Watching Quentin Blake at work drawing a character, his eyes widen and he pulls faces. It can look comical, but clearly he is utterly absorbed. That’s because the master illustrator is not just thinking about his creation – he’s acting it.
‘If it’s a dog, if it’s an old-aged pensioner, I’m trying to be them as well,’ explains Quentin, who’s best known for his 18-book collaboration with Roald Dahl.
‘Sometimes people say, “You seem to understand children very well,” and I say, “Well, I don’t, of course. I’ve never been married. I’ve never had any children.” It’s not a question of knowing about children, but you be them.
‘I actually kind of mime them when I’m drawing them. I’ve been told I make the faces of the people in the pictures, so it is like a kind of acting.’
Quentin Blake (pictured), from London, discusses his career while filling a 30st canvas with moments from his life in a new BBC2 documentary
Sir Quentin Blake is arguably the most beloved British illustrator, whose scrawly, often joyful, drawings have brought to life the books of Dahl, Michael Rosen, David Walliams and others.
Both Rosen and Walliams sing his praises in Quentin Blake: The Drawing Of My Life, a new BBC2 documentary in which Quentin discusses his career while filling a 30ft canvas with illustrations of seminal moments in his life. Despite approaching his tenth decade, his mind is as lively and his brushstrokes as vigorous as ever.
David Walliams says that if it weren’t for Blake agreeing to illustrate his first book, 2008’s The Boy In The Dress, he would not have become a successful children’s author. ‘With my first book, I just had an idea for a story,’ he recalls.
‘I found the publishers and they said, “Who would you like to illustrate it?” And I said, “The dream is Quentin Blake, but he’s never going to do it.” Then, when he wanted to do it, I was over the moon.’
Quentin had felt a connection to David’s young hero Dennis. ‘The fundamental collaboration is the collaboration with the words, the collaboration with the story, and with this it was all there in the book,’ he says.
‘Somehow it revived my own sense of what it was like being a schoolboy.’ David recalls how moved he was when he saw Quentin’s version of Dennis. ‘I had tears in my eyes because I couldn’t believe just how sympathetic he’d made the character.’
Quentin said he doesn’t regret reading English at Cambridge because learning to read books has had a lot to do with what he’s done since. Pictured: Quentin with his drawings of the BFG (left) and Mrs Armitage
Astonishingly, Quentin never went to art college. Growing up in the London suburbs he loved drawing and had his first illustration published in Punch as a teen in 1949, before reading English at Cambridge.
‘I don’t regret that because learning to read books has a lot to do with what I’ve done ever since,’ he explains. ‘What I did do was go to life drawing classes a couple of times a week.’
Blake developed his own style by drawing the same subject from memory over and over again. ‘The observation that I did in life classes for two years seems to have lasted me,’ he says.
‘I never look at something I need to draw, I just feel I know what happens. It may not be anatomically perfect, but it just comes out of the imagination or the old, unconscious observations of the past.’
Blake has gone on to write and illustrate his own books, including Mister Magnolia and the Mrs Armitage stories. He’s also created murals for hospitals and clinics that bring cheer to patients.
Quentin is having his legacy cemented with a new £8m Quentin Blake Centre For Illustration in north London as well as the documentary. Pictured: An illustration for Roald Dahl’s Matilda
But he remains best known for breathing life into the darkly comic characters created by Roald Dahl in a collaboration that began in 1977 and lasted until Dahl died in 1990. Dahl had a reputation for being irascible, but Quentin says they got on like a house on fire, bonding over wine-fuelled dinners at Dahl’s Buckinghamshire house.
‘In certain situations I think Roald could be difficult, but we got on very well,’ says Quentin. ‘Roald is a very different sort of person from me and that was good, I think, because if you’re a double act you don’t want to be two versions of the same person. There is that contrast and tension almost.’
This documentary – the first devoted to Quentin – should cement his legacy. As will the new £8m Quentin Blake Centre For Illustration, which will open in north London next year and house Blake’s archive of 40,000 pieces of work which have mesmerised readers for seven decades.
‘I like to think of books taking people away, not just to places but to experience how others feel and live and react,’ says Blake. ‘It’s about how to live more.’
Quentin Blake: The Drawing Of My Life will air later this month on BBC2.