‘Rapacious’ is a strong word for Blake, but it shows that his humanitarian concerns are deep. He expresses these concerns intelligently through his art, delighting rather than shocking the viewer into giving.
With an equally intelligent sense of how to maximize the value of his donations to such charities, Blake usually diverts payments for works commissioned by his friends to such charities: both Survival and Flora and Fauna have benefited from these funds.
Blake would never have made the trip to Livingstone, Zambia or Puerto Lopez in Ecuador to teach children to read. But that didn’t stop him devoting time to creating a series of drawings, this time greatly enlarged drawings, for the Book Bus charity. Founded by Tom Maschler, Blake’s distinguished former publisher at Random House, this charity aims to improve child literacy rates, initially in Africa, but now also in Asia and South America, by providing children with books and by motivating them to read.
The five Book Buses (actually a converted Safari vehicle and a white van, plus three conventional buses) now tour these continents, each bringing thousands of books, along with staff and volunteers, to the places where their help is needed. Blake was Maschler’s first and only choice to be the artist to animate the first buses: ‘He is one of the most remarkable children’s artists, artists of any kind, in England; I’ve watched him develop and develop,’ says Maschler, ‘and he said yes immediately.’ Blake, modest as ever, says: ‘When I was asked to do this I was taken aback and excited – generally he [Maschler] asks me what my next book is going to be. It’s the first time I’ve been asked to illustrate a bus.’
As an illustrator Blake is of course always highly aware of his brief – he had to deal first with the logistics of making drawings for an unfamiliar and irregular space: ‘We sent him a profile of the bus,’ says David Gordon, Project Director for Book Bus, ‘and the drawings just flow, under the doors even, telling a story from front to back.’ The drawings for such a project will never be something merely generic. Here he designed each set to reflect the destination country. And with his teacher’s instinct, by doing this he would also be encouraging and reassuring young bus-users that the activity in the bus would be for them, and that it would be enjoyable: children cling to the necks of the jaunty llamas who range over the South American bus; when the Book Bus pulls into a Zambian village, it is ‘welcomed like an ice-cream van, or Father Christmas’, as David Gordon puts it, and children are greeted by an elephant who obligingly holds up a book with its trunk, so that the engrossed child on its back can read in comfort.
Education, children and animals are also a theme of the Farms for City Children charity, which Blake has supported for many years. FFCC was founded by author Michael Morpurgo with his wife Clare, with the aim of bringing city-bound children into close contact with the rural environment through week-long stays on one of the charity’s three farms. Blake is now a vice-president. As he says:
I knew Michael already: we met years ago at Montaubon, where we were both going out to give talks in a variety of French schools and met up back at the hotel in the evening to compare notes on our experiences in the front line. We kept in touch and were brought together again over the Children’s Laureate scheme, of which he was the initiator, with Ted Hughes, and I was the first incumbent. I have also illustrated two of his anthologies of verse, and his story On Angel Wings. It was in fact drawings that Michael came to me for FFCC. I illustrated the covers of two books–Muck and Magic and More Muck and Magic –to promote and raise funds for FFCC. I also illustrated the inside pages of the second book, and provided illustrated endpapers for the hardback edition of the book. It was this last set of drawings that have turned out to be the most useful and versatile: the little girl with the ducks and geese became the charity’s logo, and some of the others have appeared on merchandise (such as the hothands – oven gloves – I use in my kitchen) and, more recently, on a range of clothes for children from which a percentage of the price goes to FFCC.
I suppose I ought to confess that, as I have never been to see any of the threatened tribes that Survival International is concerned with, I have never been to any of the FFCC farms. I am not motivated by a desire to join in . . .
This last sentence is certainly true, but, given the scale of Blake’s generosity to these and other organizations, its apologetic tone seems entirely unnecessary – his skill is, to bring a situation to life even though he has not experienced it himself.
Children with serious illness benefit indirectly from Blake’s ‘gifts’ to Roald Dahl’s Marvellous Children’s Charity. Blake’s hugely successful collaboration with Dahl started with The Enormous Crocodile in 1978 and carried on throughout the 1980s with household-name titles such as Matilda, The BFG and The Witches. By 1978 Blake had already illustrated over a hundred (published) children’s books, plus many other adult titles, but in terms of sales, the Dahl partnership was a turning point for him. With worldwide sales of millions, he became ‘never financially uncomfortable’ and his generosity to Marvellous, to the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre in Great Missenden, as well as to the Dahl website, is an acknowledgement of this, and has been considerable. He has created new images such as the red crocodile logo or the Dahl nurse picture for Marvellous. For the museum he drew the map and licensed existing images to be used without charge: ‘There’s no question that Quentin Blake made the museum,’ says Liccy Dahl, Dahl’s widow. ‘Everything, including the palette of colours, children love it . . . it was very generous of him.’
Children’s access to the arts is also a cause that Blake understands is important and in the case of the charity now known as the Prince’s Foundation for Children and the Arts, he did feel able to ‘join in’: the charity offers children who never visit galleries, theatres and concert-halls opportunities to do so, through partnerships between schools and arts organizations. Over several years Blake was very involved – drawing logos, appearing at fundraising events, lecturing, and even devising and introducing a teacher’s book: In the Land of Illustration. To each of these he dedicated the same time and creative imagination as he would do to any paid commission.
Finally in this list of charitable involvements there comes the French Institute, although it is not a charity itself. Inside this elegant art deco building in South Kensington are to be found some of Blake’s favourite things: people speaking French, a French bistro, cinema, and, best of all, a good French library. And so he said yes when he was approached to take part in the first South Ken Kids Festival in 1998. There are now many children’s literary festivals attached to their adult versions, in places such as Bath, Cheltenham and Hay. In Manchester, Cardiff and Cirencester, for example, independent festivals of children’s literature have been created in the last few years; but in the 1990s a combination of France’s embedded literary culture, a dynamic head of the literature department and a committed children’s librarian helped to create such an event for London. Blake’s involvement has been twofold: first he creates logos and drawings such as the one for this year’s banner and the one that he made for the first festival: ‘I did a drawing of a boy and a girl looking at books and each one was pointing at the other’s book and I think I thought that one was French and one was English and that . . . we’re looking at each other’s languages and we’re doing it through books.’ This theme is a persistent one with Blake since so many of his books are translated into French, or, as we have seen, even originate in the language.
Blake also contributes to the festival by being the British partner in the Anglo-French ‘drawing duels’: these performances are the visual equivalent of the party game where a story is created by each player contributing a single word at a time; here each of the two artists challenges the other to continue his drawing. Blake’s French partners in drawing-sparring have included the distinguished illustrators François Place and Joann Sfar, Bruno Heitz and Philippe Dumas. These events are notable for many things – the silent intensity with which each draws, and the defiant though always gentlemanly
flourish as one calls on the other to continue. After which Blake is inevitably himself challenged to sign yet more books for the expectant fans.
Even now, in his eighty-third year, Blake agreed to support the fundraising auction for the refurbishment of the Institute’s children’s library described earlier: Blake does not relish late-running gala dinners but on this occasion, as we saw, he made a speech, donated two works and then did a live drawing which was also added to the lots. This kind of support makes a vital difference to a cultural organization and Blake readily agreed to take part, because he feels fundamentally aligned with the cause of reading for enjoyment – something which libraries can so uniquely encourage.
This is a long list . . . when you look at it, certain themes do emerge – education, literacy, survival – and there is also a sense that Blake’s choice of charities to support echoes the subjects of his own work. All his output, the book illustrations, the paintings, the projects he calls As Large as Life; the series for hospitals, gallery walls, banners, building-wraps and murals; even the more private pieces such as telephone and fax drawings, they are always alive, first with humans and then with animals, birds especially. (Landscapes, places in general, do appear and richly so – the fierce urban sunsets in Clown or the great storm in Green Ship–but they are almost always at the service of the narrative and the actors who play it out for us.) There is a compassion for life on earth in the drawings that seems boundless, because it keeps on finding new outlets in every new project Blake undertakes. These drawings have a special power to encourage other people’s imaginative empathy with the cause in question, and so to donate.
Campaign for Drawing and HOI
However much these broadly humanitarian charities have gained from Blake’s generous and fruitful input, his contributions to the Campaign for Drawing and the House of Illustration have been at an altogether different level. These are both in fact also charities, but he puts them in a different category: they are institutions close to his heart, relating as they do to drawing, the thing he does every day, and his involvement with them over the last 15 years has been immense.
The Campaign for Drawing is an independent charity, set up in 2000 through an initiative of the Guild of St George, which wanted to celebrate the artist John Ruskin’s centenary. Ruskin had founded the Guild in 1871 to ‘assist the liberal education of artisans’ and the Campaign for Drawing’s purpose isolated a simple principle from this: it would promote Ruskin’s belief that drawing is a key to understanding and knowledge.
The idea for the Campaign came from Julian Spalding, a sort of polymath of the visual arts, who was Master of the Guild at the time, and who freely admits that he was ‘more and more fed up with modern art and conceptual art’ and that ‘something had to be done about drawing’. Having known Blake for many years, he says he knew he ‘wanted him on the Campaign’s board as a patron saint’ because of his ‘huge appeal, and because he draws like an angel’.
Spalding is convinced that Blake’s contribution to the early success of the Campaign was crucial. He enthuses that, together with Sue Grayson Ford, the Campaign’s first and continuing director, Blake ‘really made the Campaign and really made it work. He did all the drawings, he did the main designs, all the banners, and he gave out the awards . . . he was there . . . and he was of course a tremendous draw (himself) . . . his loyalty and his commitment to it was just unquestioning, even though he was so busy.’
The year 2000 was indeed a very big one for Blake. It was the year of the Children’s Laureate when he was busy promoting children’s book illustration; he was centrally involved in Un bateau dans le ciel, and it was also the year in which he had curated the groundbreaking exhibition Tell Me a Picture at the National Gallery. As Spalding comments:
I got the impression that he wanted to become more of a public figure, to contribute on a wider scale, [to have] a wider horizon. I think he felt this campaign absolutely dovetailed [with what was happening] . . . and it really introduced him to the museum world . . . in his very quiet way he got very excited about it . . . he was the drawing king and he made it work.
Under Sue Grayson Ford’s dynamic and tireless leadership, the Campaign, alongside other initiatives such as the Prince’s School for Drawing, and the Jerwood Prize, have certainly shaken drawing from its sleepy or comatose condition in some of the art schools and placed it firmly in the public realm, where Ruskin would have been happy to see it: through its Power Drawing education programme, it has given skills and ideas to primary teachers who have to teach the subject with little or no training. And the Big Draw month, an annual nationwide feast of drawing activities for all, often led by museums and galleries, has offered hundreds of thousands of people of all ages and backgrounds the opportunity to draw, perhaps for the first time, or for the first time in many years, and, crucially, to draw in the company of others. As Spalding put it: ‘Quentin made a comment, which summed it up: “You’ve discovered that drawing is a communal activity, we’d always thought of it as a private activity.”’
It is certainly true that, from the start, the Big Draw’s main focus has been on people drawing in numbers, and watching each other draw, together. I was there at the launch of the very first one, part of which took place in the normally oppressive tunnel that links South Kensington tube station to the museums of Exhibition Road. The scene was striking: hundreds of people caught up in the act of drawing: on what seemed like a mile of white paper lining the walls, children scrawled childish scenes next to serious artists making sophisticated sketches of each other, all apparently unaware of the (equally absorbed) watching crowds. At the same launch, Blake also remembers a session in the V&A Museum where he watched a child drawing an exhibit, so immersed in the activity that she failed to notice the cameraman filming her.
These informal public drawing activities are often punctuated by performances in lecture theatres; audiences watch artists such as Blake drawing on stage and a visualizer allows everyone to see the drawing hand. Spalding recalls:
It was at the launch at the British Museum, he just drew this woman standing there pointing, and he was talking away. There was a pause, and he said, ‘What is she pointing at?’ And then there was total silence in the theatre and this little crumpled figure appeared [on the screen], and it was absolutely right, his little crumpled figure who had done something naughty; there was something in her expression . . . the audience was mesmerised, about where it had come from . . . at that moment you could see him actually creating . . . it was a sort of mime, it was like Picasso drawing, and he was just with it . . . everyone in the audience will never forget that performance.
And since those days Blake has taken part in most of the launch days, including at the V&A, Somerset House and the National Gallery, and even one year in Paris when he could be seen on hands and knees (again) on the glossy parquet of the British Embassy drawing alongside children on long rolls of white paper.
What Blake has done for this campaign is many-layered and full of consequence: it is a model of how a ‘celebrity’ (he wouldn’t like the word) can use talent to give more than money – he has given the Campaign an identity through his designs; he has given it prominence and authenticity through his patronage; and he has given to the wide public, for whom the charity exists, through his illuminating appearances. Embroidering Julian Spalding’s description a little, as compelling as these sessions are, they are much more than a bit of artistic conjuring. In front of their eyes Blake shows people how lines become forms, how they communicate recognizable feelings and situations. The sight of Blake’s drawing hand is also a kind of call to the drawing hand in everyone watching, an invitation to take part in the activity whose purpose Ruskin said was to ‘set down clearly and usefully records of such things as cannot be described in words, either to assist your own memory of them or to convey distinct ideas of them to other people’.2 (Blake, however, would answer Ruskin by saying that if he, Blake, were to preach the gospel of drawing, it would be as much a
bout getting people to invent, to imagine, as it is to remember or convey things you have seen.)
The matter-of-fact, unsensational way in which Blake works in public reinforces the sense that drawing is an art that can be understood and undertaken by everyone.
Lastly there is the House of Illustration.
In conversation, Blake is often uncertain about the sources of his ideas but in this case he is very clear that the notion of HOI came not from him but from his friends, former student and illustrator Emma Chichester Clark and the writer Joanna Carey. They had suggested that a home would eventually be needed for Blake’s vast archive of all the illustrations for his three hundred or so books. With modesty but with the cause of illustration always close to his heart, Blake immediately realized that such a place could also provide a home for illustration and illustrators in a more general way. His vision was for a place where the art of illustration of the past and present could be seen by many audiences, a place where contemporary illustrators would meet and where the discourse around illustration could take place. On 2 July 2014, almost eleven years after the idea was born, a gallery that was eventually called the House of Illustration did open its doors at 2 Granary Square in King’s Cross, with an exhibition of work by Blake called Inside Stories.
As with all self-starting projects of this scale, the process of working out the nature and identity of the proposed organization, raising the money, finding a building, hiring staff and opening the doors to the public was bound to be a slow one: possible buildings came and went (sites in Lambeth, Southwark, Fulham and Ealing), names for the centre appeared and then had to be discarded: for example, The Quentin Blake Gallery was rejected because some potential funders, including the Arts Council, might feel that it had the ring of a vanity project. (It’s an interesting cultural difference that this was not a perceived problem either in the US, where the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art was founded in 2002 and regularly shows his work, just as in Strasbourg, France, Tomi Ungerer’s work can be seen in the Musée Tomi Ungerer – both of these are living illustrators in 2015).
Quentin Blake: In the Theatre of the Imagination Page 18