24th June: Freya Blackwood wins the CILIP Kate Greenaway Medal 2010 for Harry & Hopper
Julia Eccleshare interviews Freya Blackwood exclusively for Books for Keeps
A discreet email inviting me to a lunch on the day after the Awards ceremony for the CILIP Carnegie Greenaway Medal should have set me thinking… Freya Blackwood, an Australian illustrator shortlisted for this year’s Kate Greenaway medal was obviously in London for the Awards; of course I’d like to meet her. Although books flow across continents and time zones their authors come more rarely and all opportunities must be seized on.
Had I been smarter, I would have realised that Freya Blackwood was not in London just because she had been shortlisted for the Greenaway …Still a relatively new talent, Freya Blackwood was in London to pick up her prestigious Kate Greenaway Medal for her delightful illustrations to Margaret Wild’s Harry & Hopper.
Freya has been travelling in Europe – this is her first time in London ever – and is still surprised and absolutely delighted. After all, as she says, ‘I think the people on the Kate Greenaway list are god-like!’ She still can’t believe that she really is joining them. ‘A friend told me I was on the longlist and I didn’t pay much attention. It was more of a shock to be on the shortlist.’ She is delightfully modest about the actual win having absolutely no sense of ‘entitlement’, rather a sense of amazement that it should be her.
Born in Edinburgh in 1975 when her Australian parents were enjoying an extended trip travelling in a VW Kombie van and working far from home, Freya grew up in Orange, a city in the heart of attractive agricultural countryside about four hours west of Sydney. Her father was an architect specialising in restoring old properties among other things. ‘Dad used to take us on picnics to dilapidated properties that interested him. He loved picnics and camping way out on deserted beaches,’ Freya remembers. ‘I’m not sure if we enjoyed the camping and the rest as children or not but looking back on it now it seems great,’ she reflects laughingly and honestly.
Strong influences
It was part of what she describes as a rather ideal childhood living in ‘an old cold and messy Victorian house whereas everyone else lived in new pristine suburban houses. We ate strange, healthy food and went to exhibition opening.’ As she approvingly says, ‘My parents were a bit alternative really.’
Freya’s mum was also an artist and art teacher; as she talks of her, it’s clear that she was the strongest influence on Freya’s development both because of her own talent and because of her nurture. ‘Mum stops everything to help someone,’ Freya says with a quiet intensity that captures just how important that support was and still is. ‘She’d never directly help but she quietly develops talent.’ Pausing, she adds laughingly, ‘Well, she did once help paint some end papers but I’d drawn them and she just did the colouring in. And they weren’t used anyway!’
In terms of art styles, Freya and her Mum’s work are very different. ‘Mum’s work is way more abstract than mine,’ she says. ‘She sketches all the time. I don’t sketch. My Mum gave me a sketch book and a box of paints once but I haven’t used them.’
It seems unusual not to sketch given the numerous notebooks of other illustrators I’ve drooled over but Freya is quick to point out that her work just develops differently. ‘I do a lot of reference,’ she says quickly as a way of explaining her approach to her work. ‘I don’t need references for people but I do find them useful for animals and especially for buildings.’ She puts her different approach down to the fact that she is not ‘art school trained’ which she sees as having the benefits of giving her a rather different approach. ‘I studied visual communication and I only just passed illustration,’ she cheerfully laughs off. ‘For my major I made a film. Really I just wrote the story and then I got others to do the work which was ideal! I loved writing the story although I know I am definitely not a writer, she adds, although when pushed concedes that it is something that might develop.
Painting hobbit’s feet
Freya’s first work was in the film industry, ‘I really did sweep the floor, make the coffee and tea and go out and get lunch,’ she says. ‘Then I was allowed to do sticking things.’ The things she was sticking were physical effects which led to her first real work in New Zealand where she went to join the great The Lord of the Rings project. Despite the glamorous sound of that to all who’ve been bowled over by those physical effects, Freya dismisses the work briefly. ‘I poured foam latex for prosthetic limbs for Orcs,’ she says. ‘And I learnt to paint with an air brush. I painted Hobbit’s feet.’
The film industry wasn’t for Freya: she found it depressing and started to draw instead. She showed her very earliest work to the distinguished Australian illustrator Alan Lee who happened to live nearby. ‘I’d done my work on some very ordinary paper and he suggested a type of paper and a type of paint I should use and I’ve used it ever since,’ Freya laughs as she describes how she’d begun without thinking about those practicalities possibly one of the disadvantages of not having been ‘trained’ although overall she thinks that absence was more beneficial than not. ‘I have to make it up and that works for me,’ she says confidently. ‘I haven’t ever looked at other people’s work and copied it.’
Influences?
Of course, there are illustrators whose work have influenced her and she rattles of a string of the great British talents starting with Quentin Blake and including John Burningham and Janet and Allan Ahlberg whose Each Peach Pear Plum which she ordered from Scholastic only to be disappointed to discover it was for babies and she was about seven – even at this distance that disappointment rankles! ‘And, of course, everyone has been influenced by Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are,’ she says. She cites the illustrations of Lisbeth Zwerger as ‘her all time favourites’ while closer to home, Shaun Tan’s The Lost Thing was ‘hugely influential when I first began thinking of drawing’.
A sense of loss
Freya had actually drawn all her life creating cross sections of houses filled with cut out people and furniture, but it was when she began to draw in earnest that her life turned around. She got her first opportunity to be published when Australian author/ illustrator John Winch showed her work to his editor and she was invited to illustrate John Heffernan’s Two Summers, the story of Australian drought. Published in 2003 it was immediately shortlisted for the Australian Children’s Book of the Year and has been followed by an impressive one, two or even three books a year including Amy and Louise which won the Early Childhood category of the Australian Children’s Book of the Year and Roddy Doyle’s first picture book, Her Mother’s Face.
Typically, the stories Freya has illustrated deal with absence and a sense of loss albeit with a gentle resolution; realistically drawn, the sympathetic characters and the warm families that often surround them are touching and tender. Freya pays close attention to the details of both the inside and the outside of homes providing all her books with a strong and reassuring sense of place.
Freya was quite happy with all of her books but when she did Harry & Hopper she knew she’d created something new for her. ‘It was a story about a little boy and a dog and I thought I needed a different style of illustration. In every book I’d been trying to get my books to be more expressive. The roughs expressed so perfectly what I wanted that I just blew them up and submitted them. I knew I couldn’t make them better.’
With that confident exuberance Freya certainly gave the story of Harry’s love for his dog and how he copes when then dog is no longer there a much freer look than her previous books. It is a very welcome development in an already highly talented illustrator making it no surprise that it propelled Harry & Hopper to its exalted position as winner of the 2010 Kate Greenaway Medal.
Julia Eccleshare is the children’s book editor of the Guardian and the co-director of CLPE (The Centre for Literacy in Primary Education).
Harry & Hopper by Margaret Wild is published by Scholastic (9781 407111391).