Quentin Blake by Ghislaine Kenyon review – the brilliant illustrator at work

Blake’s images for Roald Dahl’s book and his own creations such as Zagazoo and Mrs Armitage have given immense pleasure to readers for decades. This terrific book explores his imagination

Paul Klee described drawing as taking a line for a walk, but there is nothing pedestrian about Quentin Blake’s gravity-defying figures. Remember the wretched sweet-eating infant in Roald Dahl’s Matilda, launched out of the classroom window by Miss Trunchbull, or Zagazoo’s parents, joyfully tossing their baby to one another as though he were a beachball, or Clown, the discarded toy, hurled into the air with such vigour that he lands in the bedroom of a third-floor flat?

Blake’s characters are always on the move, but rarely walking. They run, leap, trot, dance, ride, skip, spin, swing, scoot, slide, sail, swim and, of course, fly. Sometimes they have wings (birds, and bird-like people, are everywhere in his world); at other times they are simply suspended in the sky. In one of his illustrations for the Folio Society’s edition of Cyrano de Bergerac’s Voyages to the Moon and the Sun, Blake shows the hero fired off like a rocket into an infinite expanse of white. In a picture to celebrate the 800th birthday of his alma mater, Cambridge University, he has a swarm of cycling students levitate like starlings into the dusk.

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