‘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. Blake’s watercolours are slightly scruffier, not quite in focus, the characters drawn with a quill (rather than a pen) because ‘it’s unreliable, slightly uncontrollable’, and using a palette that’s quieter, more subdued. It’s as if he is offering the patients a way back in to normality, to an understanding that eating is part of life, by drawing young women in relaxed, everyday settings, sharing a picnic, stroking not one but two cats, looking at clothes in a street market. They have thin faces, long necks, are downcast and unsmiling, but they’re never alone; they’re in life rather than outside it.
‘Quentin Blake: As Large as Life’ is at the Foundling Museum until 15 April, and afterwards tours to the Paisley Museum, Laing Art Gallery and Kirkby Gallery.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in