James Mayhew

Art was always my favourite subject at school. I remember when I was 10 years old and my teacher introduced me to sketching with a scratchy old dip-pen and a bottle of ink. It was love at first sight, and I still use pen and ink to this day.

I grew up in a tiny Suffolk village called Blundeston, famous as the birthplace of David Copperfield in the novel by Charles Dickens. So I knew, from a very young age, that books and writing were something special. My father was a pilot, and was full of stories of his adventures, while my grandfather once went treasure hunting to a famous pirate hideaway called Cocos Island, so I heard more stories from him too. Growing up together, my sister Kate and I had all sorts of adventures in the countryside, and I suppose our games were another kind of storytelling.

Then of course there were books! How I loved Munro Leaf and Robert Lawson's Ferdinand the Bull, Ian Fleming's Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Bang (with astonishing pictures by John Burningham); And Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are, which I never owned but borrowed over and over from the library. Even before I could read, Kate would tell me stories from books, while I gazed at the illustrations. Tove Jansson's Moomins, Rosemary Manning's Green Smoke, Barbara Sleigh's Carbonel... We had many favourites! But it was my mother who painted and first let me loose on a box of paints. Many people said to me - "You can’t be an artist! It’s not a proper job!" And yet I always knew I would be an artist of some kind when I grew up, and eventually went on to study illustration at Maidstone College of Art, graduating in 1987 with first class honours.