‘It’s like acting,’ says the illustrator Quentin Blake about his latest project. ‘You imagine yourself there, in that situation. You imagine you are that person.’ The first-ever children’s laureate has been taking his acute eye for gesture, for character, into hospitals, as part of the Nightingale Project. His funny, colourful, bursting-with-life paintings are now decorating the walls of a mental health ward at Northwick Park, the Vincent Square Clinic and a maternity hospital in France, and are being celebrated in an exhibition at the Foundling Museum (40 Brunswick Square, London WC1). They reflect so accurately the experience of illness, parenting, age and infirmity that Blake has been asked, ‘How do you know that? You’re not a woman, you’re not a mother, you’re not even a parent!’
At Vincent Square the patients all suffer from eating disorders.
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