A
fter six decades as one of our
most celebrated illustrators,
Quentin Blake hardly needs a
confidence boost, but last
year, a taxi driver ended up
giving him a pep talk. They
were driving back to Blake’s London
home when the cabbie requested that
Blake make a contemporary version of
Picasso’s Guernica. “I wasn’t sure I was
the person to do it,” Blake says, “but
the taxi driver was. ‘Cometh the hour,
cometh the man,’ he said.”
As it happened, there was a 30ft wall
waiting for Blake at the Hastings Con-
temporary for a show called We Live in
Worrying Times (on earlier this year)
and Blake produced a poignant frieze
of refugees, a mini Guernica. It is strik-
ingly different in mood from the
humorous eccen tricity that made
Blake’s illustrations so famous — from
his collaborations with Roald Dahl,
such as The Twits and Matilda, to his
own creations, such as Mister Magnolia.
At 89, Blake shows no signs of slow-
ing down. We are in his airy office in
South Kensington, where we chat in a
reverse Johnson/Attenborough set-up:
he is not masked but I am, so as not to
jeopardise a national treasure. Perched
on a sofa covered with Osborne & Little
fabric in a bright Blake pattern of plants
and cockatoos, I feel as if I am in one of
his illustrations.NICOLETTE
JONES
children books, but had to stop because
he “couldn’t keep up with him”.
He is pleased with the programme
and particularly enjoyed the six hours
he spent drawing for it, making a
9m-long mural of images that represent
aspects of his life and work. In one
scene he is presented with the vast
white space — most people would be
daunted, but he calls it “a wonderful
invitation” and gets to work, drawing
fast. He has always been prolific, telling
me that one morning, before he had
even got out of bed, he started drawing
women’s faces. By the time he finally
got up he had 54 pictures.
A look of delight passes over his face
as he talks about his drawing process.
“I like drawing people in the wind, the
way a scarf blows back. Sometimes a
rough [sketch] has an expression you
didn’t know you’d drawn.” He draws
every day. “I once tried not to draw for
a fortnight. I lasted nearly a week.”
Although he has worked in chil-
dren’s books for six decades, Blake is
childless and unregretfully unmarried
(“We don’t all have to do the same
thing”). He says that drawing for chil-
dren does not have to involve knowing
them well or even remembering your
own childhood.
He compares illustration to acting —
which he enjoyed at school and during
his national service. It is about inhabit-
ing someone else’s emotion. He pulls
faces and mimes actions as he draws,
getting inside the feelings. “I don’t
draw me. I draw that child, there [he
points at a space in front of us]. Just as
I might draw his grandfather.”He looks like the characters he
draws: slightly dishevelled, wearing a
short pale green scarf and a green felt
waistcoat with pockets that is reminis-
cent of the BFG’s. He habitually draws
himself with stubble, but now has a pie-
bald beard. And, just as his pictures are
often exuberant, there is often laughter
bubbling in his voice.
This Christmas Blake will be lauded
in an hour-long BBC documentary,
with tributes from fans such as Peter
Capaldi and Joanna Lumley, the come-
dian Josie Long and his fellow illustra-
tors Lauren Child, Chris Riddell and
Dapo Adeola. David Walliams also
appears — Blake worked on his first twoBlake did not have an artistic
upbringing. He grew up in a pebble-
dashed semi in Sidcup, souheast Lon-
don. “It was very suburban.” His father
was a civil servant, his mother a house-
wife. Like everyone, Blake drew at five.
Unlike most, he didn’t stop. His brother
was, he says, the more obviously tal-
ented at drawing, but less persistent.
At Chislehurst and Sidcup Grammar
School, Blake’s Latin teacher’s husband
was a cartoonist, who encouraged
Blake, and he sold a cartoon to Punch
in his teens. It was a riff on a school
scene, for which he was paid seven
guineas (but he didn’t have a bank
account so wasn’t able to cash the
cheque). Another early drawing, in hisA MAN IN LOVE
WITH DRAWING
Quentin Blake once sketched 54 pictures before getting out
of bed. With a BBC documentary and a new museum in his
name, there’s no stopping the maestro, aged 89 and counting
ART
ALL IMAGES © QUENTIN BLAKE22 19 December 2021