Michael Foreman: Painting with Rainbows


An interview by Nicholas Tucker


Michael Foreman is one of the UK’s greatest children’s illustrators. He is also amazingly youthful; aged seventy- seven he could easily pass for twenty years younger. We talked together at the opening in Newcastle of a new exhibition put on by Seven Stories: Painting with Rainbows – A Michael Foreman Exhibition. Made up from illustrations taken from some of his best-loved books, this runs until next June before going on tour. It is a beautiful and often moving show but with plenty of visual jokes thrown in as well.


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ome of the illustrations come from his memoir, War Boy: A Country Childhood, winner of the Kate Greenaway Medal 1989. This superb book comes over with such intensity I wondered whether he views this time in his life as particularly formative.


‘Well of course, as a child I didn’t realise how unusual a time it was. Air raids, running across the street to the shelter, that was normal. I never remember being frightened, because my mum was there and if she was around everything was bound to be okay.’


His mother ran the local shop in Pakefield, on the Suffolk Coast. His father had died a month before his son was born. One picture in War Boy shows the shop crowded with young service men wearing paper hats and drinking cups of tea on Christmas evening wishing ‘Good night’ to the young Michael unwillingly going off to bed.


‘I can still remember how much I resented having to miss more of the fun. But what makes that picture more poignant is that some of those men, so happy on that particular night, would not be alive one year later.’


Michael’s hatred of warfare was evident from his first picture book The General, where soldiers decide to make their surroundings look beautiful rather than war-like. He continues to promote a broadly pacifist message.


‘Because of the constant flow of truly graphic images of war and suffering available almost every day on television, I now feel that there are no subjects I can’t touch on in my picture books. But of course anything you do also depends on how you leave your readers at the end of a book. I can’t see any point in producing a book for children, however realistic, that also deprives them of any sort of hope. I have never felt myself that there is nothing left to live for, so why would I put that message into any of my work?’


He also has strong feelings about our natural environment. Does he ever get disheartened when he hears about rainforests still being chopped down?


12 Books for Keeps No.214 September 2015


‘No, you must fight harder, work harder, struggle on. People can’t continue indefinitely to be so reckless about the environment. I have been lucky earlier in my career to have worked for magazines that have sent me all round the world. I still get ideas from the sketchbooks I kept at the time. So I can set a story in a real location which can then become as important as any character.’


Michael is predominantly a water-colourist, with a special ability to paint landscapes where colours merge into each other. Was there any particular influence upon him when he was first developing his style? And has he ever used computer technology in his work?


‘I was trained as a painter and for a while I liked the abstract work of Mondrian and Ben Nicholson. But I was also fascinated by the American social realist artist Ben Shahn and his wonderful jagged drawing line. He had a great influence on me and I named my son after him. As for computers, I don’t know one end from the other. And frankly, doing artwork on them doesn’t appeal to me in any way. I like going to the art store, I like buying pencils, crayons and paper, and finishing the day with colours under my fingernails. Working on a screen would have none of that.’


He has, over the years, produced many picture books. How does he feel about the amount of work this must have entailed?


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