Pull my flaps

Wonderland, Issue 12

In the world of Jan Pienkowski, sailors mix with sultans, shadows talk and creatures travel in flying pies. The Polish writer-illustrator has created hundreds of books from the attic studio in his London home, including the celebrated Meg and Mog series, which became a West End stage show and an animated television series. Pienkowski has won the Kate Greenaway medal for illustration twice, co-founded the greetings card company Gallery Five and is recognized as a pioneer of pop-up books.
“I always did creative things like making birthday cards,” he explains, “I was eight when I made my first book, which was for my dad.” The encouragement from one of his great uncles who was a painter had a great affect on the young Pienkowski. “He sent me a letter when I was a little boy saying I only have three things to tell you: that is to draw, draw, draw! So I did.” The traditional art of story telling combined with his love for drawing is central to all of his works, as is the mixture of themes he taps to make each tale a one of a kind.
These inspirations range from tips to sketch creatures at the Natural History Museum to sourcing scientific images for backgrounds and memories of his childhood adventures overseas.
World War Two started when Jan Pienkowski was just three years old, forcing him and his parents to flee their family home in Warsaw. In the following months they moved from Germany to Vienna, to a farm in Bolvaria to Italy until, in the winter of 1946, they arrived in Herefordshire, where a 10-year-old Pienkowski attended school for the first time. “And they didn’t teach art,” he explains. “But I was taught heraldry, the design of coats of arms where only five colours are used – white, yellow, red, blue and green.” This minimal use of colour affected his early works, some of which are created completely from the heraldic palette. But to broaden his range his father sent him to study with a professional Polish painter in Knightsbridge every weekend. “On fine days in the summer we’d paint on the roof of his studio and look out over the park hotel,” he recalls. “And on Sundays he would take us to see the collections at the National Gallery or to a museum – that was lovely.”

His taste for poster design arose whilst at Cambridge University, when he began advertising the various student shows. “I really cornered the market in those – so if you were putting on a show and wanted a poster you came to me,” he chuckles. The hand crafted, colourful posters impressed companies and he soon found work in the art department of a London advertising agency, continuing on to work for Collins publishers and as the art editor of a weekly political magazine called Time and Tide. He also designed book covers for Jonathan Cape publishing. “I did 24 covers a year. I always did them the night before I had to hand them in,” he confesses.
It was during this time creating the titles of Watch, a children’s television programme on the BBC, that he met Helen Nicoll, with whom he would later create the infamous Meg and Mog series. “I wore black from head to toe whilst working on Watch,” he says, “with a black mane and black gloves – I had to be disguised against a black background. I would then draw onto tracing paper, on this glass sheet, which they filmed and the children watching had to guess what I was drawing…” It was one of the hit children’s shows of the time and, after they had completed filming, Meg and Mog was born – a series of 16 titles, created over four decades. “Helen and I decided to make a book together. We lived far apart so we would meet in a service station and would sit there all day, having as much tea and coffee as we wanted, drawing and writing. Well, it seemed to work for us…”

The silhouettes now synonymous with his style came about quite by accident whilst he was working on a book for Penguin. “I thought the faces on some of the characters I had drawn were terrible, so at the last moment I decided to blacken them in so they were simply silhouettes. I anxiously drove to Penguin in Bedford Square with the book laid open on the car seat to dry. They liked it,” he says, still relieved. “It was then I realized the advantages of the silhouette.”

Pienkowski broke new ground with his distinctive silhouettes and also with his elaborate pop-up books, the first of which, Haunted House, was a huge success. “The rough copies were created out of cornflake packets,” he reveals, “and had accidental sound effects.” The charming aesthetic of his world is achieved through a combination of techniques from computer generated images, wood cuts and pen and ink sketches to scissor cuts, psychedelic backgrounds and images recycled from one book to the next. His storybooks have captivated generations of children, yet he remains charmingly humble.
“I have been very lucky to work with clever people who share their wisdom with me. They criticise me and advise, which is actually lovely,” he smiles. “There, I’ve told you all my secrets now.”