![]() When the family moved to London, he attended the Cardinal Vaughan Memorial school in Holland Park, where he learned Latin and Greek, before going on to King’s College, Cambridge, to study classics and English. His passion for art developed further after he started life-drawing classes at the age of 13. On arrival in Britain, aged 10, he was sent to Lucton boarding school in Herefordshire, and added English to his already fluent German, Italian and Polish. Photograph: Sarah Lee/the GuardianĪs a young child, Pieńkowski was taught by his mother, who encouraged his passion for drawing and making things. Pieńkowski almost broke down when talking about this time in his life on Desert Island Discs in 2009, saying that shrill sounds and screaming still frightened him.Ī Necklace of Raindrops, 1968, by Joan Aiken and Jan Pieńkowski. They often lived in extreme hardship, and for a period they were forced to sleep in pits under train tracks. The family then left Warsaw and travelled around Europe, including to Vienna, Italy and Germany, experiencing many hazards. When Jan was five years old, Jerzy, who had helped organise resistance groups, had to go underground for a year. The family moved to Warsaw, where his mother’s family lived, and his father worked briefly as a bailiff. Rural life on a farm was cut short, however, when the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939. I used to have terrible dreams, nightmares, of this witch, always chasing me and trying to put me in a pot … I think in a way she gave birth to Meg.” The woman would tell him “these totally unsuitable stories, get to a cliffhanger – and stop. It was while being cared for by a neighbour that Jan first encountered the terrifying tales about a Baba Yaga-type figure. They also gave me my palette.” He insisted that children like to be frightened in a safe place, although he did admit that some Slavic folk tales are pretty terrifying.īorn in Warsaw, Jan was the only child of Jerzy Pieńkowski, a country squire before the second world war, and Wanda (nee Garlicka), a scientist. As he put it, “the violence and hyperbole of the Old Testament stories found an echo in Desperate Dan and Dennis the Menace. Another inspiration for Pieńkowski was comics. ![]() One or two critics questioned the frightening nature of many of his picture books, and he certainly had a tendency towards the macabre and gothic. This deliciously scary yet funny pop-up book changed what could be achieved through paper engineering and he went on to explore this genre with titles including the inventive and funny Robot (1981) and the thrilling Little Monsters (1986).Ī page from Pieńkowski’s pop-up book Haunted House, 1979, which changed what could be achieved through paper engineering. The masterful Haunted House won Pieńkowski his second Greenaway award, in 1979. His interest in paper cut-outs, he said, stemmed from a wartime experience in an air raid shelter in Warsaw, where a soldier had kept the young Pieńkowski amused by cutting newspapers into wonderful shapes. Their first collaboration was the equally delicately illustrated A Necklace of Raindrops (1968). This was composed of the eastern European fairy tales that were close to Pieńkowski’s heart and featured an early appearance of his beautiful silhouette illustrations. He won the Kate Greenaway award in 1971 with the writer Joan Aiken for their second collaboration, The Kingdom Under the Sea. Pieńkowski said that he took his palette from comic strips such as Desperate Dan and Dennis the Menace. Mog, the stripy cat from the Meg and Mog stories.
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