“I think you know when you’ve come home. It’s a sense of belonging that doesn’t go away”
Listening to her instincts matters to illustrator Jackie Morris. That and a well named cat. She shares her life lessons with Ruth Chandler
The way artist and illustrator Jackie Morris came to live in Wales has something of a fairytale about it. She visited the country’s smallest city, St Davids in Pembrokeshire, for the weekend 27 years ago and never left, happily uprooting herself from Bath. “It was February and the sun was shining,” she says, her eyes sparkling at the romance of her story. “As you stroll down the high street, there’s a place where you can look up and see the cathedral, stone walls and fields, volcanic rock and the sea. I think you know when you’ve come home. It’s a sense of belonging and that hasn’t gone away.” That same day Jackie also pinpointed the place where she would later live. “I walked along a street called The Pebbles, and saw a hamlet across the valley and a cottage shining out from the hillside.” She bought the house next door and has been there ever since.
HOME SWEET HOME
It’s a pretty stone cottage, which Jackie describes as being “held together by spiders’ webs”. Inside, the small kitchen is filled with ceramics, glassware and art, and warmly scented with spices and herbal teas. After being lifted out of the wok on the (idle) stove, a lithe silver Bengal cat – who looks like he’s leapt out from one of Jackie’s paintings – playfully bats a pen. “I find coming and going difficult,” she says, such is her attachment to her adopted home and this beautiful pocket of west Wales. “The day before going away, I feel unsettled and the day I get back, it takes a while to settle myself back in.” The success of Jackie’s project with writer Robert Macfarlane, The Lost Words, means that she has been back and forth quite frequently. A few simple pleasures take the edge off: “My teapot is one of the loveliest things Robin [ her partner] has ever given me,” she says as she pours a fragrant night-time infusion from the shallow Japanese design. “I love it so much, I even take it on my travels sometimes.”
NATURAL WONDER
The Lost Words is a beautiful heirloom of a book that attempts to rewild the language of children. In it are poem-like ‘spells’ that conjure the flora and fauna that were dropped as definitions in the Oxford Junior Dictionary – including acorn, bluebell and kingfisher – written by Macfarlane and illustrated with Jackie’s rich, sumptuous watercolours.
She has been producing books since her son, Tom, 27, was born, inspired by her deep love of landscape, plants and wildlife. “I’ve always felt a stronger connection to nature than to other humans,” she says, stroking the cat now napping in her lap. Hares, tigers, leopards, lions, polar bears, deerhounds, wolves and foxes populate her stories, which she writes and illustrates with a generous dose of magic. They have been translated into more than a dozen languages and most are for everyone, not only children. “What I try to do is make a book that a parent will enjoy as well. So there’s a lot of detail – you can read a book like Can You
See a Little Bear? quickly if you just look at the words,
but if you read the pictures, too, you can take half an hour.” Jackie leans in and says in a mock-confessional manner: “One of the reasons I had children was to learn about what works in books. I’ve asked my accountant if the kids could be tax-deductable...”
WILD CHILD
Perhaps the reason for her passionate belief in connecting young people with the natural world lies in her own childhood in Birmingham and then Evesham, Worcestershire. “I wanted to be wild, but my dad was a policeman, so he didn’t like us going out much because he knew of all the dangers. He saw the worst of everything.” They holidayed in the Devon village of Torcross every year: “I loved going to Dartmoor, but we weren’t allowed beyond the car parks because we’d obviously die in a bog or get eaten by gnomes or something,” she says with a wry smile. Her parents didn’t allow her to have any more pets after the devastation she felt when her dog died. She’s made up for that since with a small pride of cats – currently The White Cat, Elmo the ginger, Spit the cat and Zephyr, the silver Bengal, who belongs to her daughter Hannah. The cats often join her on walks up the hill behind her house with working cocker spaniel Pi, and lurcher Ivy, (sometimes crowned with antlers in her illustrations). Jackie’s parents also didn’t want her to become an artist, yet it was seeing her father sketch a lapwing that influenced her choice of career. “I was six and I didn’t know what jobs were, but I wanted to do what my dad was doing at that moment.”
Two terms into art school in Exeter, she learned one of her most important life lessons: “Don’t be scared to make a change, it’s never too late, even when it feels like a big deal.” She summoned the courage to switch to the illustration course at Bath where there was more emphasis on drawing and less on graphics. Soon after graduating, Jackie secured commissions from magazines and eked out a living as an artist by day and pot-washer by night until, at the age of 27, she had a breakthrough job: six greetings card designs for the tidy sum of £200 each. She could devote herself to painting full time and hang up the Marigolds for good.
KEEPING IT REAL
There’s nothing precious about Jackie – a beguiling mix of wild imagination and no-nonsense pragmatism. “It’s a job. You can’t sit around and wait for the luxury of inspiration, you have to find it. I have two children and a mortgage.” That doesn’t mean that she isn’t subject to bad days: “Sometimes, I paint like a donkey. I get cross and grumpy.” Her advice to anyone attempting to write or paint is straightforward: “Just get on with it.” Her work as an author takes her into
schools, where she admits to causing a little controversy: “I have a bad habit of telling them they don’t need to get a ‘proper job’. If you want something, you just have to work for it.”
Jackie savours the tranquillity of where she lives and works. “When I have the windows open, I hear goldfinches outside.” It’s not all good, though: “Sometimes I find the sheep a bit irritating – the constant bleating,” she says, laughing. Book commissions and their accompanying deadlines can be stressful so, when she needs to escape, she heads to the sea, which is just a few minutes’ walk from her house. She collects stones to decorate them with a labyrinth in gold leaf, which she describes as “quiet and meditative,” returning them as a gift for people to discover or for the sea to reclaim.
AN ANALOGUE LIFE
While she prefers to write outside, often up the hill behind her cottage or in a quiet bay nearby called Porthselau Beach, Jackie paints in her studio, though she doesn’t believe creativity is restricted by location: “I’ve always thought that if people could produce art in Auschwitz, you can do it anywhere.” Her attic studio is teeming with natural finds and wildlife specimens, including the skeleton of a puffin, a wren’s feather, an owl’s foot and antique taxidermy. There’s a touch of witchcraft about it: “The last lot of kids who came up here got the stuffed stoat. They were angling for the fox, but I needed him.” The vintage typewriter was once used by her father for writing up police reports, such a stark contrast with his daughter’s beautiful tales. It’s a hint to Jackie’s enjoyment of analogue life, though not without its downsides: “It’s so frustrating when you make a mistake. How you type a whole novel on one, I do not know.” Dozens of notebooks and sketchbooks spill out of the cases. “If I look at one from 30 years ago, it takes me right back.”
Jackie is a great believer in the value of writing and illustrating journals. “Michael Morpurgo once took me aside and said, ‘I’m going to tell you a little something that Ted Hughes told me: if you want to be a writer, get yourself a little notebook and every evening describe two or three things about your day. It doesn’t have to be long, you could just write a word or a sentence.’ It encourages you to look hard and will change the way you see the world.”
“The last lot of kids who came up here got the stuffed stoat. They were angling for the fox, but I needed him”