Layers of Colour

Angela Barrett has been described as ‘one of the greats – on the Rackham and Shepard level.’ It’s the highest of praise, and comes from one who should know: John Huddy, owner of the Illustration Cupboard, London’s only gallery dedicated to children’s books illustration.

It’s a measure of Barrett’s stature in the field that the gallery devoted its first single artist exhibition to her work.

Atmospheric, dark and intricately detailed, her style is particularly suited to stories from the past: fairy tales, ghost stories, retellings of Shakespeare. She prefers, she says, to illustrate the sort of books she enjoyed when she was a child.

‘One of the earliest was a book of Russian fairy stories illustrated with black and white pictures, which were very dark and full of forests. When I was reading books I was always thinking, “That would make a cracking picture.”

‘But I still had to be shown how to do it. I went on a foundation course thinking I was going to be a painter and was told I should be an illustrator. If I’d been a painter I would have been a figurative painter, and I also liked narrative painting.

‘I loved pre-Raphaelite painting when I was in my late teens, and in a way it’s similar, illustrating books and narrative painting, but with broader themes.’

Huddy is by no means alone in his opinion of Barrett, but despite the acclaim for her work, she is slightly insecure about her skill as a painter. It took her several years to feel confident about using colour, and, initially, she stuck to black and white when she could.

‘I do these quite finished drawings before I begin and I don’t know why I bother because then I obliterate them with paint. I always felt that I was making myself a colouring in book and then colouring in.

'I always felt that I was making myself a colouring in book and then colouring in.'

‘I was doing that until quite recently. I just need that structure to hang it on, like a sculptor’s briquette or something.’

‘The most exciting thing I use is gouache, the most painterly thing. And I use it very timorously. I build things up in layers. I’m absolutely terrified of putting a great wodge of paint down in one go.

‘Building up the areas of darkness that I like so much takes an awful lot of gouache – it’s quite flimsy stuff and takes ages to build up, especially the way I use it. I always get a load on my brush and get a bit scared and dilute it.

‘I’ve often thought perhaps I should have a go at acrylics or oils. But then I think that would call for an alteration in scale, and be such a revolution in my work that I’d need to take some time off to perfect it.

‘You can’t experiment on the job, really, unless you’re pretty confident. But of course while I’m being delicate and timid with this paint, I do like the finish that I get. I do enjoy the layers of different colours, with different colours showing through.’

Although Barrett usually illustrates books with Victorian settings or earlier, she has begun to work on some set in the first half of the 20^th century; she illustrated Josephine Poole’s story of the life of Anne Frank and her latest project is Paul Gallico’s The Snow Goose, written in 1941 and taking place in the years running up to the evacuation of Dunkirk.

It is the story of the relationship that develops between a young girl, Fritha, and Philip Rhayader, a disabled artist living in a lighthouse in the Essex marshes. Fritha seeks Rhayader’s help in nursing an injured snow goose back to health.

Afterwards, the goose returns to the lighthouse each year and Fritha visits along with it, until the war has a dramatic impact upon all of their lives.

Illustrating the book posed a number of challenges for Barrett, not least in depicting Rhayader, who is described by Gallico as ‘ugly’, and whose disability makes others avoid him out of fear or pity.

As Fritha matures, though, she gradually falls in love with him. ‘I think the relationship between Fritha and Rhyader in The Snow Goose is deeply romantic. Paul Gallico’s widow said this relationship has nothing to do with sex, and I thought, well, it hasn’t now, but I’m sure that was the way it was headed if he’d lived.

We had lots of conversations about what he should be like, whether he should be more dirty and unkempt. I couldn’t bear the thought of him being dirty. I see him as the kind of man who goes and bathes in the sea first thing in the morning.’

‘I had to somehow make him both ugly and beautiful. It’s a shift in perception'

‘I had to somehow make him both ugly and beautiful. It’s a shift in perception. Jane Austen mentions it at least twice in her novels: “So and so is not handsome.” “At first I thought him positively plain.”

‘As you learn to like people and love them your perception of their looks changes, so that was a difficult thing to do - to illustrate a change of perception. So I decided to make him really fairly attractive from the beginning. I thought with Rhayader people probably just saw the arm and the hump and didn’t bother to look very hard.’

There was also some discussion about Fritha’s hair and clothing. ‘We had a great debate about her shawl – should she be wearing a shawl? But I felt she wasn’t completely out of her time.

‘It is East Anglia, after all, she’s not living miles away from the centre of life. I thought she would have worn-out clothes, hand-me-down clothes. I spent an awful lot of time looking at people in the 40s and I just had a very strong idea of the kind of things that she’d be wearing and that he’d be wearing.

‘At one point, though, I did see her in a duffle coat and then I realised that a duffle coat wasn’t really worn until after the war. They all had those belted coats which looked quite restricted, and I thought young Fritha would probably have one of those.’

Barrett enjoys the painstaking research that each project requires, and her insistence on historically accurate detail undoubtedly contributes to the authentic period feel of her work.

She likes to visit the physical setting of a book quite a long way in advance of a project, but wasn’t able to get to the Essex marshes until shortly before beginning to illustrate The Snow Goose.

In the end she didn’t go, feeling that seeing the location just before working on the book would hinder her ability to impose her own imagination upon it. In depicting the landscape she relied instead on earlier photos and sketches she had made of the Suffolk marshes.

She admits that she usually finds it difficult to convert specific topographical descriptions into visuals in her mind’s eye, and The Snow Goose was no exception.

‘It’s like when you read a novel and the house is in a westerly position with the hills rising behind it. If you picked it all out and sat down and drew yourself a map presumably it would work because the author has made it work, but it doesn’t really matter.

‘It’s only when you come to illustrate something that all those things bother you, particularly in this book because when you get to the end and she hears the snow goose come back and she runs out of the lighthouse and it says that instinctively she looked towards the land from whence the cry came, not towards the sea because she’d given up by then on the thought of seeing Rhayader come back.

‘I skimmed through it first, and you think: girl looking out to sea. But then you think she’s not looking out to sea, she’s looking out towards where the sun sets, in the west. So I have to pick over that kind of stuff. I read a text again and again.’

Having said that she doesn’t like to experiment on a job, Barrett did just that with The Snow Goose. She decided to use pencil - the medium she usually uses when producing roughs - in order to create a more spontaneous look in keeping with the nature of the text.

‘I’ve done pencil drawings for the black and white parts, and the colour parts are pencil drawings that have been photocopied onto watercolour paper and then coloured in.

‘One of my problems is that people often say, “That’s a lovely drawing you’ve done there”, and then I take it away and work on it until I’ve killed it stone dead. I find it impossible to do anything between total spontaneity and labouring over it endlessly.

‘With these I was trying to be madly spontaneous, but in actual fact I couldn’t be quite as spontaneous as I wanted to be because of the problem of retaining the personality of the characters throughout. That put the kibosh on that.’

When she saw the proofs of The Snow Goose, Barrett was disappointed, feeling that her illustrations looked muted and therefore didn’t have quite the impact she had intended.

'Sometimes you know exactly what a book is going to look like and sometimes it surprises you. And this one surprised me even though I knew what was happening.'

When the finished copies of the book arrived, though, she felt much happier. ‘Sometimes you know exactly what a book is going to look like and sometimes it surprises you. And this one surprised me even though I knew what was happening.

‘I’m much more fond of it than I thought I’d be. You sometimes forget when you’re illustrating something that it’s got a text. You’ve read the text and you’re following the text, but when you’re doing the drawings you put that out of your mind.

‘And sometimes when I’m drawing something I’m trying to get everything into it and I have to remember that I have got a text that’s saying things that I don’t need to say. This is such a fantastic story, so to get the opportunity to hang your drawings on it and to try and express that sort of feeling…

‘It always brings tears to my eyes even though I’ve read it so many times. When she stretches her arms up to the sky and calls out to the spirit of Rhayader, it’s quite heart- stopping. And that’s the way it is with the best of the books that one illustrates.’