英国著名插画家昆丁.布莱克的八十大寿作品展

伦敦艺术大学广州招生代表处 | 2013-01-23

Quentin Blake at 80: the illustrator's magical art

英国著名插画家昆丁.布莱克的八十大寿作品展

英国著名插画家、作家昆丁.布莱克迎来了自己的八十大寿，并打算在伦敦马尔堡美术馆（Marlborough Fine Art Gallery）展出他的新作品。目的并不是为了怀旧，而是去创作一些奇妙的令人深思的新作品。他的作品充满了独特的个人风格，以轻松的绘画线条来表达幽默内涵的寓意，深受喜爱。而他的许多作品也被授予多项奖项，其中就有国际儿童文学的最高奖项“安徒生奖”。这位插画大师毕业于切尔西艺术与设计学院，通过多年的绘画经验的积累，在插画界，儿童文学界别树一帜，享誉盛名。

昆丁.布莱克的新作品

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.

（英文信息来自伦敦艺术大学）

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