One Sunday morning in the early 1950s I had a new customer on my newspaper round. He had just arrived in our Suffolk village from Yorkshire. His name was Tom Hudson.
He asked me a strange question. “Is there clay in the local cliffs?”
“Yes,” I said, “we used to make models of tanks and spitfires from it. Bake the models hard in our mum’s oven, and paint them with camouflage colours.”
He asked me to take a bucket of clay to the art school in nearby Lowestoft where he was just starting as a teacher. When I delivered the clay it proved too gritty for modeling, or sculpture, as he called it. He suggested I join the Saturday class he was starting for school children. It was free, so I did.
Tom Hudson took us sketching on the first day. He gave us each a sketchbook and pencils and took us out to draw the real world. Trees, boats, cliffs, the bustling harbour. Life. I loved it. I love it still.
When putting together my new book A Life in Pictures I was able to relive numerous journeys around the world through the pages of the sketchbooks I had kept over the years.
From the Arctic, following reindeer herds, to the islands of the South Seas, from above the snowline in the Himalayas riding yaks to below the waves of the North Sea while drawing oil rigs.
That first Saturday class, at the age of 11 or 12, opened an opportunity I didn’t think happened to village boys like me. From an early age I had always loved drawing. Laying on the floor, in front of the fire, drawing from my imagination, marching soldiers, dive bombers, spaceships and monsters. Now, suddenly, I was drawing from real life!
Drawing was the only thing I was any good at in school, but I never dreamt I would, or even could, spend my life doing it.
For me, travelling and drawing the world, experiencing as much as possible first hand, has been very important. Making notes, drawing and writing on the move, became second nature. Gazing from train windows as cities and landscape and other people’s lives slide by, daydreaming on long flights when ideas whisper to your idle brain and can be jotted down in your notebook.
Just last week, on a commuter train from Waterloo, I was treated to a spectacular sunset over the old Battersea Power Station. I don’t think anyone else in the carriage saw it. They were all ‘eyes down’ on their mobile gadgets. Should I shout “Look! You’re missing the sun set!” They would probably think “silly old fool.”
Well, this “silly old fool” will never be able to thank Tom Hudson enough for making me look up and beyond my childhood horizons. To see, record and respond to the real, wide and wonderful world.
The sketchbooks are my footsteps along that journey. The locations don’t just provide backgrounds for illustrations, they often suggest new stories. Sometimes, a note, a sketch, cross fertilises from one sketchbook to another, to connect across time and space to give birth to a new idea …
The seed of an idea laying dormant in an old sketchbook is fed the missing ingredient from a new experience. Trying to share some of these experiences, some of the wonders, is one of the reasons why I do books.
Hopefully, many children will meet a ‘Mr Hudson’ and be inspired to find their own way in the world.
Michael Foreman’s A Life in Pictures is available from the Guardian bookshop.