Not for Art's Sake

Illustration, the most approachable visual art form, permeates daily life, as Quentin Blake puts it, 'a vernacular, a language everyone understands.' Here, Quentin employs this language masterfully for diverse purposes. In 2007, he concealed an unsightly building during Queen Elizabeth II's Eurostar opening by creating a 2-color street scene, later enlarged to wrap a five-story structure. Since then, he's produced site-specific works, including life-sized drawings of newborns, parents, and hospital scenes in France. Recently, he's designed everyday life drawings for UK prison family rooms. Charities have also benefited from Quentin's passion for purposeful drawing, such as creating the Roald Dahl Marvellous Charity's logo, lockdown pantomime scene changes for Comic Relief, an NHS trust mug rainbow, and Islington Libraries' reading encouragement posters.