Right out of the top drawer
If Quentin Blake were to be summed up in the sensational terms of a red-top, he would be “Britain’s favourite illustrator!” Even the broadsheets call him a “national institution”. Blake is as familiar to British audiences as a cup of tea and a nice bit of cake - if a slightly eccentric cake with bright green icing - and yet his illustrations cross international boundaries with the ease of a flying snozzcumber. He is among that select band whose creations have been joyfully embraced by generations of children.
This week, he curates his first exhibition in Glasgow of works chosen from his own archive - a London flat filled with 5000 drawings - at the Kelvingrove Art Gallery. “I’ve included a bit of everything, and I’ve put in the two Roald Dahl stories that were translated into Scots,” he explains from his South Kensington home, referring to George’s Marvellous Medicine and The Twits. “The Eejits! They’re sensational!” chuckles Blake, a youthful 74, who’s hoping to commandeer a Scots speaker to give a reading at the private view. “You feel The Twits should have been written in Scots in the first place.”
Dahl and Blake are an inextricable storybook coupling and, to most readers, Blake’s most well-known children’s collaboration, although other bestselling partnerships include those with John Yeoman and Children’s Laureate Michael Rosen. Blake’s own books are also popular, from the moment Patrick, his first creation, played his violin and changed Blake’s illustrating palette from black-and-white to colour.
I mention to Blake (the first Children’s Laureate in 1999) that I met Roald Dahl as a child at a reading. He was huge and glowering; I was petrified. “It was a bit the same for me, actually,” jokes Blake - although he was in his thirties when they met, the “first date” in a collaboration that would last until Dahl’s death in 1990. But this was no great clash of egos, as one might imagine in the genesis of a picture book. “We got on very well. He would send me a story, and I would go to his house with a lot of rough drawings. He was always keen to get in more helicopters. Children like helicopters, he said. And then we’d have a nice meal.”
There is a famous story of Dahl sending Blake one of his large, battered sandals in the post, when the two were trying to solve the problem of what footwear the BFG (Big Friendly Giant) should sport.
“Illustrating a book is a bit like a double act,” says Blake. “You hold back a bit when the writer is being particularly good and then when there’s a duller bit, you come in with entertainment on the side. You have to have a sense of that, when you sit down to read it.”
One of the more poignant, and perhaps difficult, things Blake had to illustrate will also feature in the exhibition - Michael Rosen’s Sad Book, published in 2004 after the death of his teenage son from complications arising from meningitis. “We’d been working together for about 25 years, and I felt privileged that he asked. It’s astonishing that he could do it. He writes it in a way that’s detached and personal at the same time, and that’s rather how you have to be when you’re illustrating - abstract, but up close. I identify with things while I’m illustrating them, but when I put my nib down, I stop.”
Blake’s new Kelvingrove illustrations comprise six large banners, designed to hang from the gallery’s balconies. Visitors will crane their necks skyward to see children flying on “literary birds” (birds designed for reading on). As with all Blake’s illustrations, they are clever and immediate, comic and pertinent - sparse where they need to be, brilliantly piled up with detail elsewhere. There is no immediate Scottish flavour, no flurry of bekilted subjects or flying bagpipes. “I did draw a lot of Highland cows for a book, once, though. It’s the horns - they’re fantastic!” says Blake, suddenly brimming with gentle humour.
The thought of him sitting in a field sketching Highland cows, with their faintly comical juxtaposition of cuddliness and brutishness, seems quintessentially Blakian. I ask him what character he gave them. “Enigmatic! Well, you can’t really see the expressions on their faces, can you?”
Blake’s illustrations are wonderfully free and anarchic. “Chaos, but minutely organised,” he counters. Among his many fellow illustrating “heroes” are Daumier, the nineteenth-century Frenchman, and the late Andre Francois, “wonderfully inventive and badly behaved on the page”. Blake himself is a French “treasure”, made Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres (Knight) in 2004 for services to literature - another accolade in a collection which includes the 2002 Hans Christian Anderson Award. He has championed reading and drawing in France as well as Britain - notably with Un Bateau dans le Ciel (A Sailing Boat in the Sky), which he wrote from the ideas of 1800 schoolchildren in the Gironde region, where he has a house.
Blake, who later became head of illustration at the Royal College of Art and is backing the UK’s first Museum of Illustration, was born in Kent in 1932. “At 11, I was the child that hung around art rooms in my new grammar school. I met a professional cartoonist and painter called Alfred Jackson, the husband of my Latin teacher, who used to look at my drawings. He gave me the idea that you could get paid to do this.” By 16 Blake was illustrating for Punch, although it was only when he went to meet the editor that they realised he was still at school.
Cambridge, and an English degree, followed, then a year’s teacher training - he once called himself an “escaped teacher” - although he always had it in his mind to become an illustrator. “It’s the business of narrative that I like. It’s a little bit like a theatre in which you act all the parts. It’s something that isn’t very much in painting nowadays. I spent a couple of years going to life classes at Chelsea School of Art, because I didn’t draw bodies well enough, and I’ve been living off that ever since.” The only things he doesn’t like drawing are cars, “because they don’t change when they move”.
“I like to create a feeling of spontaneity and movement in my drawings. I draw quite quickly, then look at what I’ve done, then keep reworking. I don’t think I make as many mistakes now as I used to. I mean, one ought to improve a bit over 40 years, oughtn’t one?”
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