William Stobbs has appeared once before on this blog and elicited at the time a number of appreciative comments from people who knew either him or his work. He's been one of my favourite illustrators since discovering the book Gianni and the Ogre that I originally blogged in 2009. So it was a delight to discover that he also illustrated a book by my current favourite author, William Mayne: Summer Visitors. Stobbs illustrations for this one are a little less stylized than for the orgre book but nonetheless they are just so assured and fine whether illustrating figures or landscapes there is an exquisite use of black line and white space, there is a real sense of the neo-romantic about his landscape work in particular. Above all you can tell that here is someone who genuinely understood the process involved in getting his artwork into print because these images zing from the page even on soft, not particularly good quality paper. He was a real master of his craft and deserves to be better known. The book, I am afraid, is one of the Mayne titles that I have on the shelf to read but not yet...
