It’s here in the understanding Blake has of this girl in a factory bus pondering her future, in Home and Other Stories, an educational publication from 1967. A slight little image, but there’s something so expressive about the head in the hand, the weight of the bag on her lap and the other isolated faces. But it can just as well be found in a folk-tale image of a cold sad hen from The Bear’s Winter House (text by John Yeoman, 1969), or in this picture of a batty Aunt Belinda addressing her plants in The Family Album (text also by Yeoman, 1993).
Each of these characters is immersed in their own situation, humorous or otherwise, but however absurd or pathetic, they are never mocked – somehow we can only feel glad that Aunt Belinda exists.
Perhaps his world-view can best be summed up in two books from different ends of Blake’s career, Patrick (1968) and Zagazoo (1998).
As we saw, Blake talks about Patrick as the book he wanted to do to exploit the recent introduction of cheap full-colour printing – he would write a story where colour would be essential to the narrative. But we could take another view of it: Patrick is an innocent fairy-tale sort of boy with no back-story or context – he just sets out to buy a violin, which he finds in a second-hand stall in a street-market (Blake does like a good market, street or covered, especially in France). In the next spread we see him delighted with his purchase; on the left he runs so fast he almost takes off, and on the right he stands and blows the dust off his new violin.
The idea of an old instrument that hasn’t been played for years is a magical one in itself, a kind of resurrection – and in this book, where colour is the thing, the grey-ochre dust of the right-hand image stands in symbolic opposition to the next page: when Patrick does start to play, the fish leap from the pond, now joyously multicoloured.
The magic of Patrick’s violin music becomes stronger: the trees grow not only fruits but buttered toast, cakes and jellies; when Patrick plays, pigeons turn into birds of paradise, black-and-white cows into dancing spangled creatures, and, even better, a poor tramping man’s pipe into a blazing fountain of fireworks. Best of all, when a tinker, thin and sickly (with ‘a cough, a cold and a stomach ache’), hears the music, he becomes pinker of cheek, his suit takes on a zany stripe, and his stomach rounds (as Blake then thought, symbolic of his return to health – today he fears the anti-obesity lobby might have something to say about this representation). The procession of the ‘changed’ then rolls away in a warm, elated glow which is also felt by the reader. A single-theme story written for young children in simple language, this book can also be understood by the reading adult as something much more subtle about the transformative power of music: it transports you and excites feelings of every hue, and, of course, here for ‘music’ you can also read ‘art’, since you can’t hear Patrick’s violin-playing but you can see its effects.
Blake has, as we know, no direct experience of the parental perspective on children growing up – indeed, the starting point for Zagazoo was, according to him, based on precisely this ignorance, and particularly on his view of the behaviour of (some!) children in restaurants – ‘I’ve always wondered how children who behave so monstrously grow into such reasonable and likeable adults’2 – which makes the cheerful and in the end empathetic treatment of this fundamental subject even more remarkable.
First, it suggests in the subtlest of ways that to be good parents you need to be a good couple: so you do things together, whatever they might be. In Blake’s imagination, George and Bella make model aeroplanes, do the dusting and eat strawberry and vanilla ice-cream; I doubt if he’s done any of those very much, except possibly for the ice-cream, but he realizes how different every couple’s list will be.
George and Bella have a baby, to their astonishment: the metaphor of a baby arriving in a bright parcel perfectly describes a pregnancy confirmation that you weren’t expecting but are delighted about. And the symbolism continues with the growing child taking the form of an animal for each new phase – Blake chooses these with typical imaginative truthfulness: a vulture (nights of hungry squawking) – a warthog (messy), an elephant (clumsy), a dragon (dangerous and destructive). The parental point of view is beautifully envisioned, as if from experience: for first-time parents everything is indeed a shock; the ways in which your child tests every new boundary as he explores the world can never be anticipated; you are constantly confounded and perplexed and you cannot imagine how the situation could ever improve. By far the worst stage is when the pink and loving baby you once had turns into an alien hairy creature.
This spread is a brilliant representation in word and image of the simultaneous comedy and despair of being a teenage boy and being his parents: the hairy creature, now even bigger and stranger (but not happy either, so the child’s point of view is also present) and the parents, with fading clothes and hair turning grey from worry, who clasp each other in a gesture of mutual hopelessness.
The resolution arrives quickly, in the turn of a page, just as it can do in life: the monster suddenly becomes a perfect young man; he finds a girlfriend, and the signs are that they will have a good and fruitful relationship, since they both enjoy fixing motorcycles. The cycle, it seems, might be complete. But no . . . for the story to be truly three-dimensional, and because this is Quentin Blake, we need the now grownup children’s perspective on their parents, who in turn have become two wrinkled but contented old pelicans. To return to Nikolajeva’s point, this is a highly concise book, which deals with almost everything important in family experiences in 32 pages, and it does so through its light heart as well as through the sense that, whoever you are and wherever you are in the cycle, the author understands you.
These two picture-books seem to me to sum up Blake’s understanding of the world as he meets it, as an artist and as a person: Patrick is about art and its effects, the colour and imagination that artists bring, and Zagazoo about a sophisticated but warm view of a, perhaps the first, family predicament. Seen in this way, these two books can seem somehow out of place when you find them next to Spot and The Very Hungry Caterpillar on a bright red bookshelf in the children’s section of the bookshop, because, as good as such books are, their reach is so much more limited.
In Patrick the music/art can transform as the best art can; it makes things more beautiful, more intense, more extraordinary, and, especially in Blake’s hands, the ever-present humour makes you feel more cheerful too. But Blake’s embodiment of these effects in the characters who experience them has an additional outcome, a healing one, a ‘making whole’ of the reader, who may be a child but also an adult who is wounded, as we all are sometimes, by illness, dissatisfaction or real unhappiness.
Early on, Blake’s career took off because he could both draw very well and make people laugh. He became a cartoonist, and some people still use that word to describe him, thinking perhaps of the rapid, entertaining lines and amusing situations that they might see on an 80th birthday card or on the cover of Dahl’s The Twits.
But, as we have seen, over the 65 years of Blake’s career so far, his work, while always keeping these qualities close to its heart, has become something quite other. Like all great artists, Blake would never have stood still artistically. For a person with high-functioning abilities, not just artistic but also literary, the transition from cartooning to illustrating narrative in books was a smooth and obvious one; Blake carries on illustrating books and this art, and its place and value, is still extremely important to him. But Blake has now successfully gone out into the public realm of hospitals, museums, galleries, streets and theatres, and here something else has come into play. Without the help of words or texts, these images need to speak for themselves in their contexts: generically they belong to illustration, to the everyday, so they must both claim attention and be legible to actual and metaphorical passers-by, and this Blake knows how to do supremely well. But to these qualities Blake adds a practically indefinable ingredient, a sense of energetic human flourishing against the odds, a representation of the better
self. There are new ideas here and, although the line is recognizably Blake, some of the expressions, interactions and the colours feel different. Without explicit narratives and now articulated for big spaces, in these works we are addressed more personally, more questions are asked, and even more than in Patrick or Zagazoo, we feel Blake is speaking both to and about his fellow human beings, with all the understanding that 83 years of watching, reading, hearing and seeing and drawing have brought him.
Blake started as a cartoonist but he has now become a poet. Because he has kept on exploring, he is now – in the words of another poet, T. S. Eliot, in his 1940 lecture on Yeats – a poet who ‘in his work has remained always young, who even in one sense became young as he aged.’
From The Golden Ass
10 Something happening
When thinking about how this book, which doesn’t actually have an ending since the work is ongoing, might actually come to a close, I decided that the solution would be to let this young Blake speak for himself about his present activities:
When I was told I had reached 80 it seemed to me that the thing to do was not to organize a retrospective (I had done that a couple of times already) but to put together a show of new work. No doubt it is because Ghislaine Kenyon is aware of this that I have been given the opportunity to add some notes here, as a sort of coda, to show that there is still something happening even now.
Much of it is the result of some ongoing relationship. One of the most enjoyable of these in recent years has been that with the new Jerwood Gallery on the Stade in Hastings. The exhibition Artists on the Beach has already been referred to here, but since then I have been at work on a second exhibition, which will have taken place before the publication of this book. Like the previous exhibition, it has to do with the gallery’s relationship with Hastings, though it has a different approach. Called Life Under Water it makes use of a device which I have already employed in a set of hospital drawings – the depiction of people in everyday clothes swimming about under water with an assortment of fish and seaweed. In the hospital surroundings it suggested, I hope, the situation of individuals finding themselves in a physically and psychologically strange situation. In Hastings it is a way of isolating specific Hastings types (and in Hastings, of course, the fish are everywhere). So there are holidaymakers, schoolchildren, middle-aged ladies, the purchasers of antiques and second-hand books – but also characters with the urge to dress up that Hastings seems to inspire: bikers, pirates, morris dancers, Jack o’ the Green. All of which, I hope, helps to tell the local community that the gallery is aware of it, and salutes it.
Another relationship is with my own college, Downing, in Cambridge. The college’s symbolic creature is a griffin, and so since when, a few years ago, I found myself back in touch there has been a sequence of various versions of griffins, such as one for the new Gryphon building, and as merchandise. I also find myself at work on a pair of griffins for the Grace Howard Room in the new Howard building, at the opposite end from the brilliant trompe-l’oeil beasts by Francis Terry, the son of Quinlan Terry who designed the building. I hope mine will be a suitable contrast; fairly freewheeling drawings, but nevertheless presented as tapestry hangings.
Another development of great interest to me at Downing is the prospect of a new art gallery. Colleges, by an enlightened ruling of the City Council, are obliged to spend 1 per cent of any budget for building or redevelopment on art. This frequently comes to mean works of art, but Downing’s imaginative interpretation has been to have an existing building redesigned as a gallery, with the 1 per cent funding going to a research Fellow who is also a curator of the gallery.
I have been invited to put on an exhibition in this new gallery in 2017. Our idea is that it will celebrate another longstanding relationship, with the Folio Society. Over the past twenty years I have illustrated the Voyages to the Moon and Sun of Cyrano de Bergerac, Don Quixote and Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame. When we came in due course to talk about Voltaire’s Candide, Joe Whitlock Blundell of the Folio Society proposed that it should be made one of a recently initiated series of deluxe editions; with full-colour printing and leather bindings.
Candide proved to be a success, and in response to an invitation to propose another volume I suggested Fifty Fables of La Fontaine. The fables are most familiar to the general reader in versions edited for children, but they were not written for a juvenile audience, and they are not all about animals – although they are all about the failings and idiosyncrasies of humans, treated in an apparently décontracté fashion. So I was glad, as someone mostly known as an illustrator of children’s books, to make a selection to be illustrated for adults, and in an apparently relaxed way that I hope La Fontaine might have approved of.
I did a full-page illustration for each fable, with a few smaller drawings. There was an interesting contrast with almost any other set of illustrations I have undertaken, as on this occasion the illustrator doesn’t have the familiar task of pursuing a narrative, distributing the illustrations through the book, looking for the most effective moment to illustrate. In almost every fable La Fontaine gives you the moment; what you have to do is try to get it right. I enjoyed the activity so much that I frequently found myself doing a drawing again, not because the first version would not pass muster, but simply to see if I could get some further nuance out of it.
A further Folio deluxe edition is still in production as I write this. The Golden Ass of Lucius Apuleius was suggested to me by a friend who thought I might enjoy illustrating the story of Cupid and Psyche, which is at the centre of the book. In fact its presence there seems to be fairly arbitrary; Lucius, transformed into an ass, has no part in it, and at least one existing edition silently leaves it out. However, one of the distinctive aspects of the book, not least for the illustrator, is the contrast between the lyrical fairy-tale quality of that story and the detailed and down-to-earth accounts of the other sexual relationships in the book. There is certainly no shortage of moments, and the problem is rather of choosing among them.
The projects mentioned so far are all in response to a specific brief. The prospect of an exhibition at the Marlborough Gallery, where I first showed in 2012, allows me instead the possibility of exploration – for example, I think I will want to take further an existing sequence of drawings of stone heads. I’m not able to explain their significance, though they are evidently in some way invested with feelings. And in the 2012 exhibition there was a set of coloured drawings of the heads of women otherwise submerged in water. I’m not sure what the significance of those is either, but swimming (not so different from flying, as already noted in this book) has been happening in my pictures over a number of years. Perhaps once again it may be interesting to explore the possibilities of partial and total immersions.
But I also hope that there will be things both for this show and for other drawing ventures which I am not able to foresee.
Notes
Introducion
1 Interview in Mail on Sunday, 23 January 2000.
2 Harrison Birtwistle and Fiona Maddocks, Harrison Birtwistle, Life Tracks (London: Faber & Faber, 2014), 6–7.
3 Adam Phillips, Becoming Freud (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014), 29.
4 Arthur R. Chandler, The Story of E. H. Shepard: The Man Who Drew Pooh (London: Jaydem Books, 2000).
5 Words and Pictures (Tate Publishing, 2013), Laureate’s Progress (Jonathan Cape, 2002), Beyond the Page (Tate Publishing, 2013).
Chapter 1
1 Blake, ‘Characters in Search of a Story’, in Under the Influence magazine, No. 12, 2013.
2 James Wood, The Nearest Thing to Life (London: Jonathan Cape, 2015).
3 Rebecca Steel, http://onestoparts.com/review-quentin-blake-marlborough-fine-art
4 www.webofstories.com/play/quentinblake/34.
5 The illustration of classics for the Folio Society (Anglistik, International Journal of English Studies, Vol. 5 (2014), Issue 1, 106).
Quentin Blake: In the Theatre of the Imagination Page 23