Quentin Blake: In the Theatre of the Imagination

by Ghislaine Kenyon

  These works are now part of the identity of this maternity unit; they are with the staff and patients every day. The drawings were widely welcomed when they were installed, and for the clinical staff who led this project it was a beacon encounter, in an environment which can seem all too distant from art and culture. (Author’s translation) Any misapprehensions that Blake is primarily (or merely) a children’s illustrator are dispelled by hospital schemes such as these. Here we see him addressing adult audiences, often in testing, grown-up situations, to which he brings imaginative empathy and hope. But, in a way, his work for children’s health centres and hospitals may relate more closely to his own experiences: he has not had cancer or dementia, or a baby, but he has been a human being in the unfamiliar environment of a hospital. For the Alexandra Avenue Children’s Centre in South Harrow, Blake was commissioned by the Nightingale Project to make a large image for the reception area and several small ones for the corridors. Welcome to Planet Zog, as he calls the largest of the works, take as a theme the metaphor of alien life.

  Blake has always enjoyed creating non-human creatures: his memorable and clever illustrations for Russell Hoban’s disturbing picture-book Monsters, or the clodhopping purple versions for the more lovable Monster series. Some of his most successful live-drawing appearances, for example those at the annual Big Draw events for families, have involved him standing in front of a 3 × 2 metre stretch of paper, thick felt-tip pen poised to respond to children’s increasingly fevered demands to ‘give it another eye’ or ‘make it green and spotty’. On these occasions such yellow five-legged bug-eyed creatures give delight by coming to life on the paper, absurd and cheerful and different. But when Blake repurposed them for Alexandra Avenue, his intentions were much more specific.

  Blake approached this scheme with the child’s perspective in mind. What is it like to have to go into a strange building, meet unknown adults, who may sting you with a needle, poke your ear with a cold hard instrument, make you open your mouth wider than you actually can so that they can look down your throat, ask you to take your clothes off even, or use words you don’t understand? The situation may be as alien to you as the creatures. So Blake, with his sure emotional logic, turns the doctors and nursing staff, and some patients too, into the aliens, the Centre into a land of striped trees and curious red mountains. Unexpectedly, these aliens turn out to be quite friendly: one makes you laugh when it spoons medicine into your mouth while holding one bottle in one hand and another balanced on its tail another can hold on to three children and an ice-cream with its four arms, and smile at them all at the same time with its four eyes; a third allows you to look inside its body by opening a pink door to reveal a fascinating mass of metal pipes and cogs.

  Blake is saying to children, as he puts it, ‘You will cope and it’s actually interesting!’

  This last idea is taken up in a recent project (December 2014), hot from its successful launch at St George’s NHS Hospital in Tooting. The Dragon Children’s Centre is also used by young patients, but, unlike Alexandra Avenue, this is a major outpatients’ centre serving more than twelve thousand children each year. In a pioneering project for this Trust, the hospital’s Arts Director Lucy Ribeiro wanted to commission a scheme to animate the long low arterial corridor leading to the consulting rooms. Here are families with children with often severe or persistent conditions – a place where the anxiety level is potentially high – and Ribeiro wanted high-quality work, which would make the space a place of distraction and fun, but also empathy. Her philosophy for such commissions is that they should be grounded in the user-communities, so for this one she both consulted the staff who worked in the department and held a series of workshops, in which she canvassed families and children about the kind of atmosphere they would like to see conjured on the walls of the centre. She showed them the work of many artists and illustrators but it was Blake’s work that regularly and consistently came up as a style which was appreciated and recognized by all age-groups, as one that seemed to address them personally. Blake was the man.

  Apart from the dictates of the space itself, the only brief for him was ‘dragons’ and the fact that the users were young people of many ethnicities aged from newborns to 18-year-olds, and who mainly came with their families. The budget for the project was limited – here as in most NHS Trust arts projects, the money is raised by a separate charity and Blake did not ask for a fee, although he normally does in these situations: he says that he does not want hospitals to

  feel that art is a charitable extra, but that it makes a significant contribution that it is worth paying for; and because there are artists who do need to be paid, perhaps more than I do. Nearly all my pictures for hospitals are produced as digital prints. This is convenient in that they can be kept clean, have a low insurance value, and are replaceable. What I am paid for in fact (as for illustrations in a book) is the right to reproduce the drawings, of which I keep the originals. In this case I was given to understand that there was only £5,000 available for the project and it seemed to me that the money would be best spent on enough dragons to go all along the corridor and on getting them printed and presented in the best possible fashion by Alexis Burgess [Burgess Studio] and his design group, who have looked after me very successfully on previous occasions.

  Ideas for this project immediately flew into Blake’s head, as they so often seem to do with a new commission, and he came up with nine images: one smaller print in which the dragon theme is established, followed by eight large prints.

  In this set the dragon is both a reassuring presence, giving rides to children or reading them stories, and a patient himself, with perplexing spots and drooping ears, or a bandaged tail. Of course, Blake makes sure that the patient is surrounded by sympathetic adults, and children. The message, for both patients and their families, is that you will be taken care of in this place, whoever you are and whatever your condition.

  Ribeiro describes the day of installation as an amazing transformation of the space: ‘We hung the work during the last session of appointments. At the end of the day the clinicians emerged delightedly onto the corridor: “‘I had no idea it would change the space so much,” said the lead consultant. “I’m so looking forward to coming to work tomorrow.”’ Ribeiro feels that the work brought out ‘the childlike’ in the staff:

  They all rushed down to see the work, from different departments . . . they took time looking at it in great detail, discussing it with each other. It has really changed their environment, to have this kind of art in their working spaces; they work such long hours. I could have watched them looking at it forever – it was real wonderment.

  Ribeiro believes that the wonder was also at the fact that someone as famous as Blake would be prepared to contribute in this kind of way to a hospital corridor.

  The value of all these hospital projects to the staff, whose daily working climate is the underlying needs, demands, frustrations and anxieties of patients and families, should not be underestimated. These people, who see the art every day, find that both its positive mood and the (related) fact that Blake has been personally involved, even for a short time, with their working life, heartening and motivating.

  Young people were also the beneficiaries when Blake contributed his presence rather than his work, in a very different setting. Dalwardin Babu, a now retired Chief Superintendent in the Metropolitan Police, needed some help. In 2000 he was working in the King’s Cross area of London, at the time a territory disputed over by the rival white and Asian teenage gangs of the Regent’s Park Estate or haunted by the sex-workers of York Way. After one particularly tragic gang murder of a young teenager, Babu’s job was focused on reducing gang-crime, and he brought a rather unusual policing style to this task. Instead of the rotating-door of arrest and youth courts, he decided to use tactics of engagement. He took a group of white and Asian boys to Belfast ‘to see what can happen’. He says, ‘For a lot of them that was their summer holiday . . . a weekend away to Belfast was w
hat they wrote about when they went back to school.’ And, in travelling around the schools of the borough, he noticed that there was one thing these young people did have in common: the students were reading the Roald Dahl novels, and enjoying Blake’s illustrations, so he decided to run a reading project around these books, bringing boys and girls together in school as well as involving police officers and local business people.

  Babu and his young daughter had met Blake at the National Gallery earlier in the year where Blake had been giving a drawing performance in connection with the exhibition Tell Me a Picture. Babu remembers ‘the way he captured the figures so well, you can feel the goodness, you can feel the badness!’ and he recalls Blake’s generosity when they queued for a book to be signed at the end of the session: ‘Quentin was so lovely because we took an old battered book that [my daughter] had read and we apologized, and Quentin Blake said, “No, no I love it because it means you’ve read it.”’ It was this warm reaction that made Babu decide to ask Blake there and then whether he would give this talk to his King’s Cross gang members, and he said, ‘Yes I’d love to.’ The resulting appearance is warmly recalled by Babu and in vivid detail:

  The kids were so excited, you could hear a pin drop . . . they had their books in their hands and you could see when Quentin was drawing the BFG that they were turning the pages to look at the drawings in their own books . . . Quentin is so modest, he doesn’t realize . . . he doesn’t have to do these things but he does them for the young people there and he really gets it . . . Several years later, I met a group of youngsters, and – I’m quite emotional about this – I was with my daughters in the car, and these youngsters called out my name . . . As a police officer you’re always a bit worried when that happens: is this someone you’ve put away? And I was with the girls and being very protective; but it was a lad shouting out in delight, ‘Do you remember when Quentin Blake came to our school?’

  Blake had of course visited many schools by 2000, and in 2014 he still does visit his local primary, Bousfield. But 2000 was the year of the Children’s Laureate and he had decided that his priority would be to promote illustrated books, and illustrators, in a more far-reaching way – he would bring his message to adult audiences; it would in any case be quite impossible to go to all the schools that wanted him to come to them. But he made an exception for Babu and the gangs of King’s Cross, and has since made two further visits; one to Tottenham and another when everyone came to the police station in Harrow: ‘We had the children from local schools all in the canteen – we had shut the canteen down – and these officers who would normally whinge and moan about not having their canteen, they all came along. By the end there was a . . . bun fight about who was going to give Quentin a lift home.’

  Babu says that as a result of these projects the local level of violence ‘plummeted’, and he has the statistics: ‘There were 177 incidents in the six months preceding the King’s Cross project and in the following six months there were only four.’ He adds, with feeling: ‘For me if there were more people like Quentin Blake who would give unconditionally – he never asks for anything – if there were more people like him, I think the world would be a much better place.’

  Blake and his art have also helped make a gallery in Hastings and, by extension, the town too, more accessible places. Blake has always loved Hastings and has a home there. The Jerwood Gallery opened in 2012, in a new building in the Old Town, and in a climate of loud and heartfelt local opposition. A campaign ‘Say NO to Jerwood on the Stade’ has been objecting ever since 2009 when plans were first announced to build a gallery on the seafront. The council was to build a home for the Jerwood collection of Modern and Contemporary British art next door to the Stade, that evocative stretch of shingle at the eastern end of the town, where fishing boats pull up on the beach and strangely tall and thin weatherboarded huts known as net shops rise up like a small black seaside forest. The hostility was not so much – as in many ‘anti-art’ protests – towards the idea of an art gallery in Hastings; rather more, it was objecting to its proposed location: the fact that it would be next door to a piece of familiar fishing heritage and that its footprint would occupy a portion of the existing seafront coach-park, which, the group claimed, brought both visitors and much-needed income to the town.

  Once the gallery did open, one of the principal tasks for its new director Liz Gilmore would therefore be that of persuading local people to step over the threshold: both those people for whom the building of the gallery now represented a political defeat and those for whom the collection itself was perhaps a barrier. She realized that, for example, abstract Terry Frosts and Prunella Cloughs, or John Bratby in ‘Kitchen Sink’ mode, might seem ‘indigestible’ to some audiences. Instead, she says, she would aim to create an appetite for engagement with the collection through its exhibitions programme. Having seen Blake perform at the gallery at an event for the Hastings Storytelling Festival, it occurred to her that she could invite him, as an artist with an accessible aesthetic, to cast a glance at the collection, to ‘illustrate it’. Audiences would then find other reasons to visit the gallery and, with luck, they would also see the collection itself with new eyes.

  Artists on the Beach was the small but happy outcome of this strategy. In it, Blake chose ten works from the collection and for each one he made a portrait of the artist in a beach setting with Blakean details relating to their own stories, and a short piece of text. Enlarged prints taken from these drawings were hung together in one room and Blake’s idea was that, with the help of a trail, his pictures would encourage visitors to find the relevant works in the rest of the gallery. As already suggested, the Jerwood collection could be considered somewhat specialist for the non-specialist gallery visitor, but for Blake it did have some relevance. In the 1960s and 70s he had, alongside his illustration work, quietly been making easel paintings in oils.

  This was a period when many of the Jerwood artists such as Burra (also a local artist for much of his life), Clough, Bratby and Spencer were also active and Blake had been aware of and interested in their work at the time: ‘It was like revisiting one’s past, to catch up with them again.’

  Gilmore was delighted with the exhibition, and indeed with the whole process – Blake was a ‘dream’ to work with, there was a ‘humility and quietness’ about his approach, and she recognized his ability to be responsive to the context of the gallery, and to the needs of inexperienced audiences. And the result was increased visitor numbers and, she says, the feeling that the gallery had spoken to people in a different and welcome way. Blake is now busy with ideas for a new exhibition for 2015, which will also use the activities of the town as a starting point for work, which, he hopes, will be equally inviting to its residents.

  The ways in which Quentin Blake the person and the work he creates make people feel better is both subtle and powerful: readers of all ages, families, patients, working people, individuals, including people with very little connection to the art world, all seem to find something consoling, delightful, truthful about the work and the man alike. We must never forget that Blake started out as a cartoonist who was perfectly capable of making fun of people and situations, and he is an admirer of satirists, from the Charlie Hebdo artists to Hogarth, but, he says, he couldn’t do such work himself. (‘Perhaps I’m too timid,’ he says; ‘there are some people I’d love to offend but I’m not sure I’ve got the right tools to do that.’) His favourite Hogarth print is not Gin Lane but Strolling Actresses Dressing in a Barn. This image of a group of impoverished actresses using a draughty barn as a changing room does, according to Blake, ‘offer to be satirical’ but what he sees is also their plight, the fact that they have completely inadequate costumes to play the roles of gods and goddesses they have to represent, and are sitting darning stockings and drinking gin to kill the pain of toothache. Blake finds satirical drawing wonderful but in a way more straightforward than what he tries to achieve in his empathetic work. What he does works because his version of
humour is neither lampooning nor sentimental, and so we can safely feel a part of it. To repeat Kathrine O’Brien’s works addressed to Blake: ‘You do have a knack of putting us all in the pictures.’

  Part 3

  Art and life

  From a series of drawings for the Kershaw Ward, 2006

  9 Patrick, Zagazoo and new-found lands

  There is a fashion among couples looking for readings for their wedding ceremonies to choose passages from children’s books. Favourite titles range from Dr Seuss’s Oh the Places You’ll Go to Margery Williams’ The Velveteen Rabbit (Princes William and Harry read alternate lines from it at their cousin Zara Phillip’s wedding), Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, A. A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden. One reason for this trend, according to Maria Nikolajeva,1 may be that for adults, children’s books strongly represent shared experience: often, as we saw in the chapter called ‘Giving’, they trigger powerful childhood memories, from a time when they didn’t yet know each other. An alternative motivation, argues Nikolajeva, might be that children’s books are so well geared to expressing thoughts and life-philosophy in a highly concise way: they are ideally suited to texts for a wedding, which for many young adults may be the first time they mark a significant life-step in public.

  Why might it be, given Blake’s renown, that the books he authors himself do not feature in any of these top-ten wedding-reading lists (although couples do often write to him asking for a picture) . . .? Popular and recognizable as his style is, perhaps the characters he creates don’t enter public consciousness in quite the same way as Winnie the Pooh or the Little Prince have done; and, as concisely written as his texts are, they do not provide epithets or passages that deal explicitly (and conveniently for these purposes) with love or wisdom; they are not so much the kind of words that people seem to want at weddings. He does and can do character, of course – just think of Mrs Armitage or Mr Magnolia – but these figures are not cuddly, they are a bit too scratchy to be favourite soft toys. Neither are they animals or children, or the kind of characters children so readily identify with. Maybe this is because what Blake has always been most interested in is the situations in which his characters find themselves, and in framing narratives for these. It is in the way that he captures such things with his imagination and his pen that his philosophy is in large part to be found. But this is a philosophy which cannot easily be isolated from his work, or indeed from his person; it is one, though, which would, I suggest, be of use to any couple starting a life together, or indeed to anyone at any stage of their life. It is a philosophy of empathy with people and the situations in which they find themselves, and it contains an understanding that gentle humour has optimism at its core. Blake’s optimism is not Panglossian, based on ignorance and foolishness, but on the simple premise that making people smile can make them feel better. I think this philosophy is there in the work from the earliest part of his professional life. It’s here in this picture from The Wonderful Button (1961), illustrating a story written by Evan Hunter (aka the crime writer Ed McBain), where an unhappy king learns how to be happy from a small boy, here shown offering the king his cloak with generous arms, while hard black trees and footprints in the snow suggest the king’s emotional emptiness.