Britain’s best-loved illustrator shows his darker side
Quentin Blake Jerwood Gallery, Hastings
Quentin Blake is far and away Britain’s best-loved illustrator: a great British brand, this exhibition argues, as instantly recognisable as “Marks & Spencer, Rolls-royce or Fox’s Glacier Mints”. Well, if the 84-year-old Blake is now considerably better known than at least the last of those household names, the foxy connection is appropriate. Tricky, mischievous animals are a mainstay of his art, with its inimitably spiky, dragged-througha-hedge-backwards pen-and-ink technique – as are profoundly problematic human beings.
Blake is best known as the illustrator of the work of Roald Dahl, perhaps the greatest children’s author of the last century. And as with Dahl, there is a decidedly dark side to Blake’s art. This show, the artist’s largest to date, wants us to consider Blake not just as a great children’s entertainer, but as a “serious” artist preoccupied with grown-up themes, such as mental health and the migrant crisis.
Everything in the exhibition was produced this year – an extraordinary achievement for a man of his age – and the first thing we see are huge brush and ink drawings, roughly 10ft by 15ft, created in situ which the plucky artist executed from a cherry-picker crane. The imagery is typically freely painted, and perhaps reassuringly whimsical: a man and woman soar over mountain peaks in a huge bird-like craft that appears half-monster-half-machine, piloted by a wacky bearded figure. In a complementary image, two more bearded men in fantastical machines face each other across a ravine. One, in wings, is about to dive off a preposterous, multiwheeled cycle, while the other appears about to drive his monster-like vehicle off a cliff.
While you could interpret these images as allegories of hubris and self-destruction – noting the presence of vultures, a traditional harbinger of death – the mood is upbeat and unjudgmental. There’s a Leonardo-like quality to the wacky inventions, but seen through the mind of an anarchic 10-year-old who is principally interested in entertaining himself.
A large group of watercolours, in moody blues and greys, strike a more adult note, with groups of bedraggled people wandering in wastelands or perched on tiny rafts in rolling seas
– all clearly redolent of the current refugee crisis. But Blake can’t resist adding lyrical touches: enormous coloured moons – or are they suns? – and a view of the fish lurking in the sea beneath a raft. If images of men in elaborate, multi-storey wheelchairs or perched on hugely tall stilts making apparently futile journeys, with vultures loitering close at hand, bring to mind Goya’s satirical etchings of pointless conflict, Blake can’t sustain Goya’s level of unremitting bleakness.
A benevolent kookiness strays into a watercolour of an elderly woman in a carriage pulled by a multi-limbed dog with wings. A batty-looking old lady motors a huge mechanised monster into the sea. In such images, Blake walks a knife edge between pessimism and delight in being alive and being able to draw. And as in a child’s vision, the precise boundaries between the two states don’t seem to matter.
Blake’s absolute mastery of line is apparent in two large, exuberant, almost abstract expressionist images of children riding monsters, with the ink poured from an oil-dispenser lying in pools on the surface of the paper. The wild-looking children appear gleefully at one with their terrifying mounts in this quintessential Blakeian image.
‘Blake walks a knife edge between pessimism and delight at being alive and being able to draw’
In Blake’s vision innocence holds terror at bay as darkness and light, futility and joy are held in balance, not in a worthy, moralising way, but as organic facts of existence. The most revealing images here are small sketchbook drawings, in which Blake explores the key images in this exhibition – mechanised monsters, men in wheelchairs, on stilts – in seemingly endless, prodigiously inventive variations. In one of them he shows himself, holding the handlebars of a unicycle, with his legs and body floating behind, as a dog runs joyously alongside. It’s the image of an artist with the conscious mind of an adult and a child’s ability to get in touch with an anarchic inner-spirit.
Blake’s more serious images put me in mind of the great Fifties illustrator Romald Searle, who created a harrowing visual record of his experiences in a Japanese prisoner of war camp, but is best known as the creator of St Trinian’s. Similarly, I doubt this exhibition will see us shifting Quentin Blake into another category of art. But why should we need to when he functions so brilliantly in the one he’s already in?