Quentin Blake’s ascent to national treasure status has been fuelled by a 70-year career as an illustrator, most prominently of children’s books, and works by one writer in particular. His distinctive and revelatory conjuring of Roald Dahl’s world is one of the glories of late-20th century illustration, but it has sometimes masked other aspects of a remarkable career that’s been about a lot more than just the genius misanthrope of Great Missenden.
A new BBC documentary, Quentin Blake: The Drawing of My Life, allows for a wider appreciation, opening as it does with the 89-year-old illustrator confronted by 30ft of empty canvas and an invitation to fill it with an artwork that tells the story of his creative life. The broad brush of biography is soon filled in: his 1930s upbringing in suburban Sidcup, south-east London, from where Blake first got his work published in Punch while still at school; his decision to read English at Cambridge rather than going to art school; his 60s career as an in-demand illustrator (his Penguin paperback jackets for the likes of Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim have an attractively louche appeal); and as an author himself, most notably A Drink of Water, made with the writer and longtime friend and collaborator, John Yeoman.
Blake’s association with children’s literature began to properly cement itself in the 1970s and the BBC has unearthed some evocative period clips of Blake’s first forays into children’s literature, sporting big-collared shirts and luxuriant sideburns while drawing on children’s shows such as Jackanory. A string of luminaries including David Walliams, Lauren Child and Michael Rosen dissect what we might call Blakean characteristics: his attraction to the eccentric, mischievous and anarchistic; his strong sense of empathy, and his understanding of characters – people, animals, whatever – outside the mainstream.
“I like to think of books as taking people away,” he says, “not just to places but to experience how other people feel and live and react. It’s about how to live more.”
Blake’s many commissions have taken him far away from children’s books. He has a long association with France, where he was awarded the Légion d’honneur, and has illustrated, among other things, The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Voltaire’s Candide. He has provided paintings for maternity centres, and depicted moments from a defiantly ordinary everyday life (washing up, walking in the rain) for an eating disorder unit, to offer the patients glimpses of normality and stability. An exhibition, We Live in Worrying Times, initially opened for just a day before lockdown last year (“Suddenly the title seemed awfully appropriate”). In it, Blake “wanted to do something that reflected the distresses we read about all the time”, adding that he has he found things in the project “that I hadn’t done before. I mean it’s partly age, I expect, as anything else. He adds: “I’m not so committed to cheering everybody up, you know.”
Not that Blake expects this to be his last word. He recalls doing a drawing of himself that said: “From now the rules of semi-retirement will come into play and there will be a lot of saying no.” “That was 1998,” he says, “and I haven’t stopped since.”
Quentin Blake: The Drawing of My Life is on Christmas Day, 4.10pm, BBC Two.
Blake’s progress: from the BFG to birthing pools
The BFG by Roald Dahl, 1984 (pictured top)
Over a dinner, Dahl and Blake went into detail on the BFG’s clothing: aprons, boots, belts and hats. Eventually they agreed on everything but his footwear and Blake returned home. Shortly after, a parcel arrived, containing one of Dahl’s own sandals. “They are Norwegian I think,” says Blake, “I’d never seen them anywhere else. And that was his origins. That’s what the BFG wears.”
Mural in the Kershaw ward at Kensington & Chelsea Mental Health Centre, London, 2006
The Drawing of My Life spotlights Blake’s hospital projects, which include a series of murals for a centre looking after older people with mental health problems, filled with lively folk climbing trees to play instruments or swing from the branches. “They encourage us to do all the things we’re not supposed to do,” says one resident.
Drawing for the delivery suites at Rosie Birth Centre, Cambridge, 2012
This image of a mother and baby in water was made for the walls of the birthing pool. A midwife at the unit, Susan Prytherch, says Blake picked up on the way that new mothers “gaze and gaze and gaze” before touching their babies: “We see this gaze all the time.”
From Hard-Boiled Legs by Michael Rosen, 1987
Blake began working with Rosen in the mid 70s and they have collaborated ever since. Back then “the idea that you wrote about childhood in a sort of rumbustious sort of way was a bit new”, recalls Rosen. “I was enjoying naughtiness and Quentin picked up on that.”
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