Quentin Blake: In the Theatre of the Imagination

by Ghislaine Kenyon

  In this image the king is a proper king with a crown, seated on a big gold throne, and the surrounding courtiers are suitably dressed in oriental clothes. The bear turns out to have a dangerous side to anyone who dares to laugh at him and this is shown in a half-page drawing on the penultimate spread, where he chases the princess’s servant, who has been foolish enough to giggle at his antics.

  This is a serious chase: Blake’s drawing of the tattered bits of dress in the bear’s substantial and dark claws and the servant’s terrified face points up the drama, injecting a heart-gripping moment into the more discursive text. For the last image Blake does not choose the more dramatic final scene of the story where the boy smashes his way into the princess’s underwater prison: instead he hints in a more gentle fashion that everything will go well.

  This half-page picture shows the couple, with the bear removing his bearskin head to reveal the boy, now tall and strong, to the delight and relief of the princess. The drawing in this last image is executed in bolder strokes and the figures are close up to us – we have moved from the fairy-tale world of the boy and the troll to something we recognize much more intimately.

  The Winter Sleepwalker and Other Tales (1994) is a collection of modern fairy-tale-like stories by Joan Aiken. Containing many fairy-tale motifs such as magic, both the dark and light kind, and some of its archetypes – witches, and so on – we nevertheless also come across elements that don’t belong to the tradition: here there are characters and places with names: for example, a witch called Mrs Hatecraft, the village Furious Hill, and polacanthus, a type of monster; there are people of the modern world like postmen, head teachers, chiefs of police and shopkeepers, as well as millers and princes, and there are evocative descriptions of place, such as this one from the story that gives the book its title: ‘Every day Alyss walked in the woods by herself, flashing like a sunrise among the dark trees. She loved to be alone, and listen to the calls of birds, or the deer and wild pigs that grunted and snuffled, the foxes that barked into the forest’.

  In ’Over the Cloudy Mountains’ Blake responds in another way – he uses the poetic as the basis for a different kind of reality, something he also does when he imagines this library scene: ‘The Head Teacher was in the school library. Here, so many books were kept, in so many high shelves, that the room looked like a huge honeycomb’. This may be a fantasy library in both drawing and text but the light bathing the two figures seems to me to be a wonderful kind of lyrical comment on the power of books. Blake’s illustrations for Winter Sleepwalker occupy an unusual place in his oeuvre – landscapes appear where they wouldn’t normally and the coloured inks he uses take us into the real, emotional world of the imagination.

  In Voltaire’s Candide ou l’Optimisme, which Blake illustrated for a Folio Society edition, the situation works a bit differently – for one thing this is not a work for young children: Blake says, ‘For a young audience there may be occasions when you might want to be less dark or less explicit, but once you are addressing an independent reader he or she is no longer someone you have to think about specifically.’5

  To put it in context, this satirical novella or conte philosophique of 1759 is taught in every secondary school in France – it belongs to the canon of Western literature, and so it would be important for Blake to find the right tone in which to illustrate this new edition: in fact, although not originally planned, it was later published by Gallimard (Folio) in France. The book is divided into 30 short chapters, each of which describes the progress of the young hero Candide. Banished from his edenic chateau for sexual misconduct, he wanders the world and discovers a place full of pain and hardship, eventually learning that the doctrine of optimism preached by his tutor Dr Pangloss is an unsatisfactory guide, and that a more practical approach is required.

  In this fantastical work, Voltaire not only parodies the stock adventures and romance of eighteenth-century literature, but he also includes religious blasphemy and subversive political commentary, and, along the way, throws in truthful insights into human behaviour. Blake’s solution to this many-levelled challenge was a series of 15 colour plates, all in the same square format, plus several more black-and-white vignettes. The illustrations are remarkably close in spirit to the work: the regular shape of the plates echoes the schematic form; the costume is historical, and the scale of humour echoes that of the text in a very specific way, from belly-laughs to wry smile. As Blake says: ‘Candide inadvertently running through an important cleric with his sword is farcical; while the garter-dropping marchioness has to be real enough to be seductive.’6

  Voltaire’s genius in mixing the most absurd farce with the deepest human understanding, such as for example the Guinean slave’s speech to Candide, is, to my mind, matched by his younger contemporary Mozart’s (in, say, the opera Cosi fan tutte, where preposterous disguises rub shoulders with the most heartfelt love music ever written). This is also Blake’s special talent and, when you look for it, evidence of it is to be found in almost everything he does, whether in an ephemeral greetings card, or a book illustration, or an exhibition work. It is surely one of the reasons why Candide appealed to him, and why, if such classics are to be made palatable to young (and not so young) modern readers, his humane kind of visual bridge-building is such a worthwhile and effective tool.

  Blake has particularly enjoyed these recent Folio Society projects, and not only because of their high production values – in addition to the three described above, he has in the last 20 years illustrated Don Quixote, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Voyages to the Moon and Sun and the Fables of La Fontaine. And he recently completed the drawings for a deluxe edition of Apuleius’ Golden Ass. With the exception of The Hunchback, these texts for adults are all either in or related to the picaresque genre, those fantastical adventures of an anti-hero, who might be an innocent such as Candide or a doer of good such as Quixote, or a seeker after magic like Lucius in The Golden Ass. They are tales that sometimes include inset stories (that is, told by characters in the story, as in the Apuleius), and early science-fiction elements, as in Cyrano’s Voyages to the Moon and Sun. They have a strong sense of irreverence for the pompous and the important, and also often of comedy. We can see the attractions for an illustrator such as Blake: an abundance of dramatic, comedic and fantastical episodes to choose from, and, as he says in his introduction to The Seven Voyages of Sinbad The Sailor, which he illustrated in a retelling by John Yeoman in 1996, also the opposite:

  Isn’t this what we find so attractive about these stories – that though they are so extraordinary, there is in them somewhere an element of truth? (Just as I was doing my pictures of the Roc I met someone who told me that in Madagascar there are traces of bones of birds far larger than anything we have seen . . .)

  So, for Blake these are natural choices, the kind of works he has illustrated from the very beginning when he and John Yeoman produced A Drink of Water, that first collection of folk-tales. He knows that by selecting texts to illustrate which are broadly descriptive of action rather than of thought, mood or feeling – in other words, of the external rather than the internal – his drawings can be supremely additive. He also shares with many of the protagonists of these tales a sense of what he describes as ‘ill-founded optimism’.

  All of which puts him in a very strong position to give these sometimes two-dimensional figures and their adventures a truly human touch.

  Occasional drawing

  Since drawing is what Blake does naturally, almost like breathing or walking, he also draws for purposes beyond the professional. Drawings as telephone scribbling, the proverbial table-cloth doodles, decorations for faxes and letters, drawings as explanations, demonstrations or plans, and those that are the kind of singular, priceless gifts that only artists are able to offer to their friends and relatives. Drawings such as these two images made for Sir Christopher Frayling, one for his wedding and the other for his last dinner as Rector of the Royal College of Art, or this design for a friend, Jake Wilson
’s wedding invitation. Wilson explains that he and his wife-to-be were to get married

  in a Temperate House in Leamington Spa, a kind of glass house filled with tropical plants, and as soon as we saw it we thought, all that’s missing is some cockatoos . . . So I eventually summoned up the courage to ask Quentin if he would draw some specially for our wedding invitation, and was stunned when he said yes straight away. Then when we thought about plain type going with this beautiful drawing, it didn’t seem right, and so I wrote back very nervously and said, would it be possible for him to do the lettering too? And he spontaneously produced three different layouts! Although on one level it didn’t surprise me that that’s how Quentin does things, I was still amazed that he took such care over something he was doing out of the kindness of his heart.

  In much more spontaneous but equally benevolent vein, here is an example of a fax drawing, in this case a reply to a letter from two librarians inviting him to curate an exhibition at the Bibliothèque de la Cité in Geneva. The message is in Blake’s perfect French and the graphic reads, ‘the heart says yes, the head too’.

  The next images are not exactly occasional drawings, but a series of images which Blake was commissioned to make for the offices of Hoare’s, the private bank, and so unpublished and unavailable to the public other than Hoare’s employees and clients. The bank has a tradition of decorating meeting-rooms with thematic pictures, and when two spaces were earmarked for conversion to such rooms the bank asked Blake to come up with an idea and some drawings. His plan was The Ledger Room (describing the contents of the shelves in some of these rooms), and the nine drawings all relate to this theme, serving as ‘the answer to a question’, as Blake often describes his work.

  Blake’s response to this commission is typically imaginative: his cartooning instinct helps him sees the potential humour in ledgers, his knowledge of history and of literary illustration gives him a ready-made repertoire of suitably costumed employees, and the picture of one of the bank’s founders is just a smart transcription of a painted portrait also hanging in the room (with added ledgers).

  Drawing about drawing

  Lastly, a coda about how Blake’s drawings can also get other people drawing. Encouraging everyone to draw – those who don’t believe they can as well as those who may have left it behind in their childhood, and everyone in between – is a mission for Blake; he is always involved in big-picture activity of this kind, although perhaps ‘mission’ is a rather dynamic word to describe his subtle tactics. In Part 2 we’ll see how his encouragement comes indirectly, through his wholehearted support of the Campaign for Drawing; and more immediately when he draws in public, or talks about drawing. But Blake’s particular teaching gene, the one that ‘shows not tells’, is strong and always in operation, so there is another way in which he urges people to draw, and that is to make drawing or painting a theme in his own work. He does it in picture-books such as Angel Pavement and the illustrations to Hoban’s Monsters where drawing is the subject. But it is also there incidentally in many ‘off the page’ works for health settings, on banners, greetings cards and other pieces of communication. In all these slightly different situations the message is a similar one: that drawing, with pencil or brush, is a skill, but one that everyone can learn, and that it is a consuming pleasure which is good for you and your wellbeing.

  As well as being enchanting things for readers, gallery-goers and hospital patients, Blake’s drawings are canonic for many illustrators and other artists, now from several generations – and those who know him personally, even those who don’t, see him as the benevolent godfather of illustration. There are of course some imitators who understand how effective the style is but have been unable to substitute Blake’s practice, experience and ideas with their own equivalents, and so have not developed their own individual ‘drawing handwriting’. And then there are those who have managed to find their voices completely, like the illustrator/author/graphic novelist/filmmaker Joann Sfar and most of Blake’s former students, who went on to make careers in illustration, such as Emma Chichester Clark, Angela Barrett and Anne Howeson. Sfar’s tribute in words and pictures in his own work Caravan (seen in the chapter on France) echoes and represents many thousands of illustrators who also comment on and ‘like’ Blake’s work every day on social media, or in the letters and drawings that they send him personally, such as this card from illustrator Yasmeen Ismail.

  Perhaps the most touching of these came in a large parcel which arrived for his seventieth birthday in 2002. As surprising and delightful as the mysterious package that turns up in Zagazoo, though fortunately not alive, inside was an old wooden paintbox, full of handmade birthday postcards from 70 Australian picture-book creators. Apart from Shaun Tan and a couple of others, Blake knew very few of the contributors to this unique birthday present, but each card was an artist’s warm tribute to another artist, telling little proofs of how Blake’s drawings now have a life beyond their own life.

  From The Rights of the Reader by Daniel Pennac

  2 Learning, teaching, learning

  He was the first teacher to show us that the truth might be relative, that our opinion mattered, and that life was multi-textured.

  Julia (Martinez) Stanton, ex-student at the Lycée Français de Londres

  Use the big gears of unconscious learning; show, not tell.

  John Richmond (haroldrosen.blogspot.co.uk)

  One of the virtues of literary studies is that they lead constantly outside themselves. (From Joe Moran, ‘F. R. Leavis, English and the University’, English [Oxford Journal], January 2002)

  Quentin Blake may be the UK’s best-loved illustrator but he could also be seen as one of its most effective if unconventional teachers. I learned this first-hand myself when, as a very green primary-school teacher in the 1970s, I used the series of Monster books,1 which he illustrated, to teach my year 2 class to read. Martin was a timid little 6-year-old with beautiful brown eyes and a speech disorder; he really wanted to learn to read but he was defeated by the then-current techniques of phonics and ‘look and say’. It was the purple figure of Monster lumbering into his life that did it for him.

  The text in these books was based on children’s responses to the illustrations, and they are compelling little stories. Monster is a creature who arrives in a city, makes friends with two children, and, over the 24 books of the series, experiences with them the city as a child does. The books are really self-help manuals for small children: Monster is at first inept at dealing with the situations which his new life presents to him, but he is helped by the children, who, being children, understand his position. Sometimes though, Monster proves to be quicker thinking than they are and so he is also useful to them. His appearance is described in one sentence at the beginning of the first book: ‘Monster is not ugly like other monsters; he’s kind of tall and his head is skinny.’ Blake takes these 17 words and creates a living character, whose usefulness to children (and so to early child readers) goes well beyond the implications of the text. In Blake’s imagination Monster is ungainly, with flat, clodhopping feet, his small head vaguely dinosaurial and small-brained; his purple figure towers above the children but his expressions (the skilful placing of two dots, the angle of the tiny line that is his mouth, and the flapping hand gestures) range from confused or upset to delighted. They echo exquisitely the feelings of a child, who, when confronted by an unfamiliar situation, at first feels fear and then, with adult reassurances, relief. And because Monster is also a big person in difficulty, the smaller people feel bigger and more confident because they can help him. As the French primary-school teacher Annie Simon, who has used Blake’s books in her classrooms for many years, remarked to me, ‘Blake’s characters are all a little crazy, and the child who feels a bit marginalized (in other words, every child, at one moment or other) recognizes him or herself in them.’ So in the drawings for these books, produced early in his career as a children’s book illustrator, there is already rich evidence of Blake’s c
haracteristic empathy with his subject. The Monster texts teach children to handle new situations in a practical way, but the illustrations teach them about dealing with their feelings, and with young children that perhaps is where the learning really starts.

  For Martin, the day he saw Monster struggling to make a picture or to read a book at school, something changed in his head. He loved and identified with this purple character, at first so hopeless, but who later becomes a proper problem solver. Martin would look at the books, drinking in the illustrations for hours before he could decode a single word. And then one day he could.

  This chapter is about an understanding that Blake has had, from very early in his life, about how people learn and how this learning is often only loosely connected with formal education. His engagement with the learning process plays out, playfully, in all aspects of his work: the short time he spent as a schoolteacher, his 25 years as tutor and then Head of the Illustration Department at the Royal College of Art, and in the many talks and lectures he has given to school, college, university and general audiences. But mainly Blake helps people learn through activities that are not primarily didactic, through the drawings he does: illustrated books for both children and adults, images for public places such as theatres, hospitals, and the walls of museums; more recently also through the exhibitions he has curated at home in the UK, in Europe and the USA.