Struwwelpeter

"When I was a kid we had this book and I loved it. It’s pretty scary but what I loved were the drawings, the lay-outs, quite simple line work and flat colour. I think it was just the nature of how they printed in those days. That image: the hair and the long finger nails—and the clothing! I mean when I’m sitting in Africa in shorts and t-shirts and here is Struwwelpeter dressed in wool and so many layers. All this amazing clothing that people wore in 19th century Germany—all those funny little hats! Also, look at the stories, “The Dreadful Story of Harriet and the Matches” — this fantastic picture of Harriet on fire! In the end she is reduced to a little pile of ashes—and her little cats all crying tears—it’s brilliant. Then “The Story of the Inky Boys” and how it tackles racism—and this picture of their teacher, Agrippa, and his huge inkpot and amazing hat. “Look at “The Dreadful Story of Harriet and the Matches.” In the end she is reduced to a little pile of ashes—and her little cats all crying tears—it’s brilliant. ” My grandmother was an illustrator and painter who had huge inkpots—she was my influence. She had a farm up in the Kalahari. There were all these wild animals. She painted everything she saw—bushmen, animals, the birdlife, the countryside—these huge communal nests of African swallows built in the trees. Her pen and ink work was a great influence on me. Yes. And she was really encouraging. When she got too old to paint she gave me all her equipment. I’ve still got a lot of it. This book, Struwwelpeter, has always been a great influence on me–the eccentricities of it! These pictures really stuck in my mind. To her credit, my mother didn’t censor it at all. Is that true? It’s also been so well translated. Whoever has done this has really captured the English idiom. And “The Story of Fidgety Philip”–we had friends who were like this and kids who were thumb-suckers. We used to play with fire. We made little fires called ‘braai’, it was so dangerous to do this out in the Veldt. That’s the hard bit. Sometimes, you see, there can be a lot happening. It can be difficult to decide. Struwwelpeter was the book I most remember from my childhood. But there were others: Jock of the Bushveld –it’s a really odd story, and another called Soul of the White Ant by Eugene Marais. This guy was a scientist, an entomologist so the story is based on fact. I’ve been caught out with facts before. In one of the Winnie books she waves her wand and goes back in history to the time of the dinosaurs. I read this book at a school and a little boy put his hand up and said, “You’ve made a mistake!” and I said to him, “What do you mean? Illustrators don’t make mistakes!” In my jungle, I’d drawn trees with creepers. The boy explained that there were only ferns in the time of the dinosaurs and that I ought to go and correct it. Isn’t that great? I just drew the dinosaurs in a jungle. But I had it wrong. Wrong trees! Another time another kid pointed out that I’d got something wrong in space. Children are pretty exacting readers as well as critics. “My mother encouraged us to read–she didn’t care what we read–so we were allowed masses of comics.” My mother encouraged us to read–she didn’t care what we read–so we were allowed masses of comics. I read a lot of Marvel and DC Comics. She also took us to the library every two weeks. Which maybe counteracted it a little–some people frowned on her letting us read comics. I loved The Hardy Boys and their incredible adventures, I read a lot of Enid Blyton but they didn’t make much of an impression. Oh, I did like the Just William books–the society seemed so formal to us, where we grew up it was pretty informal, we were running around in bare feet. So we had an interesting perspective on English society through these library books. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter I went to art school, studying fine art. I did a course in illustration because I was trying to work out how to make a living as an artist. We had some fantastic teachers, it was a very classical education–figure drawing, for instance, we had to draw the skeleton from memory. They’d give you a bit of bone and you’d have to draw it and add the muscle. Light and shade, chiaroscuro, perspective, everything. It was an amazing course. Not so much conceptual art or videos in those days! We had a guy called Mr Barry Mauritz, he would ask us to bring in interesting objects to draw. We’d draw them from one angle and then he’d make us get up and make us draw it again from a different angle. He liked bits of car engines, or scientific equipment, or tools–something weird. And, once we had drawn it, he’d take it away and make us draw from memory. “What I love most about all the books I’ve chosen, or all the artists, is their sense of design and their view of a scene – how they visualise it. ” Anyway–one day someone turns up at school with a Brian Wildsmith book. I think it was the ABC book."