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Ben Blathwayt (born 1951) Ben Blathwayt was born in Bath on 25 August 1951. Encouraged by his father, an amateur artist in pastels, he learned to paint and worked from his own studio from the age of seventeen. Employed as a part-time office boy, cartographer and photographer for a firm of architects, he also illustrated the city guide book and held a number of exhibitions while still in his teens. After his marriage in 1974, he moved to the Hebrides, finding work as a dairyman and, two years later, moved to Wales to work as a wildlife artist for Nature Conservancy. Settling in Exmoor in 1979, he began to develop as a freelance artist, through exhibitions with Bath's Nevill Gallery and various designs for the Medici Society. Bruno's Band, the first of fifteen childre��n's books, was published in 1986 by Julia MacRae Books.
American and foreign language editions of many of these works testify to their success.
The grand perspective of 'The air in the country smelled sweet...', from Bruno's Band, demonstrates that Blathwayt mastered spatial design in book illustration from the very first. The viewpoint is such that the reader can look both down into the foreground waggon, to see Bruno's Band in action, and out across the summer landscape. Smoke from the engine and crows above the corn stress the illusion of space and the division of earth and air. This image also sets the key for Blathwayt's illustration in its combination of almost cartoon-like simplicity and mimetic detail. Blathwayt's most popular books are the four that comprise the�Bramble series, published by Walker Books for Sainsbury between 1989-90. The special quality of each lies less in the basic storyline than in its particular atmosphere for, deriving from Blathwayt's experience as a dairyman, they together depict the life of a farm over the four seasons of the year. This identity in difference is seen most clearly in the books' endpapers, where an identical birds-eye view of the farm landscape is shown at each successive season, while images that follow pick up on that season's particular palette and features, such as leafless snow-covered trees. Blathwayt has written of the Hebridean farm on which he worked that 'all I love best is there'; in these books he conveys his affection for the 'light and scenery and wildlife' to a new generation.�����
