Illustrator of the Week

Animal magic
Continuing an occasional series on illustrators, Joanna Carey praises the grace and economy of Helen Ward's workby Joanna Carey
The Guardian, Saturday March 29 2008

After 22 years as an illustrator, Helen Ward admits that it's a lonely job. 

"Although I reckoned on the poverty, I didn't anticipate the isolation," she says with a rueful smile. But you can't help feeling that she thrives on that solitude.

"I'm not a joiner-in, never have been. I avoid book 'events', and talking about myself is an ordeal." But surely, as an award-winning illustrator with more than 20 books to her name, she has to do these things sometimes? "Yes of course. I'm not a mean-spirited curmudgeon. Just shy. And given the choice I'd much rather spend the day working, or walking the dog."
Ward lives in Gloucestershire, not far from where she grew up. Her parents, who live nearby, are artists, and she says she had a good old-fashioned "leftwing, atheist upbringing". She always drew and painted, and from an early age had the freedom of the library at the college where her father taught. "I grew up with a respect for books, and I knew that I would be an illustrator."
Hidden away up an alley, in the damp shadow of a nonconformist chapel, her tiny cottage is fortified and insulated with books, paintings and more books. A narrow staircase leads up to her attic studio, where she pulls illustrations from a plan chest, until we're almost knee-deep in them - early works, pictures from unpublished books such as a ravishing lemur from an abandoned ABC, a tenderly observed dormouse, leafy jungle scenes that recall Rousseau, and exquisite plant drawings that call to mind those intrepid lady explorers of the 19th century. There are birds of every description, from African bee-eaters to harlequin ducks and a fabulous cavalcade of animals, but although there are one or two centaurs and some elegant fashion drawings, human beings are largely absent.
Ward studied at Brighton Art School in the 1980s, but on graduating, although she had won the Walker prize for children's illustration, she didn't get the first-class degree she had hoped for, or a place at the Royal College. Luckily, someone from Templar Publishing had seen her degree show and snapped her up - and she's been with them ever since, developing and perfecting her distinctive style that combines a meticulous attention to detail with a gentle informality.
In The King of the Birds (1997) she used a traditional story to introduce more than 100 birds, in astonishing detail, with inventive compositions. She followed this in 1998 with The Hare and the Tortoise. Ten years on, these illustrations have a grace and economy that make this interpretation of the fable as fresh and vital as it is timeless. Ward approaches Aesop's anthropomorphism cautiously - she prefers not to compromise the animals' dignity by dressing them up or caricaturing them. Instead, with a rare ability to suggest the tactile qualities of fur, feather and bone, she celebrates the animals with a heightened realism and a dramatic use of scale. Almost all her books are about birds or animals.
Even as a child she was serious about illustration, drawing, reading, researching and making notes on how to draw animals. A significant influence on her work as a student was her encounter with the Impey collection - natural history paintings by 18th-century Indian artists, commissioned by the wife of the British chief justice in Bengal for European patrons. "I was struck by the crispness of the execution, and the fact that the drawing, though objective, is not entirely realistic. I loved the way those burnished images sat on the page, and that they weren't coldly illustrative, but had something more."
Ward works in watercolour with occasional use of gouache. She moves with ease from a vibrant tropical luminosity to the subtle, earthy tones that predominate in The Hare and the Tortoise. She achieves the gentle, mellow textures by applying colour, then "mopping it off", creating subtle gradations of tone. Using a fine Rapidograph pen to depict the fur, her drawing has the rhythmic finesse of a Bewick wood engraving. Bold areas of white space give the images, however detailed, an uncluttered clarity. She's proud that she has always managed to support herself with illustration: "Never even had to do a paper round! Yes, materials are expensive, but the real cost of illustration is in the time - a picture book usually takes me six months, so I work long hours, live on very little and never take holidays."
Five years ago, things were "ticking over" when she was invited to do some illustrations for Dragonology, the first in Templar's "Ology" series of lavishly produced compendium-style "fact-based" books with maps, flaps and special effects, archaic typefaces, bejewelled bindings and every kind of embellishment. Other titles include Egyptology, Wizardology and Pirateology, and each one brings together a team of artists. "The great thing," Ward says, "is that I don't have to worry about the layout - my own books take months, but here I'm just given printed pages, with the exact spaces ready for my artwork. I don't have to think!" Frustratingly the artists don't get individual credits, but it's easy to identify Ward's illustrations, and phenomenal sales worldwide now mean that she can easily live off her Ology royalties. She looks faintly astonished, almost ashamed of her good fortune.

So has it changed her life? Is she now tempted to take holidays? "No, I don't have an instinct for holidaymaking. I go up north each year, to stay on a farm and help with the sheep. What's different is that I can now afford a car. Poverty's no longer an issue." The success of the Ologies has given her a new freedom. She finds inspiration in the countryside, "walking the dog, herding ideas in my head; picking up pheasant feathers, seeing a raven perhaps, finding fossils or a larch twig covered with silvery lichen." The previous day she'd found a dead goldfinch, and done some watercolour studies of it. The small, delicate paintings show the little body just slightly arched, like a spent match, capturing the ephemeral nature of its existence. Alongside her picture books, these paintings offer their own kind of storytelling, and make you think about where illustration stops and fine art begins.
Nature study (of a different kind) is the subject of her recent, very beautiful picture book Wonderful Life. It's set in space and was inspired by looking at science fiction illustrations - she set out to see if she could emulate those airbrush effects with watercolour. It's an (unashamedly) anthropomorphic, ultimately romantic story about a lonely, artistic rodent, a keen naturalist who spends his days examining the surreal, psychedelic delights of the wildlife on a far-distant planet.

Varmints, by contrast, is closer to home, a strange, dark tale - soon to be an animated film - that speaks out against noise pollution and the way the cities are obliterating our countryside. "No, I'm not really an 'environmentalist' - I prefer not to ally myself to causes - but I like to be able to say what I feel, and I feel strongly that books can help children make educated choices about things that affect their lives."http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/mar/29/featuresreviews.guardianreview32