Pop-up maestro

Financial Times (July 5 2008)

Jan Pienkowski was eight when he made his first book. “It was for my dad,” recalls the 73-year-old illustrator, who now has hundreds of books to his credit. From silhouettes that act out traditional fairy tales to innovative pop-up books, illustrating tales runs in Pienkowski’s veins. His celebrated Meg and Mog series was adapted into a play, starring Maureen Lipman, and became an animated television series with the voice of Alan Bennett. He has won the Kate Greenaway medal for illustration twice and this year was shortlisted for the Hans Christian Andersen Illustration Award.

I am met at the door of his home in Hammersmith, west London, by Pienkowski himself, whose clipped beard, long hair and two walking sticks (a temporary measure following a recent hip replacement) give him the air of a mysterious character from one of his tales. Inside, we sit among antique wooden furniture and share baked mackerel, homemade soda bread, salad and a lentil and onion stew, served with seaweed (given by Satoshi Kitamura, his friend and illustrator of the children’s series Angry Arthur), followed by chocolates and a brew of nettle tea. The talk is of travels, from train journeys in India to trips to the countries that feature in his otherworldly tales, such as Syria, Iran and Egypt. Once the teacups are empty we ascend a four-storey stairway – passing by the faded, ornate wallpaper he designed in the 1960s and framed, sepia photographs – to his studio in the attic.

The Haunted House was Pienkowski’s first pop-up book, and remains his most successful. Its engineered pages revolutionised the genre of pop-up – Pienkowski calls it “the Cadillac of pop-ups” – with shapes that, instead of jumping out at you, move and then disappear: the spider on the banisters; the octopus in the sink. “It was a tremendous challenge; nothing had been attempted like that before.” he recalls. “The rough copies were created out of cereal packets, and had accidental sound effects.”
The second world war broke out when Pienkowski was just three years old, forcing him and his parents to leave their family home in Warsaw and travel to Germany, Austria and Italy until, in the winter of 1946, they arrived in Herefordshire, England, where, at 10, he learnt English and attended school for the first time.
“There weren’t any children’s books around when I was a boy because of the war,” he says, “so the ones I read were my mother’s from when she was a child in the 1920s.” These included Charles Kingsley’s Heroes, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels and Doctor Dolittle, the graphic illustrations of which influenced Pienkowski’s work. During his time at boarding school, and much to his father’s horror, he discovered a liking for comics such as Hotspur, The Beano and The Dandy, featuring Dennis the Menace and Desperate Dan. The comics were instantly understandable stories for Pienkowski, who was still trying to learn English, and their simple, sequential illustration had a huge effect on his later work, particularly on the Meg and Mog books.

The series, which follows the adventures of Meg, a witch, and her black cat Mog, is a collaboration between Pienkowski and the writer Helen Nicoll. “We wanted to have some fun but also teach children about the world by travelling to different places,” explains Pienkowski. “We had to do our homework and visit museums and half a dozen castles to get the facts right.”

The designs started with 10 colours, influenced by the thick, black lines and the strong colours Pienkowski was taught in heraldry classes at school. However, perhaps the most iconic of Pienkowski’s designs are his silhouettes, which – although they are now used in so much of his work – came about by accident in 1968. While under contract to the publishers Cape to design book covers, he was asked to illustrate a series of Joan Aiken’s short stories entitled The Necklace of Raindrops and had to produce a colour picture to present his ideas. The drawing was almost complete when Pienkowski, dissatisfied with the faces he had drawn on the figures, blacked them out with Indian ink to create silhouettes. It was when the drawing was sitting on the car seat next to him while he drove to the meeting that he realised “the advantage of silhouettes, in that every reader can identify with them, whatever country you come from”.

Pienkowski shows no signs of slowing down. This summer he is re-issuing a series of his Nursery books and in the autumn his latest silhouette book, Nut Cracker, will be released. He finds reading tiresome now, and instead illustrates stories by listening to recordings of them narrated by friends. It is traditional tales, such as Ali Baba or Aladdin, that excite him the most .

“I always liked Aubrey Beardsley, and the work of Beatrix Potter is incredible,” he muses, before adding, “I try not to look at other illustrations, though – supposing you are influenced by it! That would be awful.”

Six of Pienkowski’s Nursery books are being re-published by Walker (available from July 7).
www.janpienkowski.com