Throughout my writing life, I have collaborated with many visual artists − painters, etchers, wood-engravers, lino-cutters, watercolourists, photographers, even a stone carver; 37, I believe, not including occasional exchanges with illustrators of foreign editions of my books. For this article, I’ve chosen six artists to represent very different ways of working together. It hasn’t been easy to set aside such superb and eminent artists as Brian Wildsmith, who illustrated my first novel, Havelok the Dane (1964) and whose spirited, meticulous line drawings, with their replacement characters and glue and whiteout still hang on my walls at home. It was difficult, too, to omit Margaret Gordon: she and I made three picture books together, one of which, The Green Children, won the Arts Council Award for the Best Book for Young Children 1966–68. And John Hedgecoe – cussed, determined, imaginative, immensely talented, generous and a great photographer, with whom I worked on my Norfolk Poems (1970) – who persuaded me to wade fully clothed up and down muddy back-creeks, with strings of seaweed around my neck. But after some deliberation, the six visual artists I’ve chosen to write about are: Charles Keeping, John Lawrence, Andrew Rafferty, Norman Ackroyd, Jane Ray and Jeffrey Alan Love.
Bringing the Arts to the Everyday Lived Experiences of Young Children