My Work as a Children's Illustrator

Abstract

My Work as a Children's Illustrator Charles Keeping A few years ago I was asked to give a talk in a place called Bassingstoke, in Hampshire in England, and I was all ready to go in the morning. I used to have a calendar—the sort that hangs on the wall and when you pull the date off each morning, underneath is a little moral for the day. This morning I tore it off, and the moral was, "When everything has been said completely about a subject, be sure that some fool will stand up and say something more." I feel a bit that way today about the subject of children's books. There have been reams written and spoken about it, and I don't know what one can add to what has been said before. I feel that the best thing one could do, really, is to talk about one's own personal attitudes toward it. Walter Crane, the nineteenth-century illustrator, said that if cave paintings, the large cave paintings, were the beginnings of painting generally, then the everyday life depicted on the handles of the tools men used were the illustrations. I like to think that's what my personal illustrations have always been about. They've been about what I know and what I see and what I have enjoyed, and probably what I have been frightened of. Now I was born in Lambeth. I don't suppose anyone here knows it, but there is a very famous song called "Lambeth Walk" written about it. It's by the river and it's an area of small, mainly Victorian and Georgian, houses with small gardens. The people there were the "poor but honest" sort, and my family was part of what I can only describe as comfortable working class. We certainly weren't poor—there was much poverty around us, but we weren't poor ourselves—and we had a large household, full of aunts, uncles, goodness knows who else. We were terribly spoiled, my sister and I, and we were encouraged to create, to do everything: singing, reciting, talking. You had to tell a story every time you came home; if you didn't they wondered what was wrong with you; they thought you were ill. My grandmother always delighted in saying, "Now what have you done today?" and it had to last half an hour. She would laugh at all the appropriate moments and cry at all the appropriate moments and make your story interesting. Incidentally, she also told very, very lengthy stories herself, and you had to listen to those, too. My grandfather was a merchant seaman. He'd been to sea for forty years, he knew the Far East and Australia long before there was a Panama Canal, and he told stories of the sea. All these things were very stirring and very exciting to me as a child. Of course, my own vision as a child was not so broad. One only saw what one experienced oneself, and when it comes to my own actual work later in life, I tend to keep within what I could see as a child. That was mainly a small garden, a fence, and a large black wall. Against that black wall many things took place. It was a yard which had cart horses, and I would see these vast shapes of horses moving across this wall. These very simple images attracted me, I know, as a very small boy. And I used to like the cats and the birds and things that came into the yard and sat on the flowers. This was an exciting, tiny world to live in. I also enjoyed being taken into that yard next door and sat on the backs of cart horses. This was a very, very exciting thing for a child. It had an element of fear, because the animals were so large, and it had a feeling of almost sensuous comfort because the horses were furry and warm. When I got back home, I used to draw those horses and what I had seen in that stable. The feeling was that by drawing it...