Exhibition: Quentin Blake: Gifted

There are few artists in the World as universally loved as Sir Quentin Blake. To say his name is to conjure instant recognition of his distinctive style and to recall a moment from your own childhood. If an image can say a 1000 words, then a drawing by Blake can tell an entire story!

Thanks to an incredible gift from Blake, we are displaying 24 large-scale drawings for you to enjoy. The works form two emotive series, Children and Dogs, and Children, Birds & Dogs, the latter made especially for us, which convey the internal emotional landscape of childhood. Check out the gallery below to see some of the pictures on display.

We’re reversing Blake’s iconic process of illustration, by setting words to his images. We’ve asked long-time collaborator Michael Rosen and writers Opefoluwa Sarah Adegbite, Jackie Kay, Yomi Sode, 4 Brown Girls Who Write (Roshni Goyate, Sharan Hunjan, Sunnah Khan and Sheena Patel) and Ben Westwood, to create poems in response to the drawings, for display alongside them. We’ll also be running a competition, inviting children to write and illustrate their own chapters of a story, inspired by one of Blake’s new works. Details will be released on our website, shortly.

Given the growing crisis in children’s mental health, we hope that these drawings together, with our accompanying events programme, will create opportunities to reflect on the importance of the arts in supporting children’s wellbeing.