Michael Foreman

I briefly made it over to the Edinburgh Festival yesterday and spent a couple of hours at the Edinburgh Book Festival, where I was thrilled to find this book; 'The General' by Janet Charters. It was originally published in 1961 and reprinted by Templer Publishing in 2010 to celebrate it's 50th anniversary.
It is a book to cherish, about peace and beauty and an end to wars.
It was of course the illustration that drew me to it as it looked so much like my favorite illustrator Gerald Rose's work. In fact I was not so surprised to see that it was illustrated by Michael Foreman, as he attended Lowestoft Art School the same as Gerald Rose, but it did make me wonder about who was teaching at this school and whether Michael and Gerald had fallen under the same tutorship.
This was Michael's first book, his style developed into solid washes of colour and I had many books illustrated by him as a child. This less finished style is a revelation to me in Foreman's repertoire, I really love the quality of line and the use of colour, humour and space in these works.