Inside Quentin Blake

Quentin Blake accompanied Roald Dahl as my childhood heroes. The image of Matilda sitting on top of piles of books with her feet dangling from the floor, and the way she took a big cup of chocolate while she read through the pages of Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days, I knew Matilda could have been my best friend.

And she was.

I started cherishing my English class sessions, because I wish one day I’d meet Miss Honey. I wish there would never be a Trunchbull, and until now every time I eat chocolate cake, I would refer how good it was to how good the chocolate cake was for Bruce. I wanted a big mug that could contain hot chocolate – even though it was thirty degree in Jakarta, which make drinking hot chocolate unaccustomed. 

And then I met the Big Friendly Giant and Sophie, and then I thought Charlie was nice but Mr. Wonka was a bit odd, and then I avoided reading The Twits because they were mean, but I knew that it would be stupid not to read it because it was Dahl who wrote it. Roald Dahl put words into my heads, Blake coloured it.

(This is going to be cheesy so heads up) I become the person I am today thanks to Matilda. I jumble words and play around with it because Mr. Dahl made it so easy and fun to read. I love rhymes and limericks because he finally made it make sense. I accepted that everybody can draw – but some might have a hard time conveying their imagination – because Blake had never drawn a straight line, and the hands of his characters are crooked, and his trees were random compilations of things that don’t look like a tree, but I knew it was a tree, and even without colours, my Matilda was translucent and colourful.

There were only nine displays of works that was exhibited in the House of Illustration’s this summer. I haven’t read Dahl or saw Blake’s illustration lately, but he made me, me. I needed to pay him a tribute.

So there I was, within his water-colour world, meeting the characters that he breathe shades and strokes into. He reinvent my world all over again.