Authorgraph No.16: Brian Wildsmith
First and foremost Brian Wildsmith is a painter. But he also sees himself as an educator in the most fundamental sense of the word. Behind his many books for children is an impulse to develop in those who encounter them a perceptiveness and an awareness about themselves and the world they inhabit which will help them to become more complete people. For all his humour he is essentially a serious and thoughtful man and this view of himself and his work is deep rooted and well-considered.
There was a time when he seemed to be going in quite a different direction. Born in a South Yorkshire mining village he won a scholarship to Barnsley Grammar School and was doing science in the sixth, form. `I was going to be a chemist. Then one morning I was going into a physics class and I remember thinking “Is this really what I want to do with my life?” And the answer was no. I want to create.’ He left that day. `It was a very significant moment in my life – almost a revelation. I’ve never regretted it!’
How did his family react? ‘My mother was marvellous. My father was sceptical; but they were both very supportive. It was a case of whatever our Brian wants to do it’s all right.’ In a Yorkshire mining village being a painter must have seemed an odd thing to do `Yes, but I didn’t care. I went at it with tremendous energy and with no thoughts for anything else – except playing cricket.’
He went to Barnsley School of Art. ‘I had done nothing that would give any indication that I had any talent but they’d take anyone in those days.’ After three years, in 1949, he won a scholarship to the Slade School of Fine Art and `existed on a grant of £203 a year. `I thought I was rich. All I wanted to do was paint. I still do.’
After the Slade came National Service. `They put me in the Royal Artillery. I thought, I’m not cannon fodder.’ So with an effrontery born of logic which is not uncharacteristic Brian Wildsmith marched off to the War Office to find out what they thought they were doing. ‘They said, “All right you can go into Education.” So I ended up teaching Maths at the Military School of Music. When he came out jobs were difficult to find. He applied to be Art Master at Selhurst Grammar. `There were forty others in for it. I got it not because I was an artist but because I could play cricket and play the piano. I coached the second XI and played in Assembly.’
After three years he knew his heart was elsewhere. `My wife said, “Why don’t you do what you want to do? Be a freelance painter.” The only problem with that is how to survive while you are doing it.’ The answer was book jackets. ‘I thought with 29,000 new titles every year there’s got to be a few for our Bri.’ So after school he started to take his work around. His first commission was from Michael Joseph. Trained in Fine Art he knew nothing about printing or publishing but found the luck that sometimes comes to the innocent, the talented and the persistent. ‘The Art Director said, “We want a three colour separated book jacket.
Can you do that?” “0h…. yes,” I said. So he explained it all. “And bleeds too.” I’d never heard of bleeds, but he told me – as if. of course, I already knew.’
That was the beginning of Brian Wildsmith freelance artist. For three years they lived on book jackets at £10 a time. ‘But no-one offered me books to illustrate.’ Not that is until the day he went to show his work to yet another art editor and found a man wearing no tie, no jacket and no shoes, his feet on the desk dictating to another man with a bowler hat and a rolled umbrella. ‘He said, “Do you mind if I shave?” Looked at my work with his face covered in soap and said, “You’re not bad.” I did my first illustrations for him. Twenty-eight black and white drawings for a travel book.’
Then came the most significant meeting of his career – with Mabel George at Oxford, University Press. `She had just taken over the children’s department. She was very shy but she had a will of iron.’. This was the lady who was to be the midwife to the birth of the new approach to picture books which revolutionised children’s publishing in the sixties. She asked him to do the black and white drawings for Rene Guillot’s Prince of the Jungle. It was a significant moment. `I felt this book was somehow make or break. I knew I had to succeed. My wife was having our first child. I had to produce something different for me and for Oxford. As it turned out it showed me my future and I’m still proud of some of the pictures.’
Two years later in 1959 Mabel George uttered the fateful words, “Have you ever thought about doing an ABC, Brian?” `I didn’t know it then but Oxford had already decided to start on a big picture book programme and they were looking for an artist to carry it out. Mabel had picked me but she knew I didn’t know anything about books so she’d been grooming me for three years. The first full colour book I did was an Arabian Nights. It got terrible reviews. The TES was particularly scathing. Mabel said, “When I read that I knew I’d got the right person.
Oxford in fact were leading the way and it was Brian Wildsmith’s ABC, published in 1962, which started everything going. `I’d just begun to formulate what it was I wanted to do for children. I like there to be an inherent logic to everything I do. The logical function of an ABC is to teach. To teach how? Through basic shapes, colours and textures. It was a new concept: to produce pictures of value in their own right which would stimulate and excite children. And I wanted a new design. Most ABCs say “A is for apple”. A is not for apple. A is for A. I wanted this book to say that.’
It was, of course, a huge success. The strong shapes and colours, completely new to books for young children, certainly made an impact. It won the Kate Greenaway Award and is still in print, (in the USA in it’s 19th edition).
What next? `Well Mabel was idealistic, but she was also realistic. She said, “The key to all this is co-editions.” We needed an established author and text for me to illustrate so we could bring in foreign publishers and build up a clientele for our work. So she sent me off to do La Fontaine’s fables.’
The Wildsmith clientele grew and his name became so well-established that eventually he could offer his own storyline. `My ideas about children’s books fell into place. I want to cover the whole educational experience of the child through humour, colour, shape, form, words and pictures together, to deal with human experience. Hunter and his Dog is about compassion, Professor Noah’s Spaceship is about the environment. I have a conscious moral impulse, but not to preach, rather to show the fundamentals that make for a better world.’
Ten years ago, about the time he started writing his own stories, the Wildsmith family moved to France, to Provence where they live today. `My wife is half French and I’d always wanted to live there. And I needed a change. By nature an artist has to be insecure; it makes you keep reaching and striving. We had a nice house, everything was going very nicely. I had to put myself in a position of insecurity.’ The four Wildsmith children were thrown in at the deep end, sent to French schools. They seem to have thrived on it and certainly their father thinks more highly of the French educational system than the English. Did the children have any influence on the books? `When they were younger they used to dash home every day to see what I’d done. If they just looked and went off I knew there was something wrong. I might have done a good painting but it wasn’t a good painting for children. So I’d do it again. You have to make contact with the child; that’s the necessary spark in illustration for children.’
Life in France clearly suits Brian Wildsmith. `It’s tranquil, quiet. I can do my books and paint. The weather is good.’ He feels more at home in the cultural climate than he does in England too. `If I say, “I’m a painter” in England people think “What’s up with him?” In France they just accept it.’
He works at a desk on the gallery that runs all round the living room. (The piano his other passion – is on the other side.) `The first studio I had in England was a hut in the garden. I did Mother Goose there. But I didn’t like being cut off. I’d rather work on the kitchen table. At home now I’m isolated – you have to be – but I’m in the middle of the house so I’m not lonely.’ His day starts at 11.00, `after four cups of coffee’, and he works until lunch, at two, `on the terrace with half a bottle of wine’. Then work again until dinner at 7.30. `I always leave a piece of work in a state where I want to go back to it.’ For books he works on paper in the same size as the finished product. `That’s Mabel’s training. She started by giving me a page with the text and I’d do my drawing round it.’ But recently he’s started to do really big paintings. `Every time I go back to one I’m amazed at my own effrontery. I can’t believe it’s me that’s done it.’
The latest Wildsmith book Pelican is rich in references to the landscape and buildings of Provence. It has split pages, a new departure in storytelling and book design for him. `You have to design it like a motor car, it has to do the job properly.’ He is obviously pleased with the way he has solved the technical problems of the book but it is the paintings that are the important thing, the visual language. `The storyline has to come first but I use words merely as a connecting thread on which to string the images. The real message in my books is not literary – it cannot be said or put into words. In one sense Pelican is about the pain of growing up. Whatever the pelican does it’s wrong. In a way I’m having a little knock at education: all the pelican needed was to be shown exactly, precisely and kindly how to do something. Its problem was that it didn’t understand what people said to it. They keep saying you must go and fish – and it doesn’t know what: that means. When it learns, it is time to go away and find its own life.’ But there’s more in the pictures than that storyline. In one double spread the child goes out into a moonlit night. `Many children are terrified of night. In fact it’s a time of incredible beauty. The recognisable world changes and it’s full of colour and subtlety – not menace. Beauty and mystery make you think. To acknowledge a mystery is to think about the universe, about what is happening to you. All that can’t be put into words. I hope my painting does that for a child.’
It is here that the artist and the educator come together in Brian Wildsmith. `If you can make a child aware and perceptive you have liberated it’s mind. As a person that child can never become subjected to another individual or state. Whatever happens that person is free. It is in the mind that we live.’
A selection of Brian Wildsmith’s books from Oxford University Press
Mother Goose 0 19 279611 9, £4.95 (hbk)
The Rich Man and the Shoemaker 0 19 279612 7, £3.95 (hbk) and 19 272104 6, £1.25 (pbk)
The Little Wood Duck 19 279686 0, £3.95 (hbk) and 19 272101 1, £1.25 (pbk)
The Circus 0 19 272102 X £1.25 (pbk)
Hunter and his Dog 0 19 279725 5, £3.95 (hbk)
Squirrels 19 272105 4, £1.25 (pbk)
Wild Animals 0 19 272103 8, £1.25 (pbk)
ABC 19 272122 4, £2.50 (pbk)
123 19 272116 X, £1.50 (pbk)
Birds 19 272117 8, £1.50 (pbk)
The Miller, the Boy and the Donkey 0 19 272114 3, £1.50 (pbk)
The Twelve Days of Christmas 19 272115 1, £1.50 (pbk)
Seasons, 0 19 279780 1
Animal Homes, 0 19 279732 8
Animal Shapes, 0 19 279733 6
Animal Games, 0 19 279731 X
Animal Tricks, 0 19 279743 3 £1.95 each
Professor Noah’s Spaceship 19 279741 7, £3.95 (hbk)
Cat on the Mat 19 272123 2, 95p (pbk)
The Trunk 0 19 272124 0, 95p (pbk)
Pelican 19 279764 6, £4.95 (hbk)
