Quentin Blake: In the Theatre of the Imagination: An Artist at Work

Part 1

Art in all directions

Book cover for The Birds by Aristophanes

1 Drawing, drawing, drawing

Drawing is a way of reasoning on paper.

Saul Steinberg

The heart has its reasons that reason knows nothing about.

Pascal

To get to know the real Quentin Blake we must begin with a visit to his studio – artists’ workplaces often seem to reflect and reveal character and work in a way that few other rooms can do. For example Peter Blake (they are not related) , works in a highly organized and categorized space, surrounded by his life-collection of objects and works of art. The space seems to echo both his neat appearance and his quiet, concise way of speaking, as well as the eclectic sources for his art. Quentin Blake’s studio could not be more different.

First, the studio is there in the middle of his home – unlike many artists, Blake doesn’t go out to work. When he started out as an illustrator he couldn’t afford for the studio to be anywhere but in his flat, but even after he could, he realized that it had its advantages: he often revisits work in the studio in the evening, or even, exceptionally, at 5 a.m. And because he has at various times so often also been working away from the studio, giving talks, visiting schools or hospitals, for example, coming back to the studio-at-home is part of the pleasure of being home again. This is the first and perhaps most important example of his undivided approach to work and life. The studio itself is a high-ceilinged, south-facing room on the second floor of a late Victorian mansion block. It looks out onto a peaceful and spacious private square in south-west London; French doors lead onto a narrow balcony where, when you visit, you may sometimes catch sight of Blake, contemplating from amid the flourishing pot-plants, and then beaming and waving when he catches sight of you. Back inside the room two entire walls are taken up with shelves and boxes holding many of the 300 books Blake has illustrated so far, including disturbingly unfamiliar copies of Roald Dahl’s Matilda in Japanese or Dutch. The other walls are blank, apart from an overmantel mirror into which are stuck personal photographs, postcards and drawings; on the opposite wall, some aged ink splodges, which skitter across the white expanse much as Blake’s own drawings do on paper. But most of the surfaces are covered – the floor with boxes of his newest books, or with piles of less new ones, or with the many plan-chests which hold his current work. There is also a trestle table, a long low table, and three seats for working and meetings: a barstool, a wooden chair and an ancient Eames chair, its white seat-cushion bulging like a hernia out of its leather cover. Most of the surfaces are covered too: the low table with yet more books, this time other people’s, the chairs with documents, letters, magazines and drawing ‘failures’, as he terms them, which also spill over on to the plan-chests. The reassuring (the drawings, his own books, the postcards) mingles with the more uncertain, the yet-to-be answered letters, unread books, decisions still to be made, projects-in-waiting.

But there are two highly ordered and purposeful spaces here. The trestle is home to the artist’s tools: the pens, brushes, delicious little blocks of watercolour paint and water jars are all exactly where Blake knows they will be when he turns from the light-box on which he works and which sits on another plan-chest, at right-angles to the trestle.

Today, pale blinds keep out the worst of the sun, and, amid the jumble of surfaces and things, the focus is on a figure in a navy-blue cardigan standing hunched over the light-box. For a few seconds we hear only two sounds: a breathing, heavy with concentration, and a scratching, the contact between a possessed pen-nib and the uneven surface of watercolour paper. An act of drawing is taking place and we hold our breath.

This chapter will watch Blake drawing, because, in his mind, this is where his life-story begins: his earliest memories are connected with either looking at drawing, or doing it, and drawing is something he has been doing practically every day of his life since childhood. This chapter will explore what, how, when, where and why he draws. Drawing is of course the vehicle for his kind of illustration – he doesn’t paint much or photograph or collage or make film or animations – but, alongside book illustrations, Blake has always made drawings, which do not answer a professional brief. These range from phone doodles (although he doesn’t like or use that word because it’s what fans always ask him to do) to large works which inhabit a happy kind of artistic noman’s-land, somewhere between illustration and fine art.

Let’s return to the studio where he spends part of every day, to the man and to his light-box.

This is a technique he has been using for over thirty years and this choice of it as a working method is key to any understanding of his work. He stands at the light-box – it is a way of keeping alert, in charge of the activity, really seeing what is going on. As he says: ‘I’m fairly sluggish and inactive, but everything, pretty much everything I draw I draw standing up . . . and in a way it’s like some kind of sport.’

If his drawings are for a picture-book, the process is, briefly, that he starts by creating a chemin de fer, a storyboard for the whole book, which then gives him a clear sense of how each double-page spread is going to work, both on its own and in the context of the whole book. For each of these spreads he will make a rough. The way Blake usually approaches these is to start with ‘the situation’; how a character is reacting to an event such as this encounter from Russell Hoban’s How Tom beat Captain Najork and his Hired Sportsmen, perhaps with a surprised expression, or one full of expectation or disappointment. Impressively, right from this moment, and probably also because he has done it for so long now, he always seems to have an instinctive knowledge of how everything is going to fit on the page.

Having settled on the rough that works best, he places it on the light-box, followed by a sheet of watercolour paper, by preference the French Arches Fin (cold pressed) brand, which he buys in great bulk, sometimes from Green & Stone’s in the King’s Road (‘but they never have enough!’ he sighs). The light from the box allows just enough of the rough drawing to penetrate the watercolour paper, so that Blake can use it as a kind of cue for the final drawing: as he puts it, ‘You’re drawing it as if for the first time, again’. There will be some connection to the original idea, but to Blake this process preempts the deadening effect of direct copying. He has a great need for the constant twoway engagement between hand, brain and imagination to be clear and unobstructed. This in turn produces in the drawings a spontaneity, which people who don’t know read merely as rapidity. Yes, the final drawing may have taken a matter of minutes, seconds even, but this definitive version is the result of the ten others that preceded it, and, in a broader sense, of the 75 years of constant practice that came before those. Of course, not everything works every time. Blake is highly self-critical, he knows how to ‘slaughter (his) darlings’ as the composer Benjamin Britten once described the process of rejecting favoured ideas that do not ultimately serve the final form of a work. ‘Sometimes’ he says, I spend all day doing a drawing and at the end I think that’s not right and I do it again, and I realize that one is better. But sometimes the second version tells me what’s right about the first one. If the less good one is good enough I can sell it at my dealer’s, Chris Beetles, but there are still some that are so bad that I have to tear them up. My studio has a very big waste-paper basket!

Blake’s ‘mistakes’ are always where the line has gone wrong somehow, and this has to be right because lines are his medium: a sequence of lines that create the actions and set the scenes, to which colour is then added; somehow where colour is concerned though, he uses it unerringly and spontaneously:

I don’t have a set of rules about colour and how you use it, I don’t think leaves are green, or tree-trunks brown. Colour can add depth, emotion and atmosphere. I don’t know how I do it, it’s instinctive; some people do roughs in colour for books but I only ever do black and white – I busk the colour.

This sense of busking is also involved in another kind of drawing, unrelated to books, which Blake calls his ‘discoveries’.

These are works whose origins Blake claims often not to know: ‘it’s like encountering somebody for the first time; you come to know them as you draw them . . . you arrive at the edge of their story . . .’ Here he works directly onto the watercolour paper, often using, say, ‘dangerous’ and ‘unpredictable’ media such as watercolour pencils and water: ‘You draw the picture and then you go into it with water on a brush and then you’ve got a minute or two to bring it off, or not.’ Or with pen and ink, where all erasing is impossible (though Blake does admit that in some cases he administers a white paint ‘plaster’ to an accidental blotch, when the drawing in question is to be reproduced). In both these types of drawing it is clear that operating in the uncertainty of the moment is the only safe way for Blake: it is only when he has a sense of not knowing the ending that his self-willed pen can get going.

Less unpredictable in terms of the technique, but with an equally unknown outcome, are a series of drawings Blake has called ‘Characters in Search of a Story’. These are made with a chinagraph pencil and Blake describes the process:

I may start off with a general sense of what the next character may be, though sometimes I have no idea at all. I begin by drawing the eyes, the nose, one side of the cheek. As the drawing proceeds I begin to get a sense of what kind of person this is and what I should emphasise: they may get older, or younger; just occasionally they change sex. And it’s also possible I suppose, the nature of drawing being what it is, that I may put in characteristics that I’m not even aware of. Later on I may realise that some of them have elements of people I know or have met, though I don’t put them in consciously . . . they are invented on paper and it’s there that I get to know them.¹

I think Blake is genuinely surprised at the way his visual memory and his unconscious operate for him – perhaps for an illustrator used to working to the brief of a text or something else, the contact to his inner world that these kind of free drawings permit is even more immediate and powerful. There is another telling manifestation of the way that his whole being works unconsciously through his hand and pen: Blake usually works alone in the studio but when, on a rare occasion, he was observed drawing some little characters by a friend, she said afterwards: ‘Did you know you were making all the faces?’

Since Blake is mainly drawing in his studio and not on the move, in cafés or stations, streets or countryside, it is also clear that most of what he draws must emerge more or less fully formed from the imagination. As we will see in the chapter on learning, one of the few situations where Blake has actually drawn from life was when he attended life-drawing classes in Cambridge and then at the Chelsea School of Art. Even then, it was the drawings that he did ‘away from the model’, when he got home from the class, that he felt more satisfied with. He does carry around little books with blank pages, but these are not so much sketchbooks in which to draw what he sees around him, as notebooks, where ideas for drawings might be recorded, alongside to-do lists and other work-related thoughts. Comparing these early ideas with their final expressions in books or other forms, it is astonishing how little they change – this is another highly practical example of what Blake calls ‘the instinct to do the right thing’.

He seems to have operated away from the model from the very beginning: in the 1944 issue of his school magazine, the Chronicle of the Chislehurst and Sidcup County School for Boys, there is a drawing by the 11-year-old Blake called ‘After the Game’. Blake now feels a certain embarrassment about his early output: even though seeing these drawings in print was an important stimulus to his career as an illustrator, he doesn’t want any words or pictures which don’t make the Blake grade to be in the public realm and so it is not reproduced here. Of this one he says: ‘It’s not a good drawing – I wasn’t interested in football, and I got the studs in the wrong place!’ But let me describe it instead: it is small, drawn with what looks like a soft pencil and shows three boys in the school changing room. It has a classical feel, with each boy monumentally and separately engaged in a different activity; the central figure taking off his shoe is almost an updated Spinario, that Hellenistic sculpture-type of a boy removing a thorn from his foot (a version of which is in the British Museum). The drawing is divided by the horizontals of a bench and the verticals of the coat stands, roughly at the pleasing ratio known as the Golden Section (the ratio of the longer side to the shorter side). At the age of 11, Blake was not aware of this ratio, nor, he says, had he ever looked at the work of Piero della Francesca or Georges Seurat, both of whose works these silent, sculptural figures recall.

The smooth drawing style (which Blake now describes as ‘wooden’) is most unlike the dynamic one that he was soon to develop, but there are many elements in this childhood work that have become as important and characteristic as his spluttering pen and animated dramatis personae. This changing-room scene was not drawn from life – Blake thinks he probably did it at home with the basic materials available there, and that he was recalling something which was memorable, perhaps because it made an impression: boisterous team sports, new football kits, smelly changing rooms. Second, it is a scene of ordinary life, the stuff of the art of illustration. In 1944, when most boys of his age, if they were drawing at all, would probably have been doodling fighter planes or soldiers, Blake chose to draw an everyday event. What this drawing also shows is that Blake was interested in figures in movement – at 11 he could already do this with Blakean accuracy, which is not so much anatomical correctness as physical authenticity: the way in which he knows how to capture a pose such as a boy balancing unsteadily on one foot to undo his shoelace, or a boy easing his football shirt over his head, cautiously, because it is still buttoned up, in the way of lazy 11-year-olds. Both movements suggest an artist recalling how it feels to be doing them himself, while in the act of drawing them. This drawing also has a precocious sense of composition.

Although, according to Blake, he is never thinking about organizing his drawings while doing them, he realizes when he looks at them afterwards that he has in fact composed them. In this work the figures are placed in a line, frieze-like, but not in a straight line, and at different depths in the picture space. The group is also broken up, by the vertical of a coat stand, with one boy to the right and two to the left of it. Balance and harmony are achieved by the height of the bench crossing the verticals at the Golden Section, and by the pleasing echoing of the angled legs of the central and right-hand boy. Finally, and this is a strong Blakean trait, he includes a few details, very carefully selected from his memory and placed to suggest the essence of the scene, in this case 11-year-old schoolboys in a school setting: the discarded goalie’s glove in the foreground, where we notice it; the open book, dropped face down on the bench; the wrinkled sock; and the satchel propped up against the wall. Not many, but each one articulate and additive, helping the viewer to imagine being there too. The studs on the boot may be inaccurate, but we totally believe in the scene . . .

All the elements of this early drawing tell us something important about an activity (if it can be called that) that is absolutely central to all Blake’s work: something that the literary critic James Wood calls ‘serious noticing’. Wood applies this term to the way that really skilled novelists manage to look at the world and see and select the details that will most aptly tell the story. As Wood says, ‘the details are the stories; stories in miniature.’² I sometimes think I see Blake consciously ‘noticing’, watching these details of life, on a train, say, or in a café, but he would say that the process was completely automatic: it seems that noticing and selecting in order to imagine and create is just Blake’s default state.

Where he draws

This naturally gifted draughtsman drew first at home, then at school in the art-room, and then, when he was able to buy a home of his own, in the studio, and most of what he drew came from his head. But there was one period when he did draw from life, proof that he could really do both. In his Punch days in the 1950s he would occasionally stand in for Ronald Searle, as theatre illustrator, working alongside the critic Eric Keown. Searle had taken over this role from G. L. Stampa in 1949, and, in Blake’s view, he had complete mastery of the genre, magically combining caricatured physical likeness with the actors’ attitudes from the production in question, making them instantly recognizable to the readers. (Blake’s favourite eightieth birthday present was a Searle drawing of Bud Flanagan.) Blake did a few three-week stints of this kind on occasions: ‘They were a bit of a nightmare,’ he says, as they usually involved working late at night after a First Night at the theatre in order to deliver early the next day. Blake enjoyed the process, though he feels that his own efforts were less successful than those of his hero, Searle.

This drawing, made on the first night of the London production of the musical Annie in 1978, shows Stratford Johns as the soft-hearted Oliver Warbuck, Andrea McArdle as the orphan Annie, a well-captured Sheila Hancock as the devious Miss Hannigan, and Sandy, the stray dog. The drawing has all the fluency that Blake had acquired by this time and he could obviously achieve likenesses, but there is something perverse about him having to reproduce a situation created by another director. It is worth remembering that in 1978 Blake was also producing illustrations for Roald Dahl’s The Enormous Crocodile. Somehow it is as if, when freed from the need to stay close to reality (unlike in such theatre drawings), and liberated from the tiny spaces of cartooning, a wellspring of movement, colour and humour is released which gives rise to drawings such as this one and many thousands after it. It is interesting that in the end it was not the reportage aspect of illustration that most excited Blake, even in the field of theatre, which, as we have seen, he felt very close to. Instead, first in book illustration and then later in works that Blake calls ‘off the page’, such as his projects for healthcare settings, he seems to have found the proper outlet for his natural inclination towards creative