Angela Barrett is widely regarded as one of this country's finest illustrators. She won the 1989 Smarties Book Prize for Can It Be True? and the 1991 WH Smith Illustration Award for The Hidden House. In addition, she has been shortlisted three times for the Kurt Maschler Award and once for the Kate Greenaway Medal. Her other picture book titles include Beware Beware, The Emperor's New Clothes and Through the Tempest Dark and Wild: Mary Shelley.

Here she talks to Write Away about her art and working process.

In an interview from several years ago you say you’d wanted to be a painter and now you’re an illustrator and you sound almost apologetic about it.

Doing the children’s books was sort of an accident, but not an unhappy accident. There’s so much passion in good children’s stories, in all the classic fairy stories, if they’re interpreted in the right way. They’ve got everything in them, in life. So I’m very glad to do that.

Your style is atmospheric, usually serious and very detailed. Is this because of the material you are given, or are you given the material because of your style?

I have a certain amount of choice. There are things coming in all the time. If I’ve got the choice of things, I do like serious things. But I also like the opportunity to do something funny occasionally. The only really funny thing I’ve done is The Emperor’s New Clothes in a retelling by Naomi Lewis. It’s not laugh out loud funny, it’s droll. I always got the dark fairy stories, the desperate girls in forests, and then I moved on to real life girls in desperate circumstances: Anne Frank, Joan of Arc first. I do like a tragedy, there’s no doubt about that. I relish the tragedy! (Laughs) I’m doing Anna Karenina at the moment. My pictures are of people standing around thinking about stuff.

Morally there are certain things that I want to illustrate. I was so very very glad to do the book about Anne Frank because of the way that I felt about what happened to her and everybody else. Sometimes I’ve had some influence over the plot of the story. We did Beauty and the Beast and Max Eilenberg did this retelling and it was fantastic. And we sat down and he’d researched all the Beauty and the Beasts ever done. And there were various things we discussed, like Beauty’s father, who was such a difficult character to really square. We said, “What are we going to do about him? This isn’t a lovely thing, this father who’s prepared to go off and leave his daughter to a fate worse than death.” So there was that and then towards the end of the story there are some versions where Beauty’s sisters are turned into gateposts to stand at the gates of the palace where she will live in happiness with the Beast and view her happiness day after day until they repent. In another version that I read, they don’t even get the opportunity to repent! And I just thought this was obscene. Beauty is such a kind girl, why would she let that happen? What kind of moral is that to end the story on? And after all, what have they done to her? Nothing really ghastly. They’ve just been fairly averagely selfish. I like to make sure everything works out properly.

The Beast is a distillation of several cats I have known and a few other things. When he’s dying at the end it’s the dying cat. I like that in the Anne Frank as well. Amongst all that murder and ghastliness going on you think, girl has to leave cat. She obviously knew what was happening in many ways, but I think she must have been quite hopeful when she was a little girl that it would all turn out all right in the end. So leaving the cat must have been pretty traumatic. We got the cat the wrong colour. I didn’t know what colour the cat should be and I did it orange and white because I thought it needed colour in the picture. When I’d finished all the pictures – I’d painted the cat three times – my editor said we’d heard from the Anne Frank House and they loved the book but we’d got the cat the wrong colour. The clue was in the name. The cat’s name was Moortje. Apparently it means Smoky or something like that. Deeply embarrassing.

You tend to work on projects set in the past.

The thing I always enjoy trying to find in any text is the big dark romantic moment. I don’t mean romantic between two people, I mean high drama. I’ve never enjoyed happy endings. I like them, I find them deeply satisfying because I’ve always enjoyed 19th century literature. I think it’s all part of the fact that everything will be tied up quite nicely at the end. But I always find those very difficult to draw. I think life is incredibly sad and awful, but I also think it’s incredibly funny. It depends on the mood I’m in. And it’s the same with the work. I take tremendous pleasure in small things, and felicitous little events and objects and things coming together. I’ve never wanted to illustrate anything completely contemporary. I have to feel that it’s in the past. And it’s not that I’m not engaged with modern life. I’m very grateful to have been born now and to have the opportunities that I’ve got and everything but I couldn’t bear to draw anything set in the latter part of the 20th century or the 21st century. I don’t know whether it’s the closest thing to equate to a dream life. There seems to me to be far less beauty and graciousness. That can’t be altogether true, Yet it does seem to me that everything that’s old was more beautiful. I can’t draw things until I’ve distanced myself from certain places, like the Anne Frank House, and I can’t draw anything unless it’s completely distanced from me with quite a lot of time.

For the picture books for older readers, like Anne Frank and Joan of Arc, do you work in a different way because of the seriousness of the subject matter?

You enact things in front of the mirror just to try to get expressions. I’ve decided my last appearance of Anna Karenina will be the point at which she leaves her house for the last time. She’s had too much opium, I think. She looks in the mirror and says, “Who is that?” Anyone who’s feeling very unhappy will know that moment of looking in the mirror and thinking oh dear, you’re in a right old state, but also feeling distressed and puzzled. And so it was with Joan of Arc. I just sat down and thought, I’m 19 years old, I’ve done my best for my country and I’ve been fighting and now I’m being burned at the stake, how do I feel about that? And I made this drawing and I took it to my editor because I knew it would be one of those pivotal moments that she’d want to have a look at. And she said, “I think she looks too upset.” (Laughs) And I said, “Can you look too upset under these circumstances?” And she said, “I think so, that’s terribly distressing.”

And you also use a camera for some portraits.

All I ever wanted to do was draw pictures and I didn’t want to go in the life class [at college], which I regret in many ways because my drawing isn’t what it ought to be. Sometimes when I’m drawing a figure I feel as if I’ve never drawn one before. I feel so ignorant about what joins onto which muscle. I have occasionally got a friend to model for me and taken some pictures. I don’t actually like putting anyone through sitting there while I draw because I just find the pressure too much, so I just take some pictures. But for the most part I concoct people from bits of reference, I make things up and I look in the mirror.

 Do you think about the age of your audience?

No, I don’t give it much thought. Often I don’t even know until the book comes out and it says it’s for 8 years and up. I take it all from what’s in the text. There are certain things I know I have to leave out, like sex, violence and smoking. And the obvious things like that are always discussed, like when I did Joan of Arc, are we going to show her being burned at the stake? Well no, we’ll draw a veil over that. I’ve tried to get people smoking into pictures occasionally and there’s always been a no-no on that. I gave up smoking myself years ago and I think it’s a very bad habit and should be abandoned, but there are certain characters that appear in books that I think ought to be smoking. I’ve very rarely had anything censored. I remember from Walker Books once, in Beware, Beware, I did a particularly nasty fairy that everyone said was just too nasty. There was something about it that everyone thought was just too unpleasant. As it turns out it would have fallen down the gutter anyway. I was attempting to represent scariness – I thought that was quite nasty.

When I was a child the things that frightened me were always a bit surprising. I had a book once with a picture of an Alsatian dog looking over the parapet of a bridge. And I think it was just meant to be an Alsatian dog and perfectly pleasant, probably quite a friendly dog. But there was something about the way it was drawn that put the wind up me. And I still always… when I’m asked to do something a bit sinister, I still think of the ears pointing up like that and I think it’s like Maleficent in Walt Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, she’s got horns. I thought about it for Beast when I was doing Beauty and the Beast. I’ve used that every now and then, because for me it’s a sign of something a bit scary.

I always think if there’s something readers don’t get now they might get it later, or if they don’t get it, their parents might get it and explain it to them. I hate this idea that you can’t use vocabulary that children won’t know. That’s what dictionaries are for. I have to do it now, all the time, still! That’s the way you learn things, isn’t it? And I think it should be the same with pictures. Sometimes I like to take a peculiar angle on things. I remember when I was doing the picture of Macbeth for Stories from Shakespeare. I don’t think anyone quite understood the way I illustrated it. I’d done Banquo’s ghost sitting in the chair and these two other figures and they’re all looking at someone who’s out of the picture. And they’re all supposed to be looking at Macbeth. Banquo’s looking at him going, “Here I am sitting in your chair and I’m dead.” And the other two are looking at him going “What’s wrong with him?” And I took it in and I got this call some time later and they said, “Which one of these men is Macbeth?” And I said, “None of them is Macbeth. You’re Macbeth.” You think if people don’t get it then obviously it hasn’t worked. But I still think it’s worth a try, even if it has to be explained. I leave it up to my publishers to say, children won’t get this, and people who have children, and people who are thinking about education. I just think about giving them what I would have liked, and what’s fun.

 In some of your books you have painted small, unusually shaped illustrations, or tiny ornamental details. Do those shapes come about because of the layout or do you just do them because you just like a bit of variety?

I love doing tiny little drawings. When you’re pacing a book it often happens that you go through it at the first reading and there are things that just scream out at you to be drawn. There are other bits that you know you’re never going to be very happy with. I’m not very good with crowd scenes or certain vehicles. And there’s a childish instinct to try to get out of doing them. You can’t just bunch all the illustrations up in one place and just do what you want to do. But sometimes you can illustrate something and if you do it very very small then it’s out of the way quite soon. Sometimes things just lend themselves to it. To do a big crowd scene, drawing all the figures is grim. But crowd scenes done on a very small scale are great. You can do the figures so small that you don’t have to put the features on the faces. And I also like homing in on details. I quite like a still life. I think there is a significance in objects which is quite potent. Sometimes there is something you so want to draw and you haven’t had a chance to tuck it in anywhere. Endpapers are a great opportunity for sticking things in. I do like decorative devices. I like a big dramatic picture and I like spareness. I think my pictures would be more spare if I was doing them for adults, but children like details.

You must enjoy doing the research for work set in earlier periods.

 I’ve enjoyed the research and everybody’s kind enough to say that I get things right. To me it just seems instinctive to want to get things right. But you can do too much research – you can mistake research for having done the work. The nice thing about doing a fairy story is that if it isn’t quite right, hey, it’s a fairy story. People could wear what they like. When I did The Emperor’s New Clothes I set it in around 1913. I think for fairy stories you can’t go much later than the twenties. Maybe it’s got something to do with anything you can vaguely remember or you think you can remember.

Apart from Anne Frank, The Snow Goose is the latest thing you’ve done – set in World War II.

The Snow Goose is kind of what we don’t really get anymore. It’s just aimed at the general public of all ages, and certainly people of all ages seem to regard it as a very special book.

What sort of research did you do for The Snow Goose?

 I was born in Essex and I have been to the Essex marshes but I’m ashamed to say that I didn’t go to the Essex marshes for this because I don’t actually like drawing from life too near to the subject. When I did Anne Frank I didn’t go to the Anne Frank House. I wish I had. I wish I’d gone about three years before I did the book so that I could filter the experience through my memory. And it was the same with the Essex marshes. But I do spend a lot of time in the Suffolk marshes, which aren’t that different. I had lots of photos and sketches I’d made of the Suffolk marshes for reference. I think that East Anglian landscape is pretty much the same. I love that flat, lonely landscape. The big skies are absolutely fantastic. And there’s a sort of mystery. When I listen to the Sea Interludes of Peter Grimes by Benjamin Britten, that’s it for me. There’s something slightly sinister about it – lovely and a bit sinister.

One of the things I really enjoyed about doing The Snow Goose was going to the Imperial War Museum to do research. I went to the archives to look at the photos of Dunkirk. I was worried about the topography because I don’t really know about Dunkirk, but one just had to produce a summation of what was going on. The thing that did strike me as most interesting was that the men really did form orderly queues! I don’t know whether it was because so many of them were English. And also the ghastly clouds of smoke as the oil refineries burned as well.

For Fritha there are various women in the back of my mind. Oddly enough, I saw a young woman in Suffolk after I’d finished this book who looked to me like the grown-up young Fritha: those nice bones, and dressed in a belted green mac, which was very old-fashioned. I just read what Gallico said and I felt that if she had her hair down and quite long that that would be enough to make her look…I thought it would be enough for Fritha to have unruly hair in an age when you look at women and the hair is always done. There was a great deal of debate about this, because Mrs Gallico felt that Fritha should be more of a waif.

What about artistic influences?

A lot of the 20th century artists came to mind as influences when I was doing The Snow Goose. One of my favourite painters is Stanley Spencer. When you look at the war artists at the Imperial War Museum you think of Nash’s pictures of the Battle of Britain. But then coming through some of those paintings what I like is that you can then refer them back to the Italian Renaissance. I like Carpaccio at the moment. I love that sort of stillness and there are so many fantastic hats as well, and also those little details. And I like the finish too. I suppose most of the painters I like do have that very detailed finish that’s very representational.

There’s a wonderful picture of the Fritha and Rhayader that manages to look both period and modern at the same time.

That is based on a sketch I made when I was illustrating Beauty and the Beast. I think it was from a painting. I’d seen a painting and I liked this lighting effect: the figure in the foreground practically a silhouette and the background bathed in light. I don’t know where I saw it. If I’d seen it in a gallery I would have bought a postcard. Anyway, I made this rough drawing and it didn’t crop up. Sometimes you can’t use things. And then when The Snow Goose came along I thought, oh yes, that’s where it’s going. It is shamelessly romantic and I was worried about it being too cheesy. We fiddled about with the expression on her face because she looked too sensual, somebody thought, not innocent enough. I wasn’t sure if she doesn’t look a bit dozy now, a bit starstruck. That was one of those easy pictures. It seemed so clear what I was going to do.

Thank you Angela Barrett for talking to Write Away.

2008-01-05