Quentin Blake at 80: the illustrator's magical art

英國著名插畫家昆丁.布萊克的八十大壽作品展

英國著名插畫家、作家昆丁.布萊克迎來了自己的八十大壽，並打算在倫敦馬爾堡美術館（Marlborough Fine Art Gallery）展出他的新作品。目的並不是為了懷舊，而是去創作一些奇妙的令人深思的新作品。他的作品充滿了獨特的個人風格，以輕松的繪畫線條來表達幽默內涵的寓意，深受喜愛。而他的許多作品也被授予多項獎項，其中就有國際兒童文學的最高獎項“安徒生獎”。這位插畫大師畢業于切爾西藝術與設計學院，通過多年的繪畫經驗的積累，在插畫界，兒童文學界別樹一幟，享譽盛名。

昆丁.布萊克的新作品

Crouching in a bookshop, at small-child height, in front of the picture books, I found myself laughing at familiar scenes. Here is Mrs Armitage in her rickety car, with great weights descending "kerplunk" as she hurtles along: "Bumpers? Who needs them?" Here is Mr Magnolia, with his sisters and parakeets and mice, and rhymes any two-year-old can bellow, "BOOT", "HOOT", "ROOTY-TOOT". Here is Angela Sprocket, with a pocket for everything, even the kitchen sink, and the magical Green Ship, steering into the eye of the storm. All are creations of Quentin Blake. Words come to mind: exuberant, chaotic, comic  joyous.

On a table nearby are books for older children, in which Blake's drawings illuminate other people's texts. He may be benign, but he has a mercurial wit, a cartoonist's eye for the telling gesture, a spiky morality, a gleeful touch of anarchy. He can do smelliness well, such as the matted beard and clouds of stench in David Walliams's Mr Stink. And his long collaboration with Roald Dahl showed that he can do nastiness too: the horrible Twits, the grumpy grandmas and beastly aunts, the frightening Grand High Witch with her evil drool, the gloating red-tongued wolf of Revolting Rhymes. Yet any darkness is filtered by humour. For years now, children have seen these characters as he drew them, from the BFG in his sandals and Willy Wonka in his hat to Matilda with her tower of books.

Blake's scratchy, knobbly, angular style may be immediately recognisable, but he is still a master of the unexpected. Celebrating his 80th birthday on 16 December, he is tetchily pleased that his new exhibition at the Marlborough Fine Art Gallery isn't a retrospective  as if he were a grand old man at the end of his career  but a show of new, intriguing, thought-provoking work. When the gallery invited him to make etchings and lithographs, he grasped the chance, even though  or perhaps because  these were unfamiliar media. Eventually, he produced mysterious etchings of women and birds and jewel-tinted humanoid insects; lithographs of girls with dogs; strange, disembodied heads of women floating in water, like archaic fragments from the depths; bouncing, vividly coloured, nude Sporting Women; and haunting drawings of Companions and Characters in Search of a Story. All the sequences are, he feels, "like illustration pulled inside out". Instead of pictures supporting a text, viewers provide their own narratives. The effect is unsettling, taking us to some edge, a borderland of metamorphosis.

（英文信息來自倫敦藝術大學）