The Finnbrit Federation Seminar – The Bigger Picture
The Ambassador’s Residence, Helsinki, 26 September, 2025
Anthony Shaw
The calm before the seminar – photo by Anthony Shaw
Under the now traditional azure skies and fading autumn leaves of the Ambassador’s Residence in Kaivopuisto, attenders at the annual seminar met once again to attend the Federation’s Autumn Seminar and listen to talks by two local illustrators, and from a Professor of Illustration at the Cambridge School of Art.
However, for the first time in the history of this event, it was organised this year not only by the activists in the Federation in Tampere but in conjunction with another body, the Finnish Association of Freelance Illustrators. After a warm introduction to the event by Ambassador Davies, who reminded us that the Seminar in 2024 was her foirst official function in her new appointment, we got down to business. With the three speakers all well down the road along their professional careers, the audience had the opportunity to hear the stories of three careers that had all started at British art schools of the 1960s but had taken them in different directions around the globe.
Leslie Quagraine – From Battle to Battle
Born to a Finnish mother and a Ghanean father, Leslie grew up in north London and , as he said, ‘like all children I enjoyed drawing’. It was the attraction of the newly introduced colour supplements in the Sunday newspapers that prompted him to go to art school in Barnet and later to the Middlesex Polytecnic (now the Middlesex University), where he was in the same class as late 1970s pop star Adam Ant. While the real Adam Goddard’s career peaked in the UK, Leslie turned down an offer of work from the Oxford University Press and opted to try his luck and look for work as an illustrator in his mother’s homeland, and relocated to Helsinki.
Leslie had many tales about the entering the job market in 1980s Finland, the first one being the difficulty of finding anybody at work, since it was midsummer and everybody was on their ‘kesäloma’, summer vacations. The process involved finding an empty public ‘phone box’ and with a large handful of coins ringing around companies asking for a chance to present his portfolio. Working initially for the long-running practical scientists’ magazine Tekniikan Maailma, then producing book covers for Bonnier Publishing in Stockholm, Leslie eventually made contact with editors at Helsingin Sanomat. Although his work was with the technical editor there, his reputation for rapid and the same time classy illustrations (he was told his illustrations had that indefinable magical Finnish ingredient ‘ju-ju’) soon led to commissions for more topical articles and his career there as a cartoonist.
Many of Leslie’s stories were accompanied by examples of his drawing, from multicoloured technical illustrations to black and while sketches of contemporary 1980s politicians like Paavo Väyrynen and Pekka Vennamo. He discussed his style of illustration, realistic but also fun, and how practicalities also impinged upon this style – noticing that he was able to charge more for a drawing that included a large number of individual dots! As the years progressed Leslie has been involved in many other speculative projects, where he was able to use some of those creative ideas that had initially appeared to him at art college! Meanwhile readers who still own LPs (or vinyls) will find Leslie’s drawings on the Finnish covers of Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry and even the Hurriganes. As a freelance artist, working like the original ‘free lance’ fighters of the medieval years, Leslie has fought many battles and as a sprightly 70+ year old is still in the field today.
The three speakers – photo by Anthony Shaw
Martin Salisbury – From Sketchbook to Bookshop
A fellow product of the English art school of the 1960s, Martin has spent a life immersed in illustrating and talked extensively about his orientations to work first as an illustrator of children’s book and lately as a teacher of courses designed to train children’s illustrators.
Martin has for many years been associated with the Cambridge School of Art, and stressed how its creation with the support of the essayist, social and art critic and talented artist John Ruskin has been an inspiration to him. Ruskin himself was an all round polymath, a truly progressive Victorian man of science and of letters, who wrote extensively about social and environmental issues in the years when such themes were almost unknown. The original CSA is now part of Anglia Ruskin University.
The development of illustration for children’s literature was recounted with multiple examples and references to a long list of contemporary illustrators. The first that Martin mentioned was very familiar to older attenders, Ronald Searle the creator of the Saint Trinian’s School books. It was Searle’s use of sketchbooks, including those from his time in a prisoner of war camp in south east Asia, that Martin highlighted in showing the relation between drawing from life (or from observation) and drawing from knowledge. His own recent book examines the role that sketchbooks play in forming the basis for many an illustrator’s final works, which results in a variety of individual styles that contrasts with the type of similar, sentimental style of illustration that commercial agencies produce.
Martin described the processes involved in setting up courses, and ultimately a whole degree course in illustration for children’s literature that he has started in Cambridge. As a result of these activities, Martin has his finger on the pulse of the very best in children’s illustration and proudly told of trips to the annual Illustrator’s Fair in Bologna, Italy where the best work is offered for viewing, and particularly for the eyes of future children’s literature publishers. The names Oliver Jeffes, Angela Brooksbank and the Bulgarian Vyara Boyadjieva were just a few of the many that he mentioned having a prominent role in this field, almost all of whom were prominent sketchbook drawers who utilised particularaly the creativity that they developed with pen and paper sketching from life in the real world, outside their studios.
Stewart Gray and a favourite drawing – photo by Anthony Shaw
Stewart Gray – Technical, Product and Information Illustration: the Inside Story
The third speaker of the day was another north Londoner, but one whose relocation to Finland was more round-about than Leslie Quagraine’s. Finishing school at 16, Stewart was encouraged to follow his interest in drawing that had been kindled in his young days by children’s comics, and in particular a boy’s weekly entitled Eagle. The lengthy entry for the comic in Wikipedia describes the founding of the weekly boys comic by an Anglican vicar in Lancashire in partnership with a local war veteran who was studying illustration, Frank Hampson. What particularly appealed to the young Stewart Gray, and is equally apparent in his own contemporary illustrations, was the precision of highly detailed technical artwork that was prominent in Eagle, in particular the main story starring the intrepid and deliberately inspirational (at least to boys of that era) Dan Dare, ‘Pilot of the Future’ and his thrilling adventures in outer space!
Stewart’s own progress from the London School of Printing, and later via the Fokker aircraft factory in Holland, was governed by pursuit of his own skill in technical or information illustration, producing mainly technical manuals, until romance enticed him north to Helsinki. Like Leslie Quagraine the path to full time employment in the early 1980s was not straightforward, to say the least! Hence a career as a free lance illustrator has been Stewart’s solution, and he has flourished on Finnsh soil.
His work has included contracts with almost all of the major industrial companies in the country, as well as a number abroad. Stewart showed a variety of these illustrations, ranging from refracting devices used in the oil industry or cut-away diagrams of cutting-edge Finnish ice-breakers, to arrangements of food for popular culinary magazines. The number young illustrators in the audience (the Seminars appealing mainlyto those beyond their working years) must have wondered where their future career paths might lead, especially in the age of Artificial Intelligence. Stewart was keen to assert that individual skill will never be replaced by artificial skills, hence the message of the Seminar might be reduced to the epithet: Pick up your Pencils and Draw! (See the story of the Seminar Afterparty for more details)
The three speakers – photo by Anthony Shaw