Quentin Blake - André François (Part 1) (24/65)
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British illustrator Quentin Blake was born in 1932. He had his first work published by 'Punch' magazine at the age of 16. Since then, he has illustrated books by a variety of different authors, most famously many by Roald Dahl. [Listener: Ghislaine Kenyon]
TRANSCRIPT: I went to see the… the agency, I think… up in Southampton Row, or somewhere like that, and the man… the person who'd commissioned François said… we… he said, oh no, I remember we… we had a drawing of him… a drawing from him, which was of… a… a cockerel, you know, a sort of French rooster, you know, which he'd done for something, and there were one or two slight changes that… we sent it back, asking for these changes, and we were terribly worried about the deadline, and it was coming, you know… for this, and he said, ‘Finally’, just at the last minute it arrived. He said, ‘And I ripped off the brown paper, and it was an elephant’. Which was one… I mean, that… François wouldn't have… didn't want to change anything, he just wanted to go on creating something. And in fact I did a… I got his address, I suppose when I was in my 20s, from Russell Brockbank at Punch, and he lived in… just outside Paris in Grisy-les-Plâtres, where he lived till the end of his life. And I went… down there to see him and… as a sort of pilgrimage, really. He was terribly nice, and he came… collected me from the station, and… was very… kind of modest and self-effacing. I said, ‘Have you ever had an exhibition of your work?’ ‘No, I haven't got enough of it, I'm afraid’, he said. In fact he… he became much more of a painter, and he did have exhibitions, and… you know, he's had retrospectives at the… Museum of Decorative Arts, and the Louvre, and all that kind of thing, and you know, he was a great man. But… while I was there, apparently he'd done drawing for Pirelli, who was [sic] he used to work for, and… they'd… there was something about it they didn't like, or they wanted changed, and he had said… I mean, he was talking to his wife about it, you know, and he… and they'd… they’d… he'd said, ‘No, no, that's alright, I don't want to do it again, just send me the rejection fee’, which is what you get if they don't want it, you know. And while I was there, they rang up, and said, ‘Alright, we'll take it as it is. But I mean that's… I'm not sure that I'm… I mean that's a very good lesson, you know, for a… for a freelance artist to hear. I mean… you've… you’ve got to… partly got to be François to get away with it, but I mean, it’s… it's strengthening, and it's good to see it actually happen in front of you as it were. And… in his sitting room there was a wonderful trompe l'oeil drawings of shelves, with things on the shelves, which he'd done, which sort of, were very effectively trompe l'oeil, but didn't… actually didn't deceive you. I mean, they weren’t… they were three dimensional, but you still knew they were drawing, which was… which was very interesting. And the other thing I found rather touching, he hadn't finished it. Which is… you know, it was something that he was doing when he had time to do it… that… that was fascinating. And since then, I mean I've not seen him very often, but… I've seen him once or twice in London, and… he… I was very touched, because I had an exhibition of my work in an illustration gallery in Paris, what was it, three or four years ago… and… and he turned up. He came to the private view.