A Beloved British Illustrator, at the Beach

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/14/t-magazine/art/quentin-blake-show-roald-dahl-illustration.html

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The small town of Hastings on England’s south coast could keep a vehicle-obsessed child entertained for hours. There’s the Victorian railroad that brought tourists here in the 19th century, bumper cars, carousel horses and swan-shaped paddleboats at the fairground, and funicular railways scaling the cliffs at the town’s edge. On the shingle beach, the town’s colorful fishing fleet waits at low tide, surrounded by lobster pots and net.

The illustrator and cartoonist Sir Quentin Blake, best known for his work with Roald Dahl, has had a house here for some 40 years. He likes the sea: “Different things work for different people,” he says, during preparations for his new exhibition at the town’s Jerwood Gallery. “I have friends who are mountain people, but that doesn’t do it for me at all. For me it’s marshes, the sea: It’s the suggestion of it as much as anything.”

At 84, Blake remains prolific: “I draw quite quickly,” he says. Last year he illustrated a newly discovered Beatrix Potter work, “Kitty-in-Boots,” and he’s just finished work on Roald Dahl’s final book, “Billy and the Minpins,” to be released this fall.

Blake’s new show, “The Only Way to Travel,” is a sizable exhibition of the artist’s private drawings, all new, which are everywhere from postcard- to mural-size. Blake chose the theme of travel both because it allowed him space to fantasize — and because it was universal: something that even the youngest child visiting the gallery could understand. There are joyful, inventive and ridiculous pictures — wild and ramshackle contraptions built of brooms and pram wheels — but there are also what Blake terms “some very gloomy ones.” A series of vehicles fronted with grotesque faces, called “Vehicles of the Mind,” are driven by cheerful figures who seem blissfully unaware that the machines they occupy are suffering an anxiety attack. There are stilted men making their way through a misty marsh, and a figure being carried away by a giant bird: All have a germ of comedy, but, as Blake simply puts it, “they have difficulties.” In a sharp reminder of events beyond Blake’s world of fantasy, here, too, are groups of tired refugees walking in a huddle or clinging to rafts at sea.

Blake talks gleefully about a group of exuberant, wobbly pictures made experimenting with an ink dropper. “I’m not sure what you’re meant to do with it: I think you’re meant to fill your pen,” he says, conspiratorially. “And of course you’re not supposed to do this, but if you squeeze it you get a dotted line, and sometimes you get splodges as well.” The disobedience of the ink amuses him; he merrily confesses that he ruined one of the pictures by picking it up before it was dry.

Part of Blake’s great appeal to children is that he addresses them and adults alike with a combination of engaged delight and seriousness. (In life, his work seems to suggest, not all is play — sometimes things are worrisome, and grown-ups also need space for daydreams and fantasy.) In another recent series, Blake has drawn women at the seaside in the company of strange creatures. “If you were on a beach, you might like a small crocodile to keep you company,” he suggests, earnestly. As well one might. It would make for a fine sight in Hastings.