As a writer, it’s rare to have your work illustrated. Rarer still to have it illustrated and find your work truly illuminated. I was extraordinarily lucky to have both, first time. When my Dear Annie column came to life it was with Clare Mackie’s needle like (in more ways than one) brush that the words were partnered. Clare’s illustrations are as multi layered as they are exquisitely detailed. I urge you to see her art in the flesh if ever you can – you could look a hundred times at one of her pictures and still see something new.
Clare Mackie was born on a farm, in the Kincardineshire countryside, on the east coast of Scotland. She grew up surrounded by fields, chickens, pigs and cows and was especially happy with the horses, although she wasn’t the conventional horsey girl. Insects, which now feature so much in her work, absorbed her too, although they can’t have been too enamoured with her. As a child she would collect bees in a jam jar, “shake it until they were really angry”, release them, then “run away screaming”. No wonder her bumble bees have such attitude now. Small toads were also collected in a “kettle-handbag”(literally a kettle with the lid off, put to the sort of logical use only a child could, don’t tell Gucci) in an eccentric great aunt’s garden and “importantly swung about”. Look out for handbags, on a rare occasion manifest with mouths, in her illustrations.
Aged 12, Clare decided she wanted to be an artist. After leaving secondary school, she put herself through a foundation year at both Dundee College of Commerce and Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art. Then after being told she was “forcing clay to do things it wasn’t supposed to” on the ceramics course at Edinburgh College of Art, she stumbled into the illustration department where her talents at last could be properly channelled. Five years later she left Edinburgh with a first class BA Hons (Dip) in Illustration and Printmaking.
At first, after graduating, Clare was told she was “too quirky” by most who did not get her work (not everyone does and not everyone should). But whilst still at college she had illustrated the cover of J.D. Salinger’s biography as well as illustrating articles for The Guardian and The Observer. After Edinburgh she took a year out to build up her portfolio, then went to London. That was back in 1990 and since then many lucky writers and art directors around the world have had their words enter Clare’s brain and come out again through fingers upon which I believe angels dance.
