Quentin Blake: In the Theatre of the Imagination

by Ghislaine Kenyon

  Further back, Blake’s colleagues and students at the RCA recall his generosity to Brian Robb, who was his predecessor as Head of the Illustration Department and had been his most important mentor in Blake’s early career. Friend and distinguished potter Alison Britton says: ‘He was Brian’s surrogate son really, incredibly loyal.’ This was demonstrated in the period when Robb became unwell but was still at work. The artist Russell Mills recalls that Blake ‘carried’ the situation, covering up for him when necessary. Blake is Robb’s executor, and his way of giving back has been to generally try to raise interest in the work of this gentle but at his best highly witty artist and illustrator. For example, according to Joe Whitlock Blundell, then working at the publisher John Murray (later to become Blake’s art-editor at the Folio Society), in the 1980s Blake tried very hard (in the end unsuccessfully) to persuade him to publish a book that Robb had written and illustrated about the RCA student visits to Venice.

  Robb wasn’t a relation and, as we know, Blake didn’t marry or have children; his birth family was small, only one elder brother Ken (died 2006), who married Edith, and who had two daughters. But, perhaps because of this, Blake has always been supportive of his equally small extended family (his two nieces and a great-nephew), very much behind the thick screen that protects his personal life. But he speaks of them with the warmth and admiration of someone who recognizes the complications of family life, maybe also even with relief at not having to be in the middle of these complications himself.

  Blake is modest about these personal things that he does. He is much readier to share the stories he hears from people he has unwittingly helped through his art, and there are now many of those. A man once wrote to him describing how ‘although only in his forties he had had to retire from work because of illness; he explained later that it was from profound depression’. He happened to visit an exhibition of Blake’s work, As Large as Life, a show which toured to several galleries in England and Scotland. The exhibition featured prints from four of Blake’s projects for hospitals and other healthcare settings. Assembled together for an exhibition, these works lost their ‘healing’ context; they were no longer on the walls of labour-wards or children’s outpatient waiting rooms but this did not stop them from speaking to Blake’s letter-writer. He described to Blake how ‘blown away’ he felt about such a positive view of humanity (something that Blake is occasionally accused of, he admits, cheerfully).

  More than that, it had had a very positive effect; the pictures were for him, he said, better than any drugs the doctor had given him, and it was an effect that seemed to be quite real, as some months later there arrived another letter from him saying that he had moved to London and had a job working for a charity. It was another step in my consciousness of the ways drawings can actually speak to people.

  In spite of this Blake doesn’t really know how this effect actually comes about. Perhaps it is partly that, as he says: ‘The people in some of my drawings are simply in strange situations which they are more or less coping with.’ These strange situations might be the fact of being in hospital for the first time, but they might equally well describe the situation of mental illness that this man found himself in. The fact that people are ‘more or less coping’ suggests a kind of barely adequate minimum; and what Blake doesn’t mention in that quote, but often implies in his images, is that there is almost always someone around who can help the sufferer get to that base-camp of coping. In hospital that might be a health professional or a visitor, but, in the exhibition, perhaps that person was Blake himself, speaking through the drawings. I think that, beyond this, there is something about the nature of the drawing itself, the energy of the line, a gesture, an expression, the choice of a colour, which is both consoling and encouraging to the viewer.

  Bringing people together, helping them stay together

  Blake has recently had several more letters in the above vein. Some of these are, he says,

  from people who share an interest in my drawings, often, understandably a childhood interest, and most frequently the illustrations in the Dahl books. One was from a couple who read Matilda to each other as they drove to Devon on their honeymoon. Another was from a woman who asked whether I would send a greeting to her wonderful Italian husband on a significant birthday. It was only after their relationship had been established that she mentioned her enthusiasm for the books and discovered to her surprise that he shared it – she hadn’t realized that the books also existed in Italy; evidently this brought the two even closer together.

  Perhaps the most interesting of letters of this kind – and the trickiest to anyone other than Blake – was from a young man who wrote asking for help:

  He had messed up his relationship with his girlfriend; it was his fault; he had drunk too much and been badly behaved. But they both liked my drawings. He sent a photograph of them in happier times.

  I knew nothing about him except that he was repentant; I didn’t know if it was a good idea that they should get together again, or what I could do. In the event I took a sheet of paper and drew him on the left-hand side and her on the right. In the space between them I wrote: ‘Any chance of getting this ironed out?’ and then I scrunched the sheet of paper into a ball and stuffed it into an envelope and sent it to him.

  I heard nothing back – one doesn’t often expect to hear – and I assumed nothing had happened. Quite a long time afterwards though, I was at a private view of my work in London and they appeared – hand in hand and with a T-shirt for me. On the front was a photo of them together, with the drawing ironed out and framed, and the ironing board. This was two or three years ago; I hope they are still happy together.

  From the series ‘Welcome to Planet Zog’ for the Alexandra Avenue Health and Social Care Centre, Harrow (2007)

  8 Healing

  Blake’s hospital projects have been widely written about both in the press and by Blake himself, in his book Beyond the Page. For obvious reasons, few have ever seen them in their original settings. The projects arose from a chance invitation from a clinical psychologist, Dr Nick Rhodes, to make a series of works for the ward for older adults in South Kensington and Chelsea Mental Health Centre in 1998. This was the first commission in an ongoing series called the Nightingale Project, a charity working with the Central and North West London NHS Foundation Trust, whose intention is to ‘brighten up the environment in mental health services through art and music’.

  Rhodes had realized that the environments of the mental health institutions he worked in were not helping his patients: ‘Before I left for the night,’ he says about a patient he had admitted because he considered him a suicide risk, ‘I went to see him in his room. I looked around and saw this bare little cell and I thought, “What have we done? We’ve admitted a suicidal man to this depressing place.”’ He decided that he would, with curator friend Stephen Barnham, set out on a mission to make these places ‘more homely and welcoming’.1

  There is a long and well-established tradition of art in hospitals, which is described in Richard Cork’s comprehensive The Healing Presence of Art.2 However it is clear from that book that the intentions of those who install art in hospitals have not always been to make them more welcoming places: the obvious historical example is the sixteenth-century altarpiece painted by Mathias Grünewald for the Monastery of St Anthony at Isenheim, and which is now on display at the Unterlinden Museum in Colmar, near Strasbourg. The monastery specialized in hospital work, where it treated plague patients, as well as those suffering from ergotism, a devastating gangrenous and convulsive disease, and Grünewald paints a Christ on the cross enduring these shocking symptoms. The intention of this painting may have been a kind of empathetic one, but one that might seem perversely so to us today: to remind patients that Christ suffered and understood their suffering. It is hard to imagine any patient finding any comfort in such an image today.

  Blake’s work, though, is compassionate in a very different way – he has spent very little time in hospit
al, so his open-hearted response to the invitation from Rhodes cannot be explained as that of a ‘grateful patient’. He readily admitted to identifying with the life-stage of the patients whose ward he decorated – ‘I didn’t want to be disrespectful but as I was their age . . .’ – but there is clearly much more to this set of images than a Golden Girls view of old age: that 1980s American sitcom of four oldsters living up their final years in Miami in a haze of alcoholic companionship. The digital prints (scaled up from smaller drawings) that filled the public spaces such as the dining room or corridors did indeed show older people enjoying life. But this is life to the full – they dance, read to themselves and to each other, garden, eat chocolate, paint, exercise, cook, play football and drums, sculpt, dress up, feed birds, do all the things we all sometimes like to do, and they do them in a fine multi-generational company.

  The pictures feel light-touched and full of good humour, typical Blake images you might say, and they would and do certainly make viewers smile, something that Rhodes believes is a ‘significant achievement’ in a psychiatric ward. But I think there is even more to them than that. The message seems to be both for and about the patients, most of whom had some form of dementia. It says that they are still alive and it connects them with the human activities, which, in the best settings, they might still enjoy. It reminds clinical staff, carers, family and friends that the lady hunched silently in a winged armchair in the corner is also someone who thrilled to Elvis in the 1950s and might still do so if someone could remind her, with images or with music. As dementia specialist Professor June Andrews advises people with the disease, in her guide to dementia,3 ‘If you want to stay at home for as long as possible the important thing is to keep busy. This means doing everything you usually do, whether that’s bowling, gardening, going to church, visiting museums . . .’ The Kershaw Pictures, as they are called, really seem to me a confirmation of this, and a plea for engagement with the person inside the illness or disability.

  The last word about this project comes from Nick Rhodes again. It stood out from many of the Nightingale ones, he says, because along with his essential understanding of the world on the ward in which the patients were now living, Blake brought such a unique and practical grasp of how to illustrate ‘a place’ in terms of fitting the images to the environment. According to Rhodes, Blake has an immediate and unerring sense of how each space could be animated. He even knows how to deal with the impossible problem of the Fire Exit, or other pieces of signage, which in the NHS tend to appear on walls with minimal aesthetic consideration, highlighting the anonymous institution over anything else that might have been placed there to mitigate such an atmosphere. In the Kershaw ward a Fire Exit sign appeared prominently on a wall at the end of a long corridor, in a place Blake had identified as a good spot for an image. Blake first wondered whether the sign could even be incorporated with the image, but finally settled on a decidedly horizontal picture showing a man in a hammock which was placed well below the sign and managed to distract all attention from it.

  Other hospitals have been quick to recognize the value of these schemes and since 1998, prompted by the Nightingale Project, Blake has done an average of one project a year. These range from waiting rooms in the Armand-Trousseau Children’s Hospital in Paris, to mental health centres in London, to maternity wings in Cambridge, Scarborough and Angers, (France), to an Eating Disorders Unit in London. Sometimes the works are commissioned by hospitals, but Blake will also occasionally come up with an idea (as if from nowhere) which Stephen Barnham, co-director of the Nightingale Project, seizes upon gratefully. For example, Blake remembers being on holiday in France and starting to draw figures, who were swimming but fully clothed.

  He showed them to Barnham who saw at once, with his valuable and rare knowledge of both art and the needs of patients, that these images could find a good home in the Gordon Hospital, a mental health unit in London. Blake now realizes that these figures were also in what he calls a situation, which is parallel to the actual one they find themselves: alien certainly, but with reassuring elements.

  He currently has more plans for London hospitals including a smaller-scale project at the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children, where Blake has made a set of images for a pleasant and comfortable room. But this is the room in which parents can be together, perhaps only for a day or two, with their critically ill and dying baby or child.

  These drawings were commissioned by a couple who lost their own baby, Elliott: as Jenny and Michael Walker recalled in an Observer interview (3 May 2015), there was no family-room for the three to be together during Elliott’s last days, and they ended up staying in a store-room at the end of the corridor. ‘As Elliott was dying,’ says Jenny, ‘we said: “We don’t want any other parents to have to go through this,”’ and so they set about raising money for an ‘end-of-life care room . . . to enable families and their children to have a quiet, peaceful time in their last hours together’. For the couple, the idea of an artist’s work helping to create such an atmosphere was an obvious one, and Blake was a natural choice of artist: not only did Jenny love his work, but they knew that asking a well-loved illustrator to make work for the room would be a consoling bonus. The couple were delighted with the results of this commission: Jenny says: ‘Blake has captured in pictures what I sometimes struggle to put in words.’ And of the image illustrated here, she says: ‘One [horse] is drinking; [the other] is looking round. I’m not a horsey person, but it moved me and my husband to tears when we saw it because the horses are really caring for each other.’ There really is a different kind of healing at work here, because, as Jenny has understood, these images are not primarily designed for the patient, who will not recover, but for the soon-tobe-bereaved family.

  Speaking about the project Blake says:

  In the ten years from 2006 to 2015 I have had the opportunity to undertake an extensive sequence of projects for hospitals. The most recent two of these were, unusually, both commissions from individuals. The set of four related pictures for Dr Kathrine O’Brien is described later: the second, Elliott’s Room, is still at the time of writing not yet in place, which is why Ghislaine Kenyon has asked me to write some notes about how it came about and how it is developing.

  About a year ago I was approached by a young couple, Jenny and Michael Walker, whose son, born in Great Ormond Street Hospital, had sadly not survived. So that they could be with Elliott for the end of his short life the hospital had put them in a room not specifically intended for that purpose. Subsequently, aware that there would be other parents finding themselves in a similar situation, the Walkers asked if Great Ormond Street could find such a room; it would be called Elliott’s Room, they would pay for its furnishing and decoration, and having seen some of my other work for hospitals, they asked me if I could produce some pictures for it.

  I have been fortunate in the sequence of hospital projects I have worked on that I have encountered – more by accident than design – a gamut of different situations: young patients in England and France; adult and elderly mental health patients; those with eating disorders; mothers about to give birth. And how I was eager both to respond to this young couple’s positive and generous gesture, and to find the answer to a new question. It was immediately apparent that many of my visual gambits of cheering-up, teasing, activity, optimism, would be out of place. In all these projects I have taken the opportunity to consult both patients and professionals; here, in my first exploratory drawings as with later ones, I had the invaluable resource of being able to get the reactions of two people with first-hand experience.

  What was needed, it seemed to me, was images which were calm and intimate, which refer indirectly to the situation and were directed at the parents as much, or more, than at the children. The pair of horses, for instance, among the earlier drawings, had meaning for my young clients, and other animals and birds were at their suggestion. The room also has to contain medical equipment and is, within its small space, quite assertiv
ely rectangular. In an attempt to ease that, the pictures have a sort of decorative vignette fringe, or a soft watercolour edge. And then, the other element that seemed to me essential, some kind of prospect, some journey travelled or yet to be travelled, some vista to be looked back over and at the same time to be looked forward to.

  The pictures will be reproduced as digital prints, but even so, taking into account the relatively small size of the room, and that we wish to encourage some sense of domesticity, I am sure they will not be large.

  My own take on the horses is that the picture with its leafy framing device is like a vignette, an incidental little drawing, which gives character to a page. But in this context it is something different: the two grey horses standing in a peaceful stream may be just that; perhaps the one looking up from the water is simply distracted by the birds above; but, as Jenny picked up, they can also be read as a metaphor for the parents; in the sombre tonality of the picture, that raised head might be staring into the distance – mourning an absent child. Going into the territory of dying takes bravery. Even clinical staff with whom I have worked on arts and health projects have several times admitted to me that this is something they’re ‘not very good at’, but Blake has managed to embrace this most extreme of situations too.

  Also from such a personal contact but in a very different spirit came a commission from Dr Kathrine O’Brien, Blake’s former GP, to make some work for her consulting room. Again there was no brief but she was looking for something that she could actually use in consultations. As she says, her understanding of the reason why patients visit her surgery is that