imagination Page 4