Brought up in mining village of Penistone, near Sheffield, Brian Wildsmith was born into a mining family. After studying at Barnsley Art School he won a scholarship to the Slade School of Fine Art where he studied for three years.

Brian is a talented musician and spent his National Service teaching music at the Royal Military School of Music, but he soon gave up teaching so that he could devote his time to painting.

Brian Wildsmith believes that children like good illustrations and well designed books and that they are much better able to understand art than some adults will give them credit for. An innovator in picturebooks in the 1960s, Wildsmith says, “Picture books give an opportunity for a marriage between painting and illustrating, and the challenge of designing each page is very stimulating. I believe that a beautiful picturebooks of the right kind are vitally important in subconsciously forming a child's visual appreciation, which will bear fruit in later life."

Brian Wildsmith lives in Nice in the South of France. Here he talks to Write Away about his illustrious career.

For the son of a miner to want to become an artist must have been very unusual, especially sixty years ago. Did you encounter any class prejudice?

The only time I met class distinction was when I came to London. When we were boys everybody was poor so nobody felt poor. I was mad keen on cricket and I used to play for the University College cricket team. In those days only 3% of working class boys went to university. All the rest were public school. They wouldn’t talk to me. They wouldn’t sit next to me on the bus. It was revolting. But that’s how it was. The only class distinction we had up north was whether you took gold top milk or silver top milk! I met a bit of it in the publishing world too. The only place where I never met it was Oxford University Press. They were wonderful. They became my mother and father.

Class is the British problem. It’s sad, because Britain has some of the most cultured people and some of the most wonderful museums, but as a nation the British are not interested in culture. If you live in France you realise the difference. The other week we needed a plumber. There was a 6ft by 5ft painting on the wall. “That’s interesting,” the plumber remarked. “Did you do it?” “Yes,” I said. “Ah,” he said. “How did you do that?” and “Why did you do this?” The French have a better natural feeling about creativity.

Did you have a particular interest in children’s books or was it more a case of having mouths to feed?

The one thing they never ask you at art school is; how you are going to make a living. It never comes into it. You can’t teach art, anyway: you can teach technical things like mixing paint, but the essence of a painting or an image comes from the inside. The purpose of a teacher is to be perceptive and encouraging.

The way it happened for me is that after I had taught for three years, I read somewhere that there were 28,000 books published every year. I realised that they all needed a book cover. So, I taught myself how to do book covers. They were produced in three or four colour printing in those days. Each colour had to have its own separate drawing and then they all had to overlap to create the final image. And I learnt how to do the lettering.

Then I went to see Oxford University Press and Mabel George. Brilliant woman, but so shy I didn’t see her face. I took some paintings with me and she said, all right, we’ll be in touch. Within two weeks she had sent me some work for two or three full colour book covers. When I started producing book covers my wife said, “I think you should give up the teaching and concentrate on what you really want to do”, so I resigned. Then she said, “I can tell you now, I’m pregnant.” Which was very wonderful of her; I wouldn’t have had the courage to resign if I’d known. It was a good move. In my first year I earned three times as much as I did as a teacher.

For the two years after that Mabel gave me some books to illustrate in black and white. And then she asked me if I’d like to do 12 paintings for Tales from the Arabian Nights, which I jumped at. When it was published, a review in the The Times Literary Supplement review - nobody signed their reviews in those days - said: “we now descend to the lowest depths to Brian Wildsmith’s vicious attack on the Arabian Nights. These aimless scribbles wander aimlessly and pointlessly about the page.” When I went to see Mabel she said “Oh Brian, don’t be upset over a stupid piece like that.”

Next she asked if I’d thought about an ABC, which I did and that book won the Greenaway Medal. The next step came when Mabel encouraged me to write stories. In school I was terrible at English; in those days you weren’t judged on ideas, it was where you put your full stops and comma. When I voiced my reservations she said, “Brian, I have editors with ink pots full of full stops and commas. It’s ideas that count.” And that’s how it started, and it’s gone on ever since. I don’t know how I got 82 ideas. How do you get ideas? It’s not easy.”

Does the training you had as a painter make you approach things differently?

I’m sure it does. I wasn’t interested by the illustrations that were around at the time. I was trying to do something different; in fact I’ve put it in writing:

“Our children are our inheritance and our immortality. They are the building blocks of our civilisation, but we are sometimes inclined to forget this important and crucial fact. A child’s soul is like an empty book on which anything may be written. It is capable of all things but contains nothing. We must write in that empty book about love, humour, compassion, truth, understanding and justice.”

I try and do that in my books: in for example, The Hunter and His Dog. We used to have a lovely long-haired Dachshund. And when he was three or four he became blind. Then he lost his sense of smell and he would just sit in a corner all day. Next door there lived a ferocious big dog. The whole village was scared of him. He used to come round to our house at seven o’clock every morning and howl until we let him in. He came and he sat beside our little dog and licked him all day. It made me realise that animals have compassion. Then a little while later I was having my breakfast and I heard gunshots and dogs barking and I thought, “That’s it: the idea for my story”

The story starts with a hunter, who goes to a farm to buy a young dog to train as a hunting dog. This he does by throwing sticks which the dog fetches back. Then they go out hunting and the hunter shoots a duck. The dog goes after it but he’s full of compassion for the suck. It takes it to a safe place and starts licking it. And this keeps going on. When the dog goes back to the hunter it takes a stick with it. The hunter becomes intrigued because one day he sees the dog going into the pantry to get food to feed the ducks. He follows the dog and when he sees what he has done, he is horrified. Remorseful, he takes the ducks back to his farm. When the ducks have recovered he takes them off into the sunrise and lets them all fly away.

 When I did my counting book -123, I didn’t want to do it in the conventional way. I took the three basic shapes, the circle, rectangle and triangle. One circle is a component of many parts: it’s not just one, it’s .555 or .1. So I made it abstract using pattern. I did the same thing with the triangle and the rectangle and then I joined them together so they start building up to make shapes, like a duck for instance.

 When you started, did you set out to break boundaries?

No. It was the old Yorkshire attitude: “Everybody’s daft except thee and me and I’m not so sure about thee” My approach was ‘don’t interfere with me, I’m going to do it anyway and if you don’t like it, too bad’. You have to believe in yourself. I suppose it was a kind of arrogance, but more about a belief in children and what I was doing.

 In terms of style did you do anything to cater for your readership?

 No. They had to take it or leave it. But every subject demands its own way of going about the task. You don’t play Bach in the same way that you play Chopin. There’s a slightly different way of interpreting those very different composers. It’s expressing the inner reality of what you’re doing. The curator of the Tokyo Fuji Museum and the director of the Wildsmith Museum once said to me, “When I was a student I used to save my money to buy your books. I remember the art master asking us to draw a bird, draw a fish, draw a bottle and he came round and said ‘No, you haven’t painted it. You haven’t painted it. He brought out my ABC and said ‘That’s what’s painted here, the inner reality of what it is.’” That’s what’s important. It doesn’t matter how you do it as long as you do that, because that’s the essential wonder of everything.

Who are your artistic inspirations?

Giotto, Goya, Turner, Picasso, They are just a few. They are all superb. Piero della Francesco in particular. He is one of the most innovative and wonderful creators. He was very famous as a mathematician but he wasn’t very much thought of in his time. In England we have William Blake. Wonderful. He died in poverty. One of the most original artists England has produced. His paintings are not like English art. They’re extraordinary images.

You obviously love the natural world. Do you see children as a part of the untamed natural world or are you trying to get them to appreciate it?

That’s a good question. I want them to appreciate it and I want them to be a part of the world. But I also want them to preserve it. This is what I said in the touring exhibition catalogue: “For many of us life is or can be wonderful, but for our children and our children’s children maintaining an ecological balance and treating our wonderful world with great respect and love is essential to humanity now and in the future.”

I love the effects you get when you paint leaves, or fine animal fur, as on the donkey in The Miller, the Boy and the Donkey. Can you tell us something about the techniques you use?

In a case like the donkey, I did the drawing and I filled in the shape with a thick acrylic paint. When it was dry I then painted over it in various thicknesses of wash and when it was dry I took a razor blade and lightly scraped the top off. There’s no way you could get that effect with a brush.

 For The Owl and the Woodpecker I drew the limits of the tree, then the owl, and, again, I filled it full of acrylic and lightly scraped it to give that wonderful feeling of feathers. Then I just painted in with thick gouache and drew the leaves with thicker paint on top. You paint on a rough surface that you’ve applied in acrylic, arrange that surface, take a lightly dampened cloth and wipe it over and just paint the rest on top.

About a year or so after the terrible review you got in the TLS for your first book, the Arabian Nights, you won the Greenaway medal for ABC. Do you think that critic might have felt threatened about what your work said about childhood?

 You’re right. I think that critic did feel threatened. I’m still trying to find out who it was! Before I came here I looked up a lot of the reviews of ABC and there were some wonderful reviews, but that one knocked them all out.

When you were working there were other artists such as Raymond Briggs, John Burningham, Quentin Blake and Jan Pienkowski, who became influential in their different ways.

We’re all very different. Artistically they were baked beans on toast as opposed to three star Michelin food. I love baked beans on toast! But that’s another side of illustration.

The only thing that bothers me is there are people who want me out of the way. When I won the Kate Greenaway medal my wife was not invited to the reception. Can you imagine? I read that in 1966 I was runner-up for the Hans Christian Andersen medal. I was never told I was the British candidate. I was never told I was the runner-up. In 35 years I’ve never been invited to exhibit my work in this country. I’ve never been asked to give talks. I’ve given lecture tours across Canada, five or six times in America, South Africa, Taiwan, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. Not once here.

ABC is out of print at the moment. Does it bother you?

Absolutely. But when I look around the market for children all I see is a downgrading of everything. It’s all sweets and crisps, whereas nourishing food is just as tasty. I remember when I first started Smith’s wouldn’t stock my books. The buyer hated my work. But I had my own corner in Harrods. I went in one Christmas and they had a pile of my books. I went in the next week and they’d all gone. I asked them if they were going to order more and they said no: “If I buy yours I won’t sell the others.”

Do you think picture books are undervalued as an art form in this country?

Yes, absolutely. If you go to Japan everything’s art. That vase – they wouldn’t say it’s inferior to this, that or the other. Here – crikey! But it’s all part of the art establishment. When you think about the Tate Gallery - the attitude! Are you working on anything at the moment? I’ve just handed Oxford the idea for a new book. Mabel George said to me “Don’t ever tell anyone your ideas”, so I’m not going to tell.

Thank you Brian Wildsmith for talking to Write Away.