Panel Borders: The art of Brian Wildsmith Podcast

First broadcast on  Resonance 104.4 FM 25/03/10 Alex Fitch talks to Brian Wildsmith on the eve of a retrospective of his work at The Illustration Cupboard in Piccadilly.

Listen to the full podcast here

 

Podcast Transcript

The illustration cupboard in London is doing an exhibition of your work, celebrating both your 80th birthday and new printings by the Oxford University Press. Yes, that's right. So you've basically had your entire career illustrating children's books. Was that something you expected to do when you studied art at the Slade, or had you considered other ways of exhibiting your work as well?

 

No, in all my career, certainly as a student, no one ever mentioned, no professor or teacher ever mentioned how are you going to make a living. No one ever said, well, you know, this is how you're going to make a living. It never came into the question, and certainly not at the Slade. I mean, I was at Barnsley School of Art, and I won a scholarship from there to the Slade School. And again, you know. And of course I didn't do illustration at the Slade. All we did was draw or paint the nude figure. And in my case, I won a scholarship and my scholarship was worth £203 a year. And on that I had to travel, I had to buy boarding and buy my paints and so on. And I couldn't afford paints very much because they were, you know, there's, well like today is still rather expensive. So I spent most of my time drawing. Apart from that, as the British Museum was just down the road in Callow Street from the Slade School, I spent a lot of time looking at the drawings of Michelangelo and Leonardo and Goyer and so on. In those days, you see, you could become a member of the Museum and you were allowed to have the... actual drawings, the original drawings, in your hand to look at them. It's absolutely wonderful. I don't know if it's like that now, of course. But the idea of how to make a living never entered me enough. We didn't do illustration on the slate. And that came later.

 

Did you think that you might have a career as a fine artist then?

 

I was hoping so, but it... It never entered my head. It's very strange. How I became an artist, or decided to do art, I'm still baffled by it. I was good at chemistry and maths, and I was thinking of, I was going to be a chemist. And one day on my way in the sixth form to a physics class, into my head came the word, is this what you want to do for the rest of your life? And the answer was no, I want to be a creater. And even that, even now, because in the grammar school, I mean, the art there was just stupid and ridiculous. All we did was sit in a circle as a class around cubes and triangles and various other objects and draw them. I'd never heard of Michelangelo or Leonardo, or Goyer or Matisse and so on. And... I'm still puzzled by what made me want to do it. Of course, I used to like, I mean, apart from throwing these cubes, I used to throw, you know, airplane battles. It was during the war and warships bombing each other and so on. But the idea of... becoming an artist and of course it was a mining village who becomes or thinks of becoming an artist in a mining village? I'm still puzzled but I'm glad I made the decision obviously.

 

Well in the brief biography in the catalogue that the illustration cupboard has brought out it says that you showed your paintings to an editor at the Oxford University Press and she commissioned you to do your first children's book. How did that meeting come about to start off with?

 

Oh well... First of all, I became, as a way of making a living, after I had to do my national service after the Slade, and I was enrolled in the Royal Army Educational Corps, and I taught mathematics at the Royal Military School of Music, now and all. And after that, I had to think of, I suddenly thought, I've got to make a living. And so... making some fabric designs and I sold a few to Liberty but of course they were I only paid five pounds a time and so I decided I have to become a teacher and I became teacher of art at Selhurst Grammar School and whilst there I read somewhere that 29,000 titles were published every year and I thought oh they'll build the book cover so I thought that the photo the book covers and to let me know and I thought started getting i used to after the school was finished at four o'clock I would get on my Lambretta and rush to London and then I started getting commissions and then they started giving me black and white drawings and during this time I wanted to paint I used to go down to Kent and I painted the Hopfields. Well, it was about 1958. I went to see Oxford University Press, a wonderful woman, Miss Mabel George, who was so shy. I hardly saw her first the first few times I saw her. And I showed her my Hopfield paintings. She didn't say anything about them. She said, we'll be in touch, Mr. Wildsmith. And I thought, oh, is it another don't call us, we'll call you. But after a couple of weeks, she called me in and asked me to do some book covers, which I did. And this went on, and then she gave me some books to illustrate in black and white. And then she said, when I went in one time, she said, would you like to do 12 colour illustrations for the Arabian Nights and I jumped at it, I said I'd love to do it. So I did the 12 illustrations and they were published, 1960, and a review came out from the Times Literary Supplement, it said, "we now descend to the lowest depths of the Arabian Nights by Brian Wildsmith, the vicious attack on these Arabian Nights. these aimless scribbles which to do to the drawings wander aimlessly and pointlessly about the page. This may be art but it certainly isn't illustration" And I thought oh my god this is the end of me. Anyway when I went to see Mabel she said oh Brian don't take any notice of that rubbish. She said we're the Oxford University Press we make our own decisions here. She said it's that review that's made us realise we've got something very different in you. And would you like to think about doing an ABC? Because she had just discovered a wonderful fine art printer in Austria. And she said, what are your ideas about it? So I told her and she said, right, do it. And that was it. A wonderful woman. A wonderful woman.

 

I have to admit that until I started looking at your work I didn't even know that the Oxford University Press did children's books.

 

 Oh yes they did.

 

So was it that they were set up to have an educational bent or to reprint classics or were they always doing kids books that had wider appeal?

 

Well they did a few. I mean they did Edward Artisone and I don't know of the others but he was the famous one. I mean they did a few but it was a section of Oxford University Press. And I have to say, I mean they have been absolutely wonderful to me. They've been my second father and mother. And from there it developed. I mean after the ABC she said, what about some stories from you Brian, doing your own illustrated stories? And I said, oh, Mabel. I said, I was terrible at English. I used to get the lowest marks in the class. And I said, my spelling's terrible. It still is, actually. I don't know where to put the full stops or the commas and all that. I always get it wrong. And in those days, you see, you weren't marked on ideas. You were marked on where you put the full stops and commas. And Mabel said, Brian, she said. We're the Oxford University Press. I have editors with thousands of full stops and commas and question marks in their inkwells. Said it's ideas that count. Tell me about your ideas. And that's how it started. Ideas are the essence of... well the idea is the essence of any children's book. And then how you develop it is up to the person with the idea.

 

And did you ever find it particularly difficult combining text and images on the page, or did it come naturally to you?

 

Oh, no, it came quite naturally. I mean, you have to work within a certain area, and you have to be able to design the picture so that it incorporates, or has an area where you can incorporate the text. No, I didn't find that difficult at all.

 

Looking at the examples of your work in the catalogue, I don't know how indicative they are of your career as a whole, but generally you seem to work in gouache. Is it because that's a medium that reproduces particularly well on the page?

 

Oh yes, I mean, watercolour or gouache. I mean, my paint, I have done other paintings on canvas and so on, but using oil paint, I mean it takes ages to dry and you can't, you know, if you make a mistake it's difficult to obliterate it. But with gouache and watercolour, it's a perfect medium for doing illustrations.

 

Also you've incorporated collage into some of your pictures. So I was wondering if Gustav Klimt was an influence at all?

 

I didn't know about Klimt. Okay. I discovered him later, he's a wonderful painter. But I mean, a kind of... It's been done by most artists, you know. It's a way of... What matters is the image. How you do it is not particularly important. It's the actual result of the image. And of course... when it's been printed you can't even tell that a piece of paper's been stuck on or a piece's been taken away or so on. It's a very, very useful means of producing an image.

 

And in terms of your fine art training, looking at the many images you've done of animals, presumably your background in doing preparatory studies has helped in drawing so many different kinds of wildlife. I mean, do you continue to sketch from real life or have you now built up a big enough collection in your head that you can draw from memory?

 

Yeah, well, yes, I mean, basically, you know, you always draw from memory. You look at it, if you were drawing a nude, you have to look away, and so your memory comes into... place but only for a few seconds of course but in the case of animals which I discovered I mean I didn't know anything about animals when I started I didn't really think about painting them but when I started looking at them and seeing their potential I realised they were absolutely wonderfully beautiful objects and I learnt about them I used to go to the zoo and make drawings but I used to I started collecting photographs of animals, but I didn't want to reproduce them photographically. I wanted to make them look like a tiger, or a leopard, or an elephant, obviously. But I wanted to impose my own feeling about them. and that's what I have always done. And of course, as regards children, animals are very, very attractive. And so by using the animal to tell a story and using the animal to invigorate the child, I mean, I changed them slightly because I wanted them to be, in a way, humorous. I wanted to express what was the feeling of the story. And I mean, they're not photographically exact. And I wanted to inspire the child to invent its own way of doing, shall we say, an animal, or not just an animal, anything. I mean, the point about what I've always wanted to do is inspire a child into producing and... thinking about its own vision of something. I mean, in fact, a talk I gave somewhere in South Africa, I was talking to children about it, and I said... If you want to paint an animal, if you want to paint an elephant red, white and blue, paint it red, white and blue. It's your elephant. You're inventing something which you want to create and want to be, you know, to love doing. So you paint it as you want it because it's your image.

 

And looking at examples of your art without text, it's quite interesting seeing the spaces where obviously you left room to put the text in. But as art in their own right, it's quite interesting seeing the gaps because they add a kind of meditative quality to your work. The absences and then the presences, I think, complement each other very well.

 

Yes, it's all part of the designing and inventive process. you have to make it, you have to make the shape of the image look complete, but then you have to leave an area for the text. I mean, in some cases, in many books, of course, the text is printed over the image, but I always felt that it was better to have an area part of the design, which it's part of the design. and included in it, but it is an area where then you can put the text, and of course it's easier then for the child to read.

 

And you seem to favour landscape images even when you're doing collections of animals on the page, so that it's spread over two pages of a book simultaneously. Is it just that that's a shape that you particularly think suits your work best of all?

 

Well I suppose so, but... I like the double spread page because I can make a bigger, bigger image. But I suppose with all the work I've done, I find it all part of the process of creation, what can I say? I mean, when I first started illustrating books in black and white, you were given an area by the publisher in which to put a black and white drawing and you were given an area like three inches by four and a half and you had to be able to make a drawing that fitted into that area It was all part of the learning process. I was able to make an image to fit into a particular area. You have to think about it before you do it and you do a few little odd scribbles and so on and finally you come up with an answer.

 

I think one thing that's interesting about seeing your work across a double-page spread is that because it's a book that's designed to be read from left to right With some of the books you've used that so that the picture itself tells a story, for example, your rendition of the Easter story. If you look at just the image alone without the text, you can still see a narrative that runs from the left-hand side to the right-hand side of the picture.

 

Yes, that's absolutely right. Oh yes, in the Easter story, when we start the story, Jesus is on a donkey and he's going from the left to the right. Was that something that you thought as you worked more and more in telling stories in picture book format that the art and the text could actually work independently of each other to a certain extent in telling the narrative? Well, the picture tells the story in detail, but you have to, with the text, you have to explain roughly what's going on. I mean... not if it's... The story is based on an idea. You need an idea... Before you do a book, you need an idea, whether it's a story or whether it's a book about letters and so on. The idea comes first, what you want to do, and then... you have to think, well, how can I make this work? As a story, it has to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. I mean, for example, how do you get the image? How do you get the idea? I mean, one book I did, I think some of them are in the exhibition. It was called Jungle Party. And I used to keep, I used to grow in the backyard, I used to grow tomatoes. And one day I was out watering them and I felt a bite in my ankle. And I thought it was a bee, because it was a lovely sunny day. When I got into the kitchen, I looked it in, it was a two-fanged mark. And I had a subtraction syringe when I was able to, I tried that on it, and it threw out all the venom from. It was a snake bike. I'd been bitten by a viper. And I thought, right, I'm gonna do a story about snakes and get my own back on them. And I still thought of the story of Jungle Party. And that made me think about it. But it was the idea that came first, and then I have to work out a story that I want to do using animals that I love around that idea. And that's... story came about.

 

Also in the catalogue is a reproduction of a poster that you did for a Japanese museum in 1978. Yes. And more recently in 1994 there's an entire Japanese museum devoted to your work. How did that connection come about to start off with? When did you find out that the Japanese were huge fans of your art?

 

Well first of all, I mean, it was about 1985. I was doing very well and I decided I'm going to do some different kind of work, which I want to do. I want to do some inventive paintings. And I decided to start making some very large paintings, which were about six feet by five. And I spent five years doing them. And I did 50. took six to London and not one single gallery would come and look at them. But a gallery in New York on Fifth Avenue, the Shilla Wapner Gallery, jumped at them and they exhibited the whole 50. And then they went to San Francisco, the 871 Gallery, and then they went to the Marizan Museum in Tokyo. And after that exhibition, they decided they'd like to exhibit some of my illustrations. And when it was over, a woman came up to me and she said, Mr. Wildsmith, I used to work for Oxford University Press, but she said, I'd like to be your agent and sell your illustrations. So I said, well, I'd be very good, okay. And she said, I'd love to sell them for you, which she did. And then after a while, she said, Brian, you shouldn't sell these illustrations. They need to be kept intact. She was called Michiko Nomura. She said, they have to be kept intact and I'd like to start a museum for them. And so she actually built, she bought an old, old hotel and she spent about four million pounds renovating it all and started the Weill Smith Museum and that's how it developed. Cool. Amazing, an amazing woman and the museum is still there of course and in fact they are coming to Newastle Upon Tyne. Have you heard about the one at Newcastle Upon Tyne? No, no I haven't. Oh, the Book Den at Seven Stories in Newcastle Upon Tyne is a lovely big museum for children and so on. And they are having a three month exhibition of the illustrations from one of my books. They are not showing the originals because they said they were very frightened because the gallery is very, very light and they thought it would disturb them. So they're taking huge blown up works of the books from my, what's it called, animal gallery. Animal gallery, bless you. So it's been shown there for three months. And they're actually flying over for two days just to go and have a look at it. Amazing people, the Japanese, wonderfully dedicated.

 

 Well it would be nice that your work is able to be viewed in that sort of scale in this country if it's only been...

 

Yes, yes, it's wonderful. and honoured by it all.

 

And looking at the development of your style over the last several decades, the work that you did in the 80s and 90s, particularly in the depiction of sort of weird and wonderful vehicles, it became much flatter, the uses of colour, and much more illustrative. I was wondering was that when you started recalling the vehicles that you observed on National Service and wanted to depict some of those in art?

 

Oh yes, yes. Well they're all wonderful things, you know. I mean just about everything has a magic about it. And whether it's an airplane or a motorbike or a building or an animal or a person and so on, if you can somehow get a kind of original vision about it, it's something glorious that you can do. I mean... The whole point that I've said before, what I want to do for children, is to make them take their own ideas and make them into something that they want it to be. And by that idea, you can become creative. And by being creative, you're giving yourself a lot of happiness. It's creativity that's... Wonderful. I mean, it's vision and so on. It's what's lacking in a lot of our modern world, not in science and so on, but in, I mean, I think of our politicians. They don't seem to have much vision about the future and what things can be. It's what it's basically all about. One of the reasons that I wanted before, to do is that our children are our inheritance and our immortality. They are the building blocks of our civilisation, but we are inclined sometimes to forget this important and crucial fact. It's important to remember that at conception, a child's soul is like an empty book in which anything may be written. It is capable of all things that contains nothing. We must therefore write in that empty book about love, humor. compassion, truth, understanding and justice. Profitable wonders that will determine how the child will develop in order to ensure a happier and a more peaceful world. There it is in a nutshell.