A BRUSH WITH MAGIC
Under the eaves of her home in west Wales, Jackie Morris produces beautiful work with a touch of the otherworldly
Motoring along narrow roads hedged with blackthorn blossom is a study in nature when Jackie Morris is at the wheel. She’s scanning the sky for the first swallows, which arrive early here in Pembrokeshire. Seconds later, she brakes to watch a buzzard swooping down on a young rabbit. As a result, it can often take a while to reach home – a white cottage, sitting on a hilltop on the west coast of Wales. Swallows and buzzards are just some of the birds that provide Jackie with constant inspiration. “It’s the shape of them, their flight, their soul,” she says, explaining why they appear with such regularity in her illustrations, notably in The Lost Words, her award-winning collaboration with writer Robert Macfarlane, which celebrates the goldfinch, kingfisher, magpie and other marvels of the natural world that were omitted from the Oxford Children’s Dictionary.
Hares are another favourite of Jackie’s: “They are elusive, magical and fierce. The first one I saw was in Wiltshire as a child with my father, who took me for
walks and taught me how to find a skylark’s nest. It was early one frosty morning, the earth crusted with mist. A barn owl floated silently above the surface, then, suddenly, hares erupted from the ground. They live in a different world. We have separated ourselves from that world and are no longer in tune with nature.”
There’s a stuffed hare in her attic studio, a reminder of her 2013 book Song of the Golden Hare, one of more than 30 titles she’s written, including The Snow Leopard, The Ice Bear and Tell me a Dragon. Her most recent release, Mrs Noah’s Pockets, came out last year, and is based, she says, irreverently, “very loosely on a book called the Bible”. The hare is joined by various other stuffed creatures – owls, a duck, a heron, as well as sundry feathers and wings; all study pieces for reference. There’s a drawer full of sinuous otter sketches of all shapes and sizes, swirling across the page. These are drawn in Sumi ink (used by scribes since the seventh century), which she grinds on an inkstone and mixes with water, then applies with a brush made from squirrel, sable or weasel hair. Some swim on smooth Arches paper, others dive on rough-textured, cotton-based sheets made with well water at the 400-year-old Two Rivers paper mill in Somerset. “I can pull otters out of my head,” Jackie says. “It’s their shape and muscle strength that fascinate me.”
Now in her fifties, Jackie knew from the age of six that she wanted to draw, “to conjure birds from paper and colour” after her father had magicked up a lapwing for her on a scrap of paper. She uses, appropriately, Blackwing pencils, with paper stumps for smudging, Winsor & Newton watercolours, and a panoply of
“I can pull otters out of my head – their shape and muscle strength fascinate me”
“I don’t do books for children. I do books for people”
pens with a range of coloured inks – “Sepia creates a lovely effect”. Often labelled a children’s author, she explains: “I don’t do books for children. I do books for people. They have to appeal to children, parents, illustrators.” Initially, however, she was told she was too working class to pursue a creative career – presumably because she didn’t have a private income – but was determined to go to art college. At Exeter University, her tutor said, “Your attitude is as substandard as your work.” She transferred to a different course at Bath, where another tutor recognised that she was hungry to learn – “which is good, as you don’t have much talent”. She proved both of them wrong after graduating, when she was commissioned by national magazines including Radio Times, New Statesman and Country Living, supplementing her income by working on a cheese stall while living in a farmhouse on the edge of Bath, saving money; and walking, always walking. She drew illustrations for Greenpeace, Amnesty International and Oxfam, and it was when her greetings cards were spotted by children’s author Caroline Pitcher that she was encouraged to work on storybooks. A few years later, she started writing them, too: “I have always loved chasing words, seeing them in my mind’s eye. Writing is like drawing words.” When asked if it’s difficult to create both the words and the images for a book, she says no, “because you use different parts of the brain. And you get paid twice”.
What’s surprising – and encouraging – is that Jackie couldn’t read fluently until she was 12, and her spelling was atrocious. But her advice to other aspiring artists and authors is: “Read everything. If you’re not enjoying it, put it down. You might pick it up again in ten years’ time.” In Jackie’s case, the words start on a Remington typewriter that belonged to her father: “He was a policeman and used it to write up murder reports. Now I write poems on it.” Despite being highly regarded – “The Lost Words has taken on a life of its own and brought new audiences to Robert Macfarlane and to me” – she is never content with her work. In fact, she doesn’t like it. While other art, including Tamsin Abbott’s folkloric stained-glass
Jackie spends hours watching, writing and drawing in the open air
pieces, hang in the low-beamed, slate-floored kitchen and sitting room, very little of hers is on display. “It’s not the finished product I like, but the process. That’s what keeps me going – it will be better next time.” She says in the past she’d be in tears sending off her work, thinking it wasn’t good enough, and she still gets nervous. “Then, when I see it in print, I usually decide it’s okay.”
Jackie spends hours watching, writing and drawing in the open air, in fields fringed with snowdrops or on clifftops punctuated by gorse, to get natural features exactly right; for The Wild Swans she spent days observing them at Slimbridge Wetland Centre. On her daily walks with Ivy the lurcher cross, Pi the cocker spaniel and Elmo the ginger moggie (the two Bengals, Lady Spittifer and White Boy, remain at home in the comfiest chairs), she collects large pebbles and small stones. Taking them home, she decorates them with gold leaf in a labyrinth design before placing them by running water to be re-found. Her current regime is to work on the beach alone for two hours before a 10am dip in the icy water off St David’s Head with her regular swimming group, the Bluetits. She then dons her Dryrobe and returns home to carry on. A collection of wooden sand timers, measuring from 15 minutes to one hour, nag her to settle down to work: “I fool myself that if I turn two of them, I will get double the work done.” Her son Tom, 26, who lives with her, keeps the hearth stacked with logs (the woodburner is her only source of heat). He used to live in Plymouth, where daughter Hannah, 24, is based, but came back to west Wales: “He says I make life too comfortable for him.”
In quieter moments Jackie says she likes to “watch a good film under a blanket of cats”, but, with a deadline for her next book looming, as well as requests pouring in for her to speak and live-draw at literary festivals, visit schools and tutor on creative writing courses, she can’t afford to let time slip away. So, for now, she’ll be heading back upstairs to the attic to transfer today’s natural wonders onto the page.