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Quentin Blake - Painting diverse subjects (61/65)

424 views · Published 13 July 2017 · 2:12 · Indexed 21 September 2026

Channel: Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People · 2017 · Entertainment

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British illustrator Quentin Blake was born in 1932. He had his first work published by 'Punch' magazine at the age of 16. Since then, he has illustrated books by a variety of different authors, most famously many by Roald Dahl. [Listener: Ghislaine Kenyon; date recorded: 2006]

TRANSCRIPT: As I said I've done illustration for… for any age group, as it were. And… I've also done quite a lot of painting which, again, is… is not for children and… almost might not be for anybody. I've… I’ve exhibited it at one time or another. I started doing it when, I suppose, when… after I'd been at Chelsea Art School [sic] where I used to go to life classes. That's what I went there for, just to draw from life because I realised I didn't know how people moved and how their balance worked and that… things of that nature. Not so much quite anatomy as… as just drawing from… from the human form. And while I was… a lot of what I was doing when I was starting off trying to make a living was quite small black and white drawings for Punch and for other magazines. And… I lived in a sort of… or I had a room which was a, kind of, ground floor room in north London and that's where I started doing paintings. And they were kinds of continuations of… of this life room experience, I think. But they were done in… in… with big brushes, I mean house painting brushes actually, you know, and with… in bright colours and a lot of them had very, sort of, black backgrounds. And so the women depicted in them, as it were, models, were… were… you couldn't see their faces either, you know. They… they were sort of… they were about mood and atmosphere and things of that kind and also about making arm gestures rather than gestures which come from the wrist, kind of thing. So they were… that was, that was like a sort of… not a secret life, but I mean another life. There didn't seem to be any overlap at all and I was either doing one or the other. Gradually I got to work in colour in books and jackets for magazines and things.

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