In the early days, under Guyatt [Richard], the department was still working out what graphic design education should be in the post-war era. Guyatt and his staff brought a strong pre-war illustrative, fine art tradition to their teaching. They could all draw beautifully and had great technical skills, but when you compare their bookish work . . . to hard-edged continental modernism, it might have looked rather twee. Good as it was, it wasn’t work that reflected the urgent conditions of the contemporary world.12
Robb belonged squarely to this bookish world and Blake was his protégé. As we have seen, by now Blake had, along with most of his fellow RCA tutors, his own established career. He had illustrated several books including a few for children. He had developed his own characteristic drawing-handwriting and already had a deep understanding of the way text relates to imagery on the printed page. But he was coming up against confident postgraduate students, often with four years of art-school experience behind them. Many had different artistic goals to his; they worked in varied media including photography, and some did not even describe themselves as illustrators. As a part-time student at Chelsea, Blake had perhaps encountered something of the art-school atmosphere; he made friends with John Flemons, then vice-president of the student union, who gave good parties and invited Blake to draw the cover of a theatre programme. But at the RCA Blake was, artistically speaking, relatively unconnected to the students he first taught. As he says:
I anticipated my arrival at the RCA with a drawing of myself in a letter to my brother. I think I was saying: ‘Now have you all sharpened your pencils nicely?’ And the spirit of it wasn’t entirely distant from the truth. Certainly the young men who were in the middle of their course were mostly very assured in the fashionable illustration of pop-art exemplified by Alan Aldridge, who took over the design of Penguin covers at the time. Among them were Adrian George and Philip Castle, who had already assumed the nom de plume of Marvin Rainbow and was by then carrying out a good deal of commercial work. They were all perfectly polite but I don’t imagine that I would have had much to say that would seem important to them.
For these and perhaps also some social reasons, the first year of teaching such students must have been something of a challenge: the artist Linda Kitson, who arrived in Blake’s second year, says that some of these people did make him feel ‘very ill at ease, he didn’t really know what he was doing’. And as Blake admits, ‘You plunged about a bit . . . I knew something about education but most of it didn’t apply.’
Somehow, with an element of bravery, Blake passed through this experience and remained undamaged by it. Although he was the teacher, his own survival and, soon afterwards, his true flourishing, came from his ability to keep learning. He had to learn to interact with the foreign bodies that these students were; he had to, and did, learn about their artistic (and general) world-views, and he probably learned that his best teaching tool was himself and his sound judgement: his unthreatening personality, his acute feeling for literature and for the literary, not to mention his drawing skills, by this time fluent and sure – all these earned him respect, even from students whose work could not have been more different from his. Dan Fern, who also arrived at the RCA in Blake’s second year and was eventually to succeed him as Head of Department, remembers Blake as ‘feeling his way’ with these, to him, ‘different’ students. He recalls how several of the students had difficulty in connecting their own styles with the work of a cartoonist: ‘It wasn’t to be honest the sort of work that any of us related to; we were cool, hip, wanting to be fashionable and he was very much in the mainstream.’
Nevertheless Fern and a small group of students seem to have been able to see through to the person behind the style, and there they met another kind of education. These recollections from ex-students, now either practising artist/illustrators or artists, or teachers of those subjects, are illuminating. From a distance of 20–30 years they are able to pinpoint the difference that one teacher made to their subsequent working lives, and to identify some of the key qualities of all truly successful teaching.
In Dan Fern’s words:
Quentin was my tutor and a couple of times I’d been round to his flat . . . so that already said something about his approach to teaching – this was the first time I’d been invited round to a tutor’s house . . . it was the first home I’d been in that belonged to someone really cultured . . . the books, the prints on the walls, the original paintings, the rugs on the floors . . . I remember thinking this was wonderful . . . and this was the first time I’d drunk wine and so everything was strange and a bit exotic . . . Of course Quentin made us feel completely at home . . . and the sharing of his private life with his teaching was impressive, and later on when I was teaching that was something to pick up on.
Fern adds:
Teaching isn’t just about handing on information, it’s about setting an example in all sorts of other ways . . . it’s difficult to say precisely what I learned from him, perhaps it was just gentle steerage and guidance. I can’t remember him (Blake) saying any specific thing, which made me think, Oh I’ve got to do it that way. I thought at the time that I wanted to illustrate children’s books, you know, big and attractive picture-books. In ways that I can’t quite describe, he steered me gently away from that; he didn’t feel that was right for me and it wasn’t.
By the time Russell Mills, a multi-media artist, arrived for his RCA interview in 1974, we meet a Blake who has really found his teaching voice. The interview took place in the Henry Cole Wing of what is now the Victoria and Albert Museum, where the Illustration Department was then located. The interview panel was a large one and included Blake:
The one thing that really struck me during that interview was Quentin Blake; they’d asked me lots of questions and they said, ‘What do you want here?’ and I said I just want to carry on doing what I’m doing, just exploring ideas and making lots of mistakes, and Quentin Blake said, ‘Well if we accept you we’ll allow you to do whatever you want and we’ll enable you to do it better’ and I thought, well, that’s all I can ask for.
However, having been accepted, Mills arrived at the RCA to find that Blake was to be his personal tutor: ‘I was really angry because I was an angry young man, this was just before punk and I was rebellious, into Dada . . . and I’d been given this children’s book illustrator!’ Mills soon changed his mind:
At the first meeting we cleared that up. We immediately connected and I think it was because he’d been to Cambridge to study English . . . the starting point for all our conversations usually came out of some aspect of that, of literature, because I was pretty well read . . . the authors I really liked, Quentin really liked as well, funny ones like Cervantes, Rabelais, (Sterne’s) Tristram Shandy, and I was able to talk to him about things he maybe knew less about like Beckett, Alfred Jarry and that more Surrealist stuff . . . It was a cultural exchange that always went on between us . . . his way of teaching was usually by asides, they were usually very subtle and they didn’t sink in till later . . . that’s what made him such a good teacher I think. He would listen and listen and listen and then he’d respond in a way that was tangential, that would knock you sideways . . . and it would be exactly the right thing to say . . . I was getting work before I left the college, and the phone would ring and it was a publisher looking for work and they were asking for me and Quentin would say, ‘Fantastic but don’t do it’ and I’d say, ‘Why not?, and he said, ‘You’re not ready, if you go out with your work as it is now, you’ll just be asked to do more of the same, over and over again, do you want to do that?’ And I said no, and I’ve definitely never wanted to be like that, to be stuck or constrained by anything. He put it into words for me. He often did that.
This is confirmed by the illustrator Steven Appleby, who wrote in a review of Blake’s book Words and Pictures: ‘Quentin was my personal tutor and I have never forgotten the subtlety, tact and thoughtfulness with which he talked to me about my work, always treating me as if we were equals
. . .’13
Another ex-student, Jane Stanton, remembers:
Quentin Blake was a very enabling person; that was his teaching style. Although they might have sometimes seemed quite frivolous, in some of the events we were involved with there was always a deep-seated learning thing . . . Going to Sissinghurst, I didn’t know anything about Bloomsbury, and Quentin would engage people about the historical side, literature meets history meets culture meets painting.
Embedded in some of these interviews with past students is also an awareness that they too had contributed to Blake’s successful career at the RCA. Looking back, they see that they were offering him an art-student experience he hadn’t really had, as well as a connection to their own cultures, not always familiar to Blake. They taught him the importance of a working life ‘in common’, the necessary counterpart of the solitary one in the studio; as Dan Fern puts it: ‘The life of an artist is something that’s shareable and should be shared’.
A shared world was certainly what prompted Blake to agree to contribute to a (very) short-lived student journal called The Geek in 1977. The cover describes it as Volume 4, number 8, although, as Blake says, there was only ever one issue. This slim black-and-white publication is of interest because it is a neat illustration of the diversity of techniques and styles with which Blake’s students confronted him, from the reportage drawings of and a poem about cardiac surgery by Anne Howeson, to Russell Mill’s assemblage piece called ‘De Selby Footnotes’ (which illustrates an esoteric fictional character which is referenced in a postmodern novel The Third Policeman by the Irish author, Flann O’Brien).
Blake’s own contribution, ‘Other Worlds’, is a selection of hand-written and illustrated extracts from two works by Cyrano de Bergerac: Voyage to the Moon and Comical History of the States and Empires of the Sun. Operating in a different sphere from those of his students, who were all more influenced by a Modernist aesthetic, Blake’s piece is also notable in his own story because it was the first time that he illustrated the works that were eventually to appear in the Folio Society edition nearly twenty years later – these being the books he says he most wanted to illustrate.
Illustrations from The Geek by Anne Howeson and Quentin Blake
Outside the curriculum
This experience of teaching points towards several truths, the first of which is corroborated by many other ex-students: that the curriculum that Blake learned to deliver was not primarily skills-based. As a postgraduate institution the RCA was of course taking on students who had in theory already ‘learned the grammar’, although according to Sir Christopher Frayling (who taught humanities at the RCA alongside Blake in the 1970s and was later to become Rector), this was by no means always the case. The 1970s were of course also, notoriously, the great era of non-teaching, when students were squirrelled away in womb-like studio spaces, visited occasionally, many remember, by tutors on breaks from their drinking duties in local pubs. Frayling recalls a student complaining to him that his tutor’s sole communication with him that year was the five-word sentence, ‘Can I have a light?’
But Blake would have certainly had drawing skills to offer, and he already knew a great deal about how to make the relationship between text and image sing most sweetly on the page. By 1978, when he was appointed Head of Illustration, he was also able to pass on valuable information about illustration as a profession, such as, for example, how to negotiate with publishers. Ex-student and now prize-winning illustrator Emma Chichester Clark says that two of the most important things he taught her were ‘to say the words: a thousand pounds’ and ‘to do roughs’, the bit of technique which Blake felt would make a big difference to her production. Blake is also remembered as the professional who generously offered his students professional opportunities. On top of all his other commitments he was what today might be called an employability manager. Ann Howeson, an artist and RCA tutor, remembers: ‘He asked me to be involved in a real project. He asked me to paint a caravan with him, for Puffin . . . I don’t think he was so famous then, but it was the fact that he asked me . . . that felt like a vote of confidence.’
But what most struck Frayling as a teaching colleague was Blake’s (to him) free-spirited teaching style, a style from which he also learned:
I co-taught with him a session on a magazine . . . it was called Ebony, and it was for black readers and it was quite before its time when you think it was 1972, and we simply held up the magazine together, stood in front of all the Graphic Arts students and went through it, page by page, looking at the typography . . . the photographs . . . the illustrations, and doing what Quentin used to call ‘thinking on the wing about it’, which was sort of riffing really.
Blake, according to Frayling, was uninterested in teaching theory separated from the practical; he was a ‘what if? Let’s imagine . . .’ kind of person, and it was this more whimsical, lateral approach to the subject, delivered in his ‘quiet, ruminative way’ that seemed to hold the students. Ann Howeson shares this view: describing Blake’s occasional recent visits to her teaching seminars, she says, ‘It’s the intimacy again, he makes everything seem possible, when he talks, he goes into anecdote and it feels like a conversation.’
So, seen from both his colleagues’ and his students’ perspectives, what Blake taught both groups was far bigger and more enduring than how to do illustration. Instead it was the product of a kind of dawning understanding that what he most had to offer was his own cultural knowledge and professional experience filtered through a light-hearted, wise and empathetic world-view. Included in the Blake package was a profound understanding of the relationship between image and text and a sense of history, which, for these students immersed in the contemporary world of the 1960s and 70s, perhaps seemed novel, even a little thrilling. He learned that this proposition would be most useful to those students who realized how they might apply it to their own personal projects, however much these might differ from Blake’s own one. And out of this came the ability shrewdly to evaluate students’ individual artistic voices, and to help them identify the form in which they would best be heard; lastly, he understood, as all great teachers do, that it was the whole of his person that was the pedagogical instrument, rather than someone else’s theory or methodology; the combination of his expertise (his licence to teach) with his capacity to see where his students were heading, and an appreciation that exhortation or correctives were more effectively delivered through quietly indirect asides than through confrontation or head-on address.
Beyond the school curriculum
This is a consistent theme. In one unbroken leap we can leave an RCA studio in 1974 where a couple of long-haired, album-cover designing students are listening to Blake talking about humour in Rabelais, and arrive – the year is now 2000 – in a theatre in south-west France where 400 excited primary school children are watching Blake draw characters from much-loved Roald Dahl books. This is learning outside the classroom, and Blake, by this time the world-famous author or illustrator of over two hundred and fifty children’s books, with a house in France, has a well-formed disposition to be involved in this kind of education. These projects that he was involved with provide really rich evidence of his quietly playful engagement with young audiences and teachers, and how he was himself discovering more about the learning process as well as offering the audiences unforgettable experiences.
Here he is, then, in the middle of a two-hour session in which he uses a visualizer. All 400 children can thus watch (and hear) every stroke of the fat marker pen, which squeaks across the paper and brings to life the ghastly and fascinating Mr Twit, the very Dahlian anti-hero of The Twits. Mr Twit’s signifying feature is a repulsively unkempt beard, teeming with trapped food. Blake doesn’t start with the beard though, instead he draws an eye and immediately has the children guessing the identity of the emerging drawing. This demonstration of active learning was particularly appreciated by one of the teachers present, who was also responsible for inviting Blake to France as part
of a wide-ranging children’s literature project. Pascal Bourgignon remembers thinking that this was real teaching – a combination of the theatrical (darkened theatre with a single figure on the stage), the slightly magical (a disembodied hand producing something recognizable out of a few lines) and the familiar (Mr Twit). All of this, he says, ‘reactivates their (pleasurable) memory and knowledge of the book, and at the same shows them the importance of typical detail in the creation of character, whether visual or literary’. And all without using a single word.
The project in question was an ambitious one which came to be called Un bateau dans le ciel (A Sailing Boat in the Sky), of which more later. The idea for Bateau had actually come out of a relationship Blake had already formed some years previously with Rochefort public library, whose librarian had invited him to create an event there. Blake was to draw the contours of a large dragon to which children would add their own details. A local primary-school teacher, Jean-Marc Sandeau, was asked to bring his class of 6-year-olds to the event and to prepare them for it by exploring picture-books by Blake. Like all good teachers, Sandeau is always eager to seize opportunities for his students. In his words: ‘I thought it was a shame there was only this dragon, and I got the library to invite him into my class.’
Sandeau and his partner Annie Simon, as well as Geneviève Roy, were all teachers who were using the revolutionary method, for France at that time of using ‘real books’ (as opposed to reading schemes) in the teaching of reading. The ‘real books’ movement had been widespread in England in the 1980s but was relatively new in France (one of its main proponents, the teacher Marie-Joëlle Bouchard, was writing in the 1990s). Sandeau constructed an ambitious project in which he and his class created their own ‘Quentin Blake book’ using characters from many of Blake’s albums, who then appeared in an original story. This culminated in Blake’s visit to the school when he was presented with the book (the library had produced a few bound copies available to readers). Sandeau particularly remembers Blake’s response: ‘He realized that this book meant a lot to the children and he spent at least two minutes (a long time!) reading it. He read it, he laughed, he could have thought it was just children’s work, but he was really respectful.’ Sandeau’s colleague Annie Simon elaborates:
Quentin Blake: In the Theatre of the Imagination Page 8