Leigh Hobbs reveals a passion for London and an admiration for British cartoonists.

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LEIGH HOBBS interviewed by NIKKI GAMBLE

I read that London is your favourite city; can you tell us about your connection with it?

 I’ve felt a connection with England since I was a little boy. I was obsessed with visiting London because my passions have always been art and history, especially English history. I first came to London when I was twenty three;  I’m fifty three today and this is my sixteenth visit. The surface of the city - the building - has been knocked around and flawed by war damage and post-war development. In London you can find an exquisite Georgian terrace next to the most hideous 1960’s or 1970’s building. But my love  for London is more than skin deep. Peter Ackroyd put his finger on it in London: The Biography, in which he talks about certain people having a connection with the ghosts of London. That’s true for me and there are special spots that I’m particularly drawn to like the steps of St Martin-in-the-Field. I’ve just spent a week in Vienna which was fabulous because it is beautiful - grand and clean. Despite being bombed in the war, there is a feeling of consistency in the scale of the architecture. In comparison, when I arrived in London last night I was confronted by unbelievable amounts of rubbish. I suppose the emotion is a bit like being irritated by a member of your family: you crunch up your fist with frustrated rage but then your eyes almost water at the end.

That appreciation of Englishness transfers to your books, which have a specifically ‘English’ feel to them……

Yes, my passion for London does relate to my books, particularly the Old Tom books. An English sensibility runs through them and I resisted any sort of Americanisation. I even wanted ‘the look’ or design to be similar to the taste of a 1950’s Puffin: a classic English feel. And I think of my sense of humour as being English.

I read one critic who described your work as John Callanesque but I find them more reminiscent of Ronald Searle. Was he influential in the development of your style?

The double whammy of being in London and talking about Searle brings tears to my eyes. I think he is one of the greatest graphic draughtsmen of the past hundred years: the master. I really appreciate his humour, which isn’t crude; a lot of it came from his experience as a prisoner of war. I felt so influenced by him when I was in my twenties that I put all of his books away, out of sight. Fifteen years later I brought them out and got the same emotional response from the work. That’s when we corresponded. I wrote an appreciation of him in a newspaper in Australia and he sent me his latest book from France. Another strong influence is Ludwig Bemelmans who did the Madeline books.

Horrible Harriet and Old Tom are alike in that they are both outsiders and some might say unlovable. Is that something that interests you?

Old Tom  is naughty but he’s not bad. Horrible Harriet isn’t horrible really; she’s the school freak and has been ostracised because she’s different. She sees herself as horrible when reflected in the eyes of others and then she plays out that role. I know what it’s like feeling alone in the school yard because although I come from a very secure happy home life, I was an extremely shy kid. We moved a couple of times when I was seven to places where I didn’t know anyone and that was difficult. I think that one of the reasons the Old Tom books have really resonated with readers in Australia and the US, is that they’re based on real characters. The books are quite simply about the relationship between a mother and a son. Angela is the socialising mother figure. Tom represents a seven-year-old boy, who loves his mum and always will, but is programmed as boys are to break away. So there is friction. She’s exactly the opposite of him, prim and proper and concerned about appearances. In fact, she’s just as strong a character as Tom because she tries to stick to her principles and she is as eccentric as he is in her appearance.

The pace and emotion of the stories are carried as much by the scale of pictures and change in the way the line is dawn as they are by the words. Do you consciously plan it that way or is it more of an intuitive process?

 It’s intuitive. The scale changes in all the pictures when I draw the characters because I’m actually drawing personality and emotion; I’m not drawing the people. For instance, if you compare pictures of Horrible Harriet, you can see that in one picture she’s calm and she looks kind but in another she’s feeling like a freak again, so I’ve drawn her big and unappealing - she looks how she feels. The children understand that without having to be told. I was once asked at a big event, ‘Why is Old Tom big in some pictures and why is he little in others?’ I couldn’t think of the answer but a little boy stood up and said, ‘I know, when he’s good he’s small and he’s being naughty he changes’.

Do you believe in innate talent or can you teach someone to be a good artist?

I do believe in talent. However, I’m not good at everything to do with art: I’ve got a good line and a good colour sense, and I think what I’m best at is creating characters. So when I was teaching I would tell the kids that we would be trying all sorts of things and that I would refuse to believe that anyone in the class was hopeless at everything. Conversely, some people are born with a lot of talent but don’t exploit their potential. They burn brightly earlier on and because they don’t push themselves, they fade. This is why Ronald Searle is so fabulous: he was born gifted; you can see that fantastic line in the drawings he did when he was fifteen. But what is inspiring is that he continued to work with self discipline and push his work forward. He is an example of someone supremely gifted with a marvellous body of work. 

 You work in black and white, and colour. Do you have a preference for either?

I love working in black and white because it’s more immediate, than colour. But I like colour because I can create a whole atmosphere in a picture and use a brush. Big picture books are like battleships, they take about six months and it is exhausting.

How do you work on the interplay of text and images in your books?

 I try and work on irony. I think of a drawing and then I see a ridiculous line of text with it. This initial thinking is followed by a lot of editing. I make lots of drafts to make it better.

Thank you Leigh Hobbs for talking to Write Away