A Life in Pictures

Michael Foreman’s book A Life in Pictures gets off to an explosive start. It’s a life that was almost over before it had properly started.

It was 1941 and he was three when a bomb fell on the house where he lived with his brothers and his widowed mother, who ran the village
shop. The bomb crashed into the bedroom (missing Foreman by inches), ricocheted around the room and exploded in flames up the chimney.

His mum grabbed him and they all raced out of the house to the Anderson shelter. He describes the way his chin bumped up and
down on his mum’s shoulder as she ran, ‘making the sky bounce’. Illustrations here from his book War Boy include an explanatory diagram of the bomb’s trajectory, in contrast to an atmospheric watercolour that shows the family running for safety. We learn a lot about the wartime
village community and the shop, both from Foreman’s memories, and his extraordinarily vivid illustrations.

Even as a child, Foreman had a passion for drawing, Art materials were scarce, but luckily he was allowed to draw on the copious sheets
of plain paper that lined the shop’s biscuit tins. And while delivering newspapers for his mum’s shop, he met one of the customers, an artist
who invited him to join a free Saturday art class. This involved sketching out of doors – a real turning point for Foreman, whose approach to drawing changed radically when he began to draw from observation, rather than relying on his imagination.

At 15 he went to the local art school. Writing about his first day in the drawing studio, along with the other, older students, ‘a lady came in
and took off all her clothes. I stood behind an easel in the far corner and sharpened my pencil. It kept breaking.’ ‘I was fortunate’, he writes, ‘to go to an old time traditional Art School. It was small and provincial. We were told to draw the world around us… over and over… we didn’t question it, we loved it. The habit of drawing the world around me stuck.’ And later on, after the Royal College of Art, a travel scholarship to the USA led to myriad commissions which took him (and his sketchbook) all round the world. He’s still passionate about the importance of drawing, and sad that it’s no longer a vital part of the art school training.

With his graphic skills, his versatility and the magical luminosity of his watercolours, Foreman’s work (now around 245 books ) includes  fairytales, classics, myths, his own original stories and picture books, and numerous collaborations with authors such as Terry Jones and
Michael Morpurgo. Locations range ‘from the top of the world in the Himalayas to the bottom of the North Sea’,from the Playboy Club in Chicago, to the Chelsea Football Club in London and beyond.

With such a wealth of pictures, covering so many aspects of his art – and you’ll certainly find some surprises here – Foreman’s inspirational, hugely enjoyable account of his work offers a rare insight into the breadth of vision that has for so many years, made him one of our finest,
most respected illustrators.