Michael Foreman (author/illustrator)

For the spaceman, see Michael Foreman.

Michael Foreman (born 21 March 1938) is an award-winning British author and illustrator, mainly for children. He lives in London. He is one of the best-known and most prolific writer-illustrators of children's books.[1]

Contents

Early life and studies

He was born and grew up in the seaside village of Pakefield, near Lowestoft, Suffolk, where his mother kept the village shop.[2][3] He studied at Lowestoft School of Art, and later in London at the Royal College of Art[4], where he won a scholarship to the U.S.A.

Career

After graduating, he lectured at St Martin's School of Art, London; and then moved to Chicago, where he worked as Art director of Playboy. He later returned to London and worked as Art Director of King.

In 1967 he returned to lecturing, and has since worked in London at the Royal College of Art, the London School of Printing and the Central School of Art.

His career as an illustrator began in 1961 when he illustrated the Comic Alphabet written by Eric Partridge and published by Routledge & Kegan Paul. Over the years he has illustrated books by Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde, Roald Dahl, Rudyard Kipling and many others, as well as writing and illustrating his own books. He has designed Christmas stamps for the Post Office, and has regularly contributed to American and European magazines.

Foreman has over 180 books to his name. His array of prizes including the Kate Greenaway Medal (twice), the Smarties Book Prize (for his books War Game (novel), later turned into an animated short, and The Little Reindeer ), the Kurt Maschler Award, the Children's Book Award, the Bologna Book Prize and the Francis William's Illustration Award (twice). Exhibitions of his work have been held in Europe, America and Japan.

He has illustrated many of Michael Morpurgo's books. His own stories often focus on conflict and war. His autobiographic War Boy: A Country Childhood, which combines photographs and adverts with watercolours and pen-and-ink drawings, was exhibited at the National Army Museum in 2010.[1] His colorful book War and Peas is about a king (depicted as a lion wearing a suit of armor) who begs food from a rich nation, only to have to battle the Fat King's army men amid towering piles of oversized food. The book can be seen as a parody of the struggle between Great Britain and Northern Ireland.[5] Penni Cotton notes in Picture Books Sans Frontières the way that Foreman has the king and his impoverished subjects appear washed-out and faded in the beginning.[5]

Approach to illustration

Foreman learnt to respond instantly to text as an art student.[6] Having drawn for the newspapers and for the police, drawing female suspects when Identikit only catered for men, he gained valuable drawing experience. A travel scholarship took him all around the world, drawing landscapes, architecture and wildlife. Although many of his books feature luminous watercolours, it is the drawing that he sees as vital: "It's all in the drawing. It's a question of creating another world, believable in its own right. I think I was very lucky to have started art school so young when they actually taught Art. It was a rigorous training - not just painting and drawing from life - but hours of anatomy and perspective.... it really taught you to understand what you were looking at."[6] His aim in illustration is to make the worlds created believable, real: "I keep trying to make things more real, not in a literal photographic sense, but in an emotional sense , telling a story by capturing the essence of the situation, giving it some meaning."[6]

Partial bibliography

Further reading

References

  1. ^ a b "Michael Foreman: 50 years of picture books". The Guardian. 22 February 2010. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/gallery/2010/feb/11/michael-foreman-army-museum. Retrieved 7 December 2010. 
  2. ^ Triggs, Pat (March 1983). "Authorgraph No.19: Michael Foreman". Books for Keeps 19. http://www.booksforkeeps.co.uk/issue/19/childrens-books/articles/authorgraph/authorgraph-no19-michael-foreman. Retrieved 7 December 2010. 
  3. ^ "Michael Foreman". Puffin Books. Penguin Books. http://www.puffin.co.uk/nf/Author/AuthorPage/0,,1000010989,00.html. Retrieved 2008-12-24. 
  4. ^ "Michael Foreman". Contemporary Writers. British Council. http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=authC2D9C28A02840211B9QkG2895C82. Retrieved 2009-01-19. 
  5. ^ a b Cotton, Peri (2000). Picture Books Sans Frontières. Trentham Books. pp. 89–90. ISBN 1 85856 183 3. 
  6. ^ a b c http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/features/magicpencil/foreman.html

External links