Bursting with Joy

When the Brian Wildsmith Museum in Japan mounted a touring exhibition of the artist’s work in conjunction with the Tokyo Fuji Museum in 2004, a staggering 1.35 million people came to see it. Yet despite the fact that the British artist is recognised as one of the world’s finest living illustrators, the exhibition at The Illustration Cupboard is the first time Wildsmith’s paintings have been shown in this country.

It’s a reflection of the two countries’ attitudes towards art, he says. “If you go to Japan, everything has its own beauty and value, whether it’s a carpet or a balustrade. It’s art, not ‘this is better than that’. Here, illustration is seen as a secondary artistic endeavour to painting.”

"Here, illustration is seen as a secondary artistic endeavour to painting.”

Born in 1930, Wildsmith won a scholarship to the Slade School of Art, but his working class background coupled with his determination to be true to his own vision set him apart from the artistic establishment of the time. “The object of a teacher is to be perceptive and encourage you. That’s what it’s about. It didn’t happen like that when I was a student. They’d try and make you paint like them. In the beginning at the Slade I was doing a portrait and this lecturer came up. He had a painting at the Tate, and he said, ‘It’s not like that. This is how it is.’ My painting was all full of colour. The essence of a painting or an image is about what comes from inside. That negativity does disturb you and set you back.”

Wildsmith did not have a great deal of interest in the illustrated texts for children that were around at the time.

'There was Ardizzone, who was quite good. I remember he came to the Slade once. They’d sit beside you and look and then go on to someone else.

'And I was doing a drawing and he said,"No, you don’t want it like that, you’ll never make any money! It takes too long. This is how you do it." In four minutes he’d done the drawing - "There: five guineas please".

'I wanted to do something different. Our children are our inheritance and our immortality. A child’s soul is like an empty book in which anything may be written. We must write about love, humour, compassion, truth, understanding and justice. In every one of my books I try and get something about that.'

After graduating from the Slade, Wildsmith taught for a few years, but realised that he would much rather be painting. He hit upon the idea of illustrating book covers and showed some paintings to Mabel George at Oxford University Press.

Within two weeks she had sent him some covers, which led to black and white illustration and then, in 1961, to colour illustrations for Tales from the Arabian Nights. The review in The Times Literary Supplement was so scathing that over 45 years later he can still quote it verbatim: '"We now descend to the lowest depths with Brian Wildsmith’s vicious attack on the Arabian Nights. These pointless scribbles, which do duty for drawing, wander aimlessly about the page."

'I don’t think anyone has ever had a worse review. I was very upset. I thought: this is the end. But when I went to see Mabel she said "We’re the Oxford University Press. We make our own decisions here. What are you going to do next? Have you thought about an ABC?"I hadn’t, actually."Yes," I said. Immediately I had this vision in my head.'

'I use what I call the Mozartian method. Mozart had an idea totally impregnated on his mind. And I work like that. For ABC I didn’t make sketches or anything. I drew straight onto the page and painted on top of that in gouache. The turtle was drawn entirely in paint, without any pencil.'

He makes it sound as though the whole process is effortless, but he hastens to add that although the ideas come almost fully formed, the execution is not so straightforward in every case.

'When I’m painting, there often comes a stage when something isn’t happening right and I have to start again until all the music and all the notes are becoming intertwined and they make what to me is a beautiful image of what I want to present.

'There are quite a few times when you’re doing a book when you start and you make a mess. I’ll spill the water over the whole thing. It happens! It’s not a precise operation at all.

"Unless I fall in love with my paintings I won’t allow them to go to the publishers."

'The main thing is that you end up with what you want to have. Unless I fall in love with my paintings I won’t allow them to go to the publishers.'

Brian Wildsmith’s ABC won the Kate Greenaway Medal in 1962. Passionate, powerful and bursting with colour, the groundbreaking ABC was published when developments in printing were enabling artists to work in full colour for the first time.

British society itself was undergoing changes too; perhaps the TLS critic and the Greenaway committee saw their own ideas about childhood challenged or confirmed in Wildsmith’s work.

'It was the beginning of the cultural revolution: the Beatles, Carnaby Street,' he says. 'It was a wonderful, creative time in England. The ABC was the beginning of the picture book revolution.'

A crop of illustrators still influential today launched their careers around that time, including Raymond Briggs, Jan Pienkowski, John Burningham and Quentin Blake.

Wildsmith acknowledges his good fortune in starting his career in earnest in an era that offered unprecedented scope for illustrators. 'Do you know the story about Napoleon? He wanted a new general. His advisers recommended someone. They said, "This guy is bright, he’s intelligent, he’s good with people, he’s a good planner." Napoleon said, "Yeah, but is he lucky?" And there’s a lot in that.

'I’ve been lucky in that I’ve always been in the right time and moment and my ideas have slotted into that.'

Titles like Jungle Party, Zoo Animals, Fishes, Birds and Animal Gallery and many more attest to the significance of the natural world in Wildsmith’s life and work.

He hopes his books will encourage children to appreciate nature and to treat it with respect. Professor Noah’s Spaceship, from 1980, is an early plea for environmental awareness.

'The animals are all wonderfully happy running in the sunshine. Then they start coughing and they can’t get around. They’re being affected by the terrible climatic conditions. They start helping Professor Noah to build a spaceship.

'Finally they take off. They land on a planet and Professor Noah says they’ve gone back in time. It more or less ends with the elephant saying, this is how our planet used to be, let’s try and keep it that way.'

His desire to encourage children to fulfil their potential as human beings extends to a hope that they be inspired to take an interest in art.

'I want to make them want to paint. Not to copy, but to think: "Look at the way you can do this with paint, look at that."

'And of course children can paint. They have their own way of expressing things.’

‘My old school had the children do their version of my ABC. The museum in Japan arranged with the local school to do the same thing and they were all sent in to the museum and exhibited for a couple of months.

'The difference between the way the British and the Japanese children did it is fascinating. It’s unique. Lovely.'

Today, just as when he was starting out, Wildsmith prefers not to take an active interest in the work of other artists in the field.

'There isn’t anyone who has the same attitude as me. Take the use of discord: in music, if one note is wrong it destroys the whole thing. In art, if you take a red and a green and put them together it’s discordant – it’s disgusting.

'But use a larger area of red and a tiny bud of green and it bursts with joy. That is what it’s all about to me.'