QUENTIN BLAKE AT THE HEONG GALLERY
40 images of Downing Women at the Heong
QUENTIN BLAKE AT THE HEONG GALLERY
Hallelujah for the Heong – a new show with real people. Whatever they exhibited it had to be exciting after the desert of gallery action over the past six months. The Heong boldly go where few appear very interested in following, and have pressed on with a long planned celebration of the anniversary of women at Downing College (always strangely referred to as ‘female students’) the first of whom walked through their classical courts four decades ago – well ahead of the rest of Cambridge University’s more celebrated colleges who dragged their feet until 1988 before they would share their space with ‘femaies’. In fact it’s a well-known story that some Magdalene students staged a disgraceful funeral ceremony for their way of life (coffin and black clad mourners included) to mark the (overdue) coming of the women. It is a diversion from the Downing triumph but the scandalously long time the male dominance continued is breathtaking, and Downing is justly proud of getting ahead of the game – even though to most of us it might seem a strange triumph since by 1980 we had a woman Prime Minister and women were admitted to every other British institution bar a handful of diehard London clubs.
Artist Quentin Blake began his English studies at Downing in 1953 and the exhibition opens with an intriguing cartoon he did as a 17 year old of Barbara Hepworth, at work in her studio; she stands before a tangled modernist piece. The Heong have the cartoon on the wall at a vantage point where the visitor can also see the magnificent Hepworth sculpture ‘Divided Self’ in their garden. A very intriguing collocation of artistic endeavours.
Nearly seventy years on, Quentin is famous - his brilliant illustrations for the 800th anniversary of the University of Cambridge were as wry and cleverly informative as any of his past work. For the Downing women anniversary he explains the rather different task before him:
“I had to invent variations of character. I do a lot of book illustration but here I had to make them up. “I was able to find 40 different people” and out of these 40 pictures, once they’d been shown, he admits, rather worryingly, he got carried away.
“I started doing more, different techniques, different media and I got used to the habit. There are now about 1000 – lots of stuff there if anyone would like to show them.”
But there are also some more recognisable cartoons complete with the characteristic Quentin Blake wit.Matilda, the Roahl Dahl character that put his drawings on the wider map is this year 30 years old.
“Interesting to me because two or three years ago Penguin wanted to celebrate Matilda who was 30. She was a striking child when I first drew her, she doesn’t look four or five years old, she looked much older. So now in the Gallery we have Matilda as a hairdresser and an astronaut and the Poet Laureate; it meant when she grew up these roles became more real. Here in Downing, women have become all these things, the serious tasks women are now pursuing. Matilda at 30 is more like women today.”
These are the most entertaining of the exhibits, and bring us back to the Quentin Blake whose wit crackles down the decades from 17 to 70.
“Illustration is immensely interesting, I read English at Downing, but when I became an artist it was all much more interesting. (There was a) play of words and pictures; also the dimension of people coming together to talk and work was especially fascinating.”
“‘(Illustration) is not only fascinating it’s important in itself. We live in worried times, always some kind of threat, some kind of dilemma. Art is very important, drawing is drawing, we need it because it has life in it, you may be drawing distressing things, refugees, homeless but it’s not, I hope, entirely distressing; the way you live it, present it, draw it has something enhancing in it. It means you are embracing it, moving forward, doing, something with it. True of all the arts and why we need them.”
Well done, Downing. Ahead of the pack as ever. And super well done Quentin Blake. What a life.
