The art of little bears, charging rhinos, funny jumbos and giraffes with long lashes
PAUL JOHNSON
Another annus horribilis over, I have been painting a New Year card. I don't do many, just one or two for close friends who I feel need cheering up. I was brought up to regard hand-painted cards, for birthdays etc., as a particularly welcome sign of affection. I love getting them, but hardly ever do now. My father was a great master of the card. He came from a generation of artists, born in the 1880s. who loved creating these ephemera for their friends: party invitations, menu cards, notices of glee clubs, illustrated letters and often dazzling sketches, portraits, done in cafés and pubs, still bearing stains of giveaway liquids. In my father's case the concentration was on Christmas/New Year cards; the scale was formidable and required a well-run, cottage-industry production line. He was an expert in many processes — engraving in steel, dry-point and etching, woodcuts and linocuts — all of which were taught at his art school, He particularly favoured lithographs. So do I; they are the only form of reproductive art that I warm to, believing, for instance, that the multi-toned works that Honore Daumier drew directly on stone or wood are among the finest monochrome works in the history of art.
My father would produce perhaps 300 of these cards in black-and-white litho. Then the whole house, not just his studio (or art room as he insisted on calling it, being oldfashioned), was turned upside-down while the cards were hand-painted. This was an elaborate and time-consuming business in which he delighted, and it was only under pressure from my mother, who had mixed feelings about this annual nightmare of aesthetic mass production, that my elder sisters, and eventually myself, were allowed to assist in the more routine bits. Then we were like a Renaissance studio family, the Holbeins or the Verrocchios, all busily at work. My father made lavish use of special gold watercolour paint to give a luxurious finish to his crib scenes and magi visits, being a staunch supporter of Jan van Eyck as the greatest painter who ever lived. He also did elaborate inscriptions in his beautiful hand, using a rare form of indian ink that had a deep, reflective quality, like gleaming ebony or lacquer. These beautiful objects were treasured by his friends, and some may still be in existence, hidden beneath the leaves of family photo albums or in old moth-balled drawers. Alas, I have none myself, a consequence of his untimely
death in the darkest days of the war, when many precious things disappeared.
However, in a small, unskilled way, I carry on the tradition, As a child, I always illustrated my letters home, and occasionally still do, though, like most writers by trade, I hate writing letters of any kind, as readers of these essays, who often send me kind, thoughtful, fascinating and heartwarming letters, know full well. It is a deformation professionnelle. On the other hand, I do scores of painted cards every year, all drawn by hand, for lithography is beyond me. These serve all kinds of purposes. Recently, for the 70th birthday of my old friend Hugh Thomas, I did a card showing his numerous books, in multicoloured jackets, flaming against a dark background. For Antonia and Harold Pinter's 21st wedding anniversary:, I did a medley of her books and his plays twinkling in a showbiz frame of footlights and floodlights. I like doing cards for grown-ups, because in their case I can be pretty sure of their interests and can illustrate them appositely, even making jokes. But most of my cards are for young people, children, grandchildren, godchildren, the offspring of friends and neighbours, and some of these kids and tinies I scarcely know and find it difficult to get accurate information about their proclivities and crazes. The execution is not difficult; it is getting the ideas that takes brain-cudgelling and spasms of genius. I will not take certain short cuts. No Harry Potterism; nothing from C.S. Lewis or old Tolkien. I knew both these distinguished gentlemen at Oxford, respected and learnt from them, and find it shocking that they are now known not for their professional work — Lewis's A Preface to Paradise Lost is a masterpiece, essential reading for any teenager who loves poetry — but for wild and meretricious fairy stories, with not one atom of the skill of Lewis Carroll or the charm of Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. As for Potter, it sounds like sorcery; I wish Evelyn Waugh were still alive to anatomise and excoriate it.
Instead. I do dragons, which have delighted artists and children for 2,000 years: it is the spikes on the back, the swishing of the forked tail and the flames issuing from the furnace throat that give pleasure. Dinosaurs are a kind of updated version, but a bit monochrome, so I am working on a hybrid, a dynodragon which can do battle with a modern St George in a spacesuit and equipped with rayguns. Not that children, bless their conservative tastes, need updating. They are
quite happy with mediaeval images, especially of armoured horses, jousting lances and turreted castles. Indeed, one of my maxims is, when in doubt do Caernarvon, with its Byzantine walls, or Bodiam, with its broad, still moat. Romans are popular, too. Last week I found myself drawing a catapult — no easy matter, I discerned — and a fully equipped legionary soldier: children like the idea of a kind of hearth-brush crowning the helmet, the short, broad stabbing sword and the leather pleated skirt — like Scotchmen in kilts, I tell them. And dinosaurs, to do them justice, have got children used to going even further back in time, like the four-year-old who once asked my mother (then, to be sure, in her eighties), 'Mrs Johnson, what was it really like in the Stone Age'?
On the whole, however, I find that for all ages, both sexes, every cultural and intellectual group and all nationalities, animal cards are the safest bet. In idle moments I often paint them on spec, knowing that they will come in useful sometime when I am asked at short notice to do a rush job for a forgotten great-aunt or a tearful grand-niece or an old colleague fallen on hard times. Giraffes never fail: you must get the camouflage exactly right (as with zebras), not forget the complex neck muscles, and make the eyes soulful and the eyelashes very long. Elephants are good for comic effects: sometimes I do one with an LBJ face, for he had the biggest elephant ears of anyone I ever met. But who remembers him now? I like to do a rhino, with little, glittering, hot eyes, and the caption, 'I am coming at you NOW!' The most popular of all are bears. I do a rather nasty-looking, snouty, baby brown bear, who says, 'I'm only a little bear,' and a big, fully grown grizzly, looking for an armful, as it were. Then there is the deliciously pretty koala who admits, 'I'm a beauty but, boy, am I expensive!' I was inspired by a marvellous photo of a wolf that I found in a magazine — wolves, especially females, can be of mesmerising beauty — to do a card entitled 'The Friendly Wolf. Fowl go down surprisingly well, under the caption, 'There's nobody here but us chickens'. (I'm going to try this with the eyes of a cowering bin Laden peering out from the back of the hen-house.) And I am starting up a new line in Muscovy ducks, which I was able to sketch recently; amazing creatures with knobbly, bright-red faces, like turkeys. What I won't do are dogs and cats, unless I'm absolutely sure which the recipient likes. A happy new year!
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