Sir Quentin Blake helped set up the House of Illustration, which opened in 2014. One of the perks of being found is that the third and smallest of the House’s exhibition spaces is a permanent Quentin Blake gallery which is given over to a rotating series of small exhibitions and displays by the great man.
At the moment, the Quentin Blake gallery is hosting the latest iteration of a project titled simply ‘From the studio’.
England’s favourite illustrator (born in 1932 and so now 87 years old) draws every day. In this little, L-shaped room are gathered the early drawings from several of his recent projects.
The mouse on a tricycle
Words cannot really convey how fantastic Blake’s work is. With a few strokes of the pen he creates characters and situations which transport you. Not only that, but almost everything he draws is funny.
Take the adventures of the mouse on a tricycle. That’s just a brilliant idea, but he then submits it to a series of hilarious variations, with the eponymous mouse, a tiny figure on his little trike, being: cheered on by football supporters with rattles and a megaphone; inspiring a flowery poet to song; having his photo taken by the paparazzi; being given a stern telling off by an elderly teacher; being made the subject of a learned disquisition by a science professor to his students accompanied by a barrage of graphs and statistics by a businessman, and so on.
Each one is brilliant. The cumulative effect is genius.
The Mouse on a Tricycle by Quentin Blake
The art of conversation
Just as simple is the idea of ‘the conversation’, which gives rise to a florid variety of different people conversing in wildly different ways, from muttered asides, to arm-waving rants, to jolly chaps with legs crossed in the park, to two people talking over the head of a disgruntled neighbour at a dinner party.
The Art of Conversation by Quentin Blake
In fact both mouse and conversation are part of a series QB has been published called the QB Papers, relatively short, large format paperbacks containing a series of drawings based on a single topic. There is no text and no story, so you are free to browse and free-associate. To date the Art of Conversation and Mouse on a Tricycle have been joined by Constant Readers, Scenes at Twilight, A Comfortable Fit, Free in the Water and so on.
The King of the Golden River
Blake has previously shown some of the illustrations he’s done for a luxury edition of John Ruskin’s 1842 children’s story, The King of the Golden River. This time round he’s showing the coloured versions, and explains that he waited some time after doing the initial drawings, for the correct colouring schemes to come to him.
Illustration for The King of the Golden River by Quentin Blake
The Lost City Challenge
There are drawings done for the Lost City Challenge, which was an instagram campaign organised by Greenpeace, the ‘lost city’ being the vibrant ecosystem surrounding chimney-shaped hydrothermal vents located in the middle of the Atlantic which are under threat from mining companies planning to extract rare earth minerals from the area. Blake contributed a picture of a vibrant oceanic scene and another one showing a lifeless seascape after the drilling has killed everything.
Moonlight travellers
This began as a personal project in 2017, the notion of a group of anonymous people journeying through a moonlit landscape. Slowly they grew into a series of watercolours depicting journeys through unknown landscapes which capture, with vivid immediacy, the mystery and intrigue of the dead of night. This years the series was published accompanied by a prose text by novelist Will Self mediating on the mystery of the moonlight.
Illustrations to Moonlight Travellers by Quentin Blake
There are only twenty or so drawings and watercolours in all, but every single one is a thing of pure delight.
Related links
- Quentin Blake: From the Studio continues at the House of Illustration
Books & Boots 