Quentin Blake New drawings and prints
Š Linda Kitson 2012
12 December 2012-11 January 2013
Marlborough Fine Art 6 Albemarle Street London W1S 4BY t: +44 (0) 20 7629 5161 f: +44 (0) 20 7629 6338 e: mfa@marlboroughfineart.com e: info@marlboroughgraphics.com www.marlboroughfineart.com Closed for Christmas 24 December 2012 – 2 January 2013
Introduction by Jenny Uglow
In the past decade Quentin Blake’s art has moved off the page, away from illustrations for the private reader into public spaces, on to walls and beyond, growing into banners and even exuberant drawings five storeys high, wrapped around the scaffolding to greet passengers at St Pancras. It is then, entirely typical that the current exhibition is not a retrospective, as might be expected of a more decorous artist in his eightieth year, but an exciting and surprising display of new work, in unexpected forms. When the Marlborough gallery invited Blake to produce a set of etchings and lithographs he grasped the opportunity even though, or perhaps because, these were unfamiliar media. As he explains in his book Beyond the Page, ‘I had tried my hand at lithography with more enthusiasm than success, but I remember only one etching, a plump nude in mid-pole-vault.’ (Perhaps a forebear of the colourful Big Healthy Girls?). Eventually he produced two sets of etchings – of women and birds in black and white with aquatint, and brilliantly tinted humanoid insects – as well as lithographs of girls with dogs, scenes of age and youth, women and water, and haunting drawings of companions and characters in search of a story. That last title could apply to the whole exhibition, for all the sequences are, he feels, ‘like illustration pulled inside out’. Instead of being at the service of a text, they demand, insistently, that we provide our own narratives. Deep connections flow between apparently disparate works. The effect is unsettling, taking us to some edge, a borderland of transformation. Liberty and border-crossing are inherent in Blake’s working methods. For his illustrations, he redraws pencil sketches in ink, not as copies but transcriptions into another form. He relishes ancient, unpredictable tools: the random scratches of the quill pen, the fluid sweeps of the inked bamboo stick.
‘You get a more adventurous feel from a scratch pen’, he says, remembering how a woman in France sent him a feather from a vulture’s wing, that he sharpened into a quill: ‘It was rather splendid’. When he applies colour, he does not mind if it escapes the lines. Escape is the essence. His people and creatures look as if they are about to leap off the paper into another dimension. Noses point, arms flap, legs twist at impossible angles. In Mrs Armitage Queen of the Road his heroine’s scarf blows in the wind, to impart the feeling of movement, the breath of air. This joy in movement appears here in the startling Big Healthy Girls, their ungainly outlines ablaze with bands of colour, the pyrotechnics of the giant water-soluble pencil. Amazonian beings balance on tiny feet, exercising with gusto, spreading arms and broad thighs, with a pale sun and a line of horizon to place them out of doors. They may be hurling javelins or catching balls, but the suggestion is that they are far from expert – they are simply young, big, sexy creatures, leaping, and bounding, their breasts pointing forwards, their hair streaming behind. They conjure something. The big healthy girls have a comedic, joyful air. Catching them unawares – something primitive or forgotten, from an earlier world – the artist is like Actaeon, spying on Diana, goddess of the hunt. With the women in water, the feeling of trespass on a private moment is even more acute. Once again, Blake uses water-soluble pencil, this time thinner, more ‘difficult’. His characteristic improvisation is muted; the mood is mysterious. All we see are heads, floating in a marshy pond among primitive plant- shapes. We may think of Millais’ Ophelia, but all literary reference is stripped away. We do not know if they are standing or swimming or drowning, and the focus on the face draws us in to ask what thoughts or dreams may lie behind the mask. We are given no clue. Even the scale is
messengers from an aerial world. ‘I find it hard to keep birds out of my work’, he has said, and in these etchings a simplicity of line imparts a feeling of folk-tale or myth – the nightingale in the Arabian Nights; the Slavic fire-bird; the Australian rainbow-bird who tricks the crocodile into sharing fire with the beasts.
Women in Water 5
uncertain – are these ‘ordinary’ women, or huge, archaic heads, half-submerged for centuries? The watery women are echoes, or reversals, of Blake’s pictures for a maternity hospital in Angers, where his use of a swimming theme, with rococo swirls of seaweed, was celebratory. It was not merely a reminder of the amniotic fluid or the way that new-born babies swim naturally, but a mode of movement and freedom, conveying the feeling, while in labour, that ‘something is just around the corner’. And if water is the basic element of life, it is also an image of the creative imagination, where ideas can swim and grow. Blake himself confesses that he is sometimes surprised by what emerges as he draws. ‘If I try to think about it,‘ he says, ‘there seem sometimes to have been periods of a sort of absentmindedness when ideas think of themselves.’ The creative element defies gravity, in all senses, and Blake’s mothers and babies seem to fly as much as swim. The lure of flight is present here in the tender etchings of women with birds,
The women are alone with their birds, and their secrets. The poet and children’s writer Michael Rosen notes ‘there is a theme running through much of Quentin Blake’s work of isolated people (we don’t usually know if they’re lonely), going about some kind of slightly fantastical matter of sorting things out – Mr Magnolia, Cockatoos, Mrs Armitage...‘. They are, more often than not, a single child’s dilemma blown up big.’ With his sensitivity, and off-beat humour, he has understandably been commissioned to provide works for hospitals and health centres: over the past few years these have included jubilant images of cavorting pensioners for a residential ward for the elderly; colourful, teetering circus folk for a mental health ward; simple scenes of walking in the rain or feeding the birds for patients with eating disorders, the balm of the ordinary. For children and young people he created Planet Zog where stalk-eyed creatures stick out spotty tongues as consultants scribble notes. None of this is solemnly therapeutic, but rather, he says, a way of showing people ‘in strange situations which they are more or less coping with.’ We all ‘more or less cope’. But if the hospital pictures offer consolation, here that function is withdrawn. The drawings of companions and characters in search of a story are ruthless in their scrutiny. The couples sit together, their relationship close yet enigmatic. Often there is a gulf between them. We can’t help wondering what links them: are they sisters, father and son, mother and daughter, strangers forced together for a moment? Some clutch small objects: a purse, a pair of glasses,
a piece of paper. Exposed and anxious, they are unsmiling, and sometimes downright hostile. If one looks closely, they often appear to hold pencils as if they would like to take over the artist’s task, a theme continued in the lithographs of girls with dogs. Again we are in some elemental place, perhaps sand-dunes, with empty buildings behind. The huge, shaggy dogs bare their teeth yet seem to listen, as animals often do, to the girls’ anxieties, reminding one of Hogarth’s pug in his self-portrait, at once the sensual animal self and the witness of his trials. The girls keep trying to draw something, laying the paper on the sand, showing their efforts to the hounds. In Blake’s own words, they ‘are making drawings they don’t seem to be very satisfied with. I think they seem to offer some suggestion of story or metaphor which is an aspect of them I value without feeling the need to attempt any sort of definition.’ We can take up the ‘suggestion of story’, but we can’t miss the struggle to make art. Blake’s first independent book, Patrick, showed how art – in that case music – could turn dull, monochrome lives into vibrant colour. In the current show, this idea recurs in the pairs of shimmering youth and grizzled age, where the pen and ink scumbles the watercolour like wrinkles on a face. We know that these golden lads and girls all must, ‘like chimney sweepers come to dust’, but for the moment they glow lazily, as resigned models or listeners (where old and young read side by side, you know they are reading different books). By contrast, it is the old who are the artists. The women draw intently, the old man plays the violin so fast that his hair stands on end. The consolation of art does not fade. Comedy and compassion return here, and in the playful etchings of insects. Following the old tradition of the bee-hive or ant colony as models of society, Blake invents sociable
Companions 8
creatures, their antennae twitching for gossip. Dressed to the nines, they go shopping, brandish parasols and find their many arms useful for multi-tasking. Some care for nervous youngsters and some have seen better days, like the old insect-lady walking home in the sunset with her heavy bag. We share the joke. We laugh at this not entirely alien world. Like the lonely people, the big healthy girls, and the floating heads, the insects share the elliptical, magical quality of Quentin Blake’s art – as we endow them with stories we leap from the real into a strange, transformative realm. Jenny Uglow 2012 Jenny Uglow is a biographer and critic, whose books include acclaimed lives of William Hogarth and Thomas Bewick, and also Words and Pictures: Writers, Artists, and a Peculiarly British Tradition.
Drawings Women in Water 1-6, 2012 Stabilo watercolour pastels on cartridge paper 300 x 420 cm
Old and Young 1-8, 2009 -2012 Pen and ink and watercolour on Arches watercolour paper Old and Young 1-4 385 x 570 cm Old and Young 5 490 x 375 cm Old and Young 6 375 x 470 cm Old and Young 7 375 x 515 cm Old and Young 8 570 x 520 cm
Big Healthy Girls 1-12, 2011-2012 Stabilo watercolour pastels in wood on Arches watercolour paper 570 x 760 cm
Companions 1-12, 2011-2012 Black chinagraph marker on Arches watercolour paper 570 x 765 cm
Characters in search of a Story 1-12, 2011-2012 Black chinagraph marker on Arches watercolour paper 570 x 765 cm
Women in Water 1
Women in Water 2
Women in Water 3
Women in Water 4
Women in Water 5
Women in Water 6
Old and Young 1
Old and Young 2
Old and Young 3
Old and Young 4
Old and Young 5
Old and Young 6
Old and Young 8
Old and Young 7
Big Healthy Girls 1
Big Healthy Girls 2
Big Healthy Girls 3
Big Healthy Girls 4
Big Healthy Girls 5
Big Healthy Girls 6
Big Healthy Girls 7
Big Healthy Girls 8
Big Healthy Girls 9
Big Healthy Girls 10
Big Healthy Girls 11
Big Healthy Girls 12
Companions 1
Companions 2
Companions 3
Companions 4
Companions 5
Companions 6
Companions 7
Companions 8
Companions 9
Companions 10
Companions 11
Companions 12
Characters in search of a Story 1
Characters in search of a Story 2
Characters in search of a Story 3
Characters in search of a Story 4
Characters in search of a Story 5
Characters in search of a Story 6
Characters in search of a Story 7
Characters in search of a Story 8
Characters in search of a Story 9
Characters in search of a Story 10
Characters in search of a Story 11
Characters in search of a Story 12
Prints Insects 1- 6, 2012 Etching and aquatint Plate size 19.5 x 15.5 cm Paper size 35 x 31 cm Edition of 30 Proofed and printed at Paupers Press, London
Women with Birds 1-5, 2012 Etching and aquatint Plate size 19.5 x 15.5 cm Paper size 35 x 31 cm Edition of 30 Proofed and printed at Paupers Press, London
Girls and Dogs 1- 4, 2012 Lithographs Edition of 35 Paper size 55 x 75.5 cm Proofed and printed at Paupers Press, London
Insects 1
Insects 2
Insects 3 Insects 4
Insects 5 Insects 4
Women with Birds 1 Women with Birds 2
Women with Birds 3 Women with Birds 4
Women with Birds 5
Girls and Dogs 1
Girls and Dogs 2
Girls and Dogs 3
Girls and Dogs 4
Biography Quentin Blake was born in 1932. He studied English at Downing College, Cambridge and subsequently attended life-classes at Chelsea Art School. He taught for over twenty years at the Royal College of Art, where he was head of the illustration department from 1978 to 1986. He is known for his collaborations with writers such as Roald Dahl, Russell Hoban, Joan Aiken, Michael Rosen and John Yeoman. He has also illustrated his own books and classics such as Don Quixote and Candide. Since the 1990s Quentin Blake has had an additional career as curator, curating exhibitions in the National Gallery, the British Library and the MusÊe du Petit Palais in Paris. He has also made large-scale work for hospitals and healthcare settings in the UK and France and most recently has completed a scheme for the whole of a new maternity hospital in Angers. He is a CBE and officer de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres; RDI; and honorary fellow of the Royal Academy and an honorary Doctor of the Royal College of Art; the University of the Arts London; Cambridge University; and other universities. He lives and works in London, Hastings and South-West France.
Marlborough London
Madrid
Marlborough Fine Art (London) Ltd 6 Albemarle Street London, W1S 4BY Telephone: +44-(0)20-7629 5161 Telefax: +44-(0)20-7629 6338 mfa@marlboroughfineart.com info@marlboroughgraphics.com www.marlboroughfineart.com
GalerĂa Marlborough SA Orfila 5 28010 Madrid Telephone: +34-91-319 1414 Telefax: +34-91-308 4345 info@galeriamarlborough.com www.galeriamarlborough.com
Marlborough Contemporary 6 Albemarle Street London, W1S 4BY Telephone: +44-(0)20-7629 5161 Telefax: +44-(0)20-7629 6338 info@marlboroughcontemporary.com www.marlboroughcontemporary.com
Marlborough Barcelona Valencia, 284, lr 2a A Barcelona, 08007 Telephone: +34-93-467 4454 Telefax: +34-93-467 4451 infobarcelona@galeriamarlborough.com
New York Marlborough Gallery Inc. 40 West 57th Street New York, N.Y. 10019 Telephone: +1-212-541 4900 Telefax: +1-212-541 4948 mny@marlboroughgallery.com www.marlboroughgallery.com
Barcelona
Monte Carlo Marlborough Monaco 4 Quai Antoine ler MC 98000 Monaco Telephone: +377-9770 2550 Telefax: +377-9770 2559 art@marlborough-monaco.com www.marlborough-monaco.com
Santiago Marlborough Chelsea 545 West 25th Street New York, N.Y. 10001 Telephone: +1-212-463 8634 Telefax: +1-212-463 9658 chelsea@marlboroughgallery.com
GalerĂa A.M.S. Marlborough Avenida Nueva Costanera 3723 Vitacura, Santiago, Chile Telephone: +56-2-799 3180 Telefax: +56-2-799 3181 info@amsgaleria.cl www.amsgaleria.cl
The artist would like to express his grateful thanks to Claudia Zeff, the perfect impresario.
Cover image: Quentin Blake, Girls and Dogs 4, 2012 Design: Shine Design, London Print: Impress Print Services Ltd. ISBN 978-1-904372-89-9 Catalogue no. 662 Š 2012 Marlborough