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Illustrator Jan Pienkowski travelled from Morocco to Samarkand to make sure he got the details right for his version of The 1001 Nights…
When Jan Pienkowski was growing up on a farm in Poland, a neighbour had a crafty way of getting him to drink his hot milk every day. She would tell him a story but stop at a crucial point, agreeing to go on only if he drank up. “They were gruesome tales, about eating children,” recalls Pienkowski in the kitchen of his London home. Those stories – often about Baba Yaga, the witch-like character of Slavic folklore – no doubt gave rise many years later to Pienkowski’s world-renowned Meg and Mog books, about a witch and her cat – and, in the mode of their telling, to his adaptation of The 1001 Nights (published in 2007 as The Thousand Nights And One Night).
Pienkowski’s recent work is perhaps the high point of his distinctive style: silhouettes of camels and courtesans trip across colourful backgrounds framed with beautiful Arabic calligraphy. The links between the book and his youth don’t end with the saga of the milk; “The style of The Thousand Nights And One Night is based on my childhood, because in Poland during the war there wasn’t much in the way of paints or crayons so we used to cut things out of paper and make pictures that way,” he says.
Pienkowski originally developed his striking silhouette style when he was working at an advertising agency in London in the 1960s. He had been asked to provide a sample illustration for the publishers of a new children’s book. “It was a sky-scape with a city underneath in the snow, all very nice, and then there were some people flying through the sky – on a pie, of all things,” he recalls. “I looked at it and thought, ‘It’s all right except for these figures; they’re not good enough. I know – I’ll just paint them black.’ So I did that, and I got the job.”
It was with a friend from Cambridge, where Pienkowski studied English and Classics at university, that he really made his name. He had worked with Helen Nicoll on a BBC children’s television programme when the two of them created hapless witch Meg and her cat Mog, whose adventures in bold primary colours have featured in many books, a television series and even a stage play. Pienkowski went on to captivate older children with such pop-up books as Haunted House and Dinner Time: open these creations and the gaping mouth of a gorilla or crocodile springs up from the page.
In the last few years, Pienkowski has returned to the silhouette to produce stunning books based on traditional stories: The Fairy Tales – including Snow White and Cinderella – Nut Cracker and The Thousand Nights And One Night, in each case with the text being written by his partner, David Walser. For the 73-year-old Pienkowski, the attraction of illustrating these stories lies in their well-honed narratives. “When you get on in age you are perhaps not quite so hooked on novelty,” he says. “Because I was lucky enough to have parents who read to me when I was little, I know quite a lot of classical texts, like the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, the Greek myths, the Bible and The 1001 Nights. In a way, I want them to go on living. I want them to go on to a new audience because they have lasted so long that they’ve been stripped of anything unnecessary; they’re very economical, and that is what appeals to me.”
For The Thousand Nights And One Night, Pienkowski and Walser travelled extensively: “We went from Morocco along the Mediterranean to Egypt, and then up to Lebanon and Syria and on to wonderful Samarkand, Bukhara, Isfahan, Muscat and north India as well. It was marvellous.”
With his career now spanning 40 years, Pienkowski continues to work, now drawing or cutting out images, scanning them and then working on them in his computer. “The fact that you can fiddle around on the computer with images means that people who haven’t been trained or have no art education can have a go at it,” he says. “People start feeling that they can do it, which is really good for children too.”
In his lifetime, Pienkowski has seen attitudes towards illustrators change wildly. “Comics were not allowed either at home or at school,” he recollects. “In the sixth form we would confiscate these comics from the younger students and read them. I think I learnt an incredible amount, and I’m not the only one; in many ways I think the only art that remains is illustration.” n
Words Omer Ali
Photography Tim White
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Children’s book illustrator Jan Pienkowski, photographed at whis home in London
Jan Pienkowski’s glowing silhouette style has entranced generations of children and adults alike
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