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Carefully spaced deep olive, soft rust and dusty pink planes sit on warm chalk, with a much-redrawn charcoal line and an unmarked lower right.

From Winnie-the-Pooh to CoBrA

May 20268 min read

I wanted this site to look like mine before anyone had read a word of it, and the first thing I reached for was Winnie-the-Pooh. I mean the original books with E. H. Shepard’s drawings, which are part of my upbringing and of my character. The first chapter opens with a bear coming downstairs, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin, and Shepard needs only a few lines to give you the posture, the mood and the complete bear-ness of the bear. His drawings don’t sit in boxes. They wander into the text and the words make room for them.

Those books also belong, in my head, to a wider romance of adventure and of journals kept while travelling, with Shepard’s map of the Hundred Acre Wood inside the covers and an Expotition to the North Pole in chapter eight. A blog is a way of journalling your own life, so a field journal seemed to me a very apt form for this one, and I was particular about how it should work. When a batch of drawings came back too detailed, the detail was exactly what made them look like AI slop, so I asked for fewer elements and more of a pencil’s imperfections: scribbles on the page, and not what I called at the time a “big square in your face big drawing wanting attention”. They were not to teleport modern machinery into an old sketchbook either. I wanted analogies that could live in an old illustration, “mood, fitting, but not exactly the thing”, as I kept saying.

I kept asking for pencil because pencil was how I remembered them, which turns out to be half right. Shepard began in pencil, with loose sketches in which he might draw a character several times to find the position, and the V&A has more than 250 of them. Then he went over the lines he wanted to keep, and the finished drawing, the one that went to the printer, was pen and ink. The economy I had loved since childhood was what remained after a good deal of deciding.

The site duly acquired cream paper, ink drawings and journal typefaces, and people looked at it and said, “Oh, Claude made that, right?”

Too many of them said it for me to laugh it off. Claude had helped me build the site and I was hardly coy about that. The trouble was that cream paper, ink line and journal type had by then become what these models give you when nobody asks for anything in particular. I had arrived at that look by way of a bear I have loved since I was small, other people arrived at it by not deciding anything, and from the outside there was no way to tell us apart. A very personal choice looked as though nobody had made it.

Claude, it turned out, has a house style of its own, and a strong one. I spent several rounds trying to keep what mattered in the idea and remove that signature, and cooler paper, different inks and new typefaces changed the ingredients without changing the meal.

The next thing I went to was just as close to me. I grew up reading Penguin and Pelican paperbacks and they mean a lot to me, because I believe they did a great deal of good in the world by publishing really good work at prices people could afford, and because they had a real part in history. Allen Lane launched Penguin in 1935 at sixpence a book, the price of a packet of cigarettes, and got it into Woolworths, whose motto was nothing over sixpence. When Penguin brought out the complete Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1960 and ended up at the Old Bailey, the prosecutor asked the jury whether it was a book “you would even wish your wife or your servants to read”. The jury acquitted, two million copies sold within a month, and as far as I can tell reaching the servants had been the idea since 1935.

Lane also thought illustrated covers were trashy, so a Penguin was a horizontal grid of hard colour, orange for fiction, green for crime, blue for biography, and after Jan Tschichold had been through the typography in the 1940s the books were inexpensive mass editions, yet, as the Design Museum puts it, “every bit as well set and designed as the most expensive in the country”. I could think of worse things for a personal website to stand beside.

As a website it failed the same way the first one had. What came back was the same old-publication grammar, pale stock, editorial type and one careful accent colour, with all the hard colour gone out of it. An excursion through natural-history plates and specimen drawers ended no differently, and my verdict on the last of those rounds was that it was still a hundred per cent the generated look, just slightly more orange.

By then the pattern was hard to miss. I had been going to my bookshelf, and the bookshelf is where these models grew up. However personal my reasons for loving a book, they had been raised on all the others, and they had very settled views on what a bookish page ought to look like.

So I asked myself what else had meaning for me, and this time the answer had no paper in it. I love the work of Stockholm Design Lab, where type is treated as architecture and a page can be a few hard blocks of colour, and it feels to me like part of the culture I grew up in, which makes no obvious sense for a Dutchman looking at a Swedish studio. I took its structure, and the full saturation I associated with Aalto and Marimekko, where a red is allowed to be red, and for the first time the journal was replaced instead of redecorated. Claude turned those decisions into a system and carried it across the site, while I set the references, judged the work and kept pushing until the implementation held them.

For about a month I couldn’t have told you why it felt so close to home. It came to me when I went back to rewrite an earlier version of this essay and wandered off down memory lane: I had seen all of this before, the same colours, the same blocks and shapes, in the Dutch art around me in the eighties and nineties. I grew up in Rotterdam, in a centre bombed flat in 1940 and rebuilt with modern architecture, public art and strong colour, and all through my teenage years my mother took me to museums and exhibitions and out to the art standing around the city. She made looking an ordinary thing to do. Karel Appel’s work seemed to be everywhere, and even a whole bunch of the toys I had growing up came in that style and that palette. I had no names for most of it. It was what the world looked like, and it had gone a long way down before I ever had an opinion about typefaces.

So I chose Stockholm because it meant something to me, and only found out afterwards what it meant. As art history the connection is a stretch, which I’ve gone into in Colour after the fire, but it is an exact account of how those things sit in me.

It also told me what was missing. Appel and CoBrA, the post-war painters from Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam who took their cue from children’s art, had been formative for me, and to my eye Appel is the more organic and rebellious version of the same impulse as those hard blocks. A strict grid can’t give you that by itself. The two together are what I mean by the house style: the discipline of a strong Scandinavian grid with something free and bodily living inside it. In June I went after that in the pictures, a little less jarring than the real thing, on a white ground and clear of the edges so that each would be part of the page instead of a picture-frame square. The first test, for an essay about my wardrobe, was exactly what I wanted, and with only slight pain at the cost I had all fifty-odd images on the site regenerated in its style.

When I rebuilt the whole site in November, a new batch came back in an expressive, figurative CoBrA manner, and I threw out every one, because they were cartoons with a CoBrA texture: little characters with props acting out the article, in thick paint. It was the complaint I had been making in May about pencil drawings. Mood, fitting, but not exactly the thing.

What those pictures got wrong is what people have been getting wrong about Appel since 1955. His best-known sentence in the Netherlands is Ik rotzooi maar wat aan, I’m just messing about, which he said to a journalist and never lived down, because it told people what they already suspected about a man who seemed to throw paint at a canvas. It wasn’t true. His supposedly wild gestures were thought through and often began as drawings, and in 2024 the Boijmans in Rotterdam hosted a whole symposium called Dispelling the Myth of Just Messing Around. Shepard’s scribbles and Appel’s mess both came out of a lot of deciding, and a generator will happily give you the scribble or the mess without any of it. A cartoon with thick paint on it is what messing about actually looks like.

The paintings here now are generated too, every one of them, and I’m happy to say so, since the deciding was never going to come from the generator. They are abstract or close to it: broad gestural strokes, dense passages beside open ones, broken edges, paint scraped back and painted over, in ochre, rust, plum, chalk, blue, green and near-black, with the vivid colour used sparingly, which is much nearer to the CoBrA paintings I had in mind than any of those cartoons. A shape may suggest a face or a bird, but nobody in them is doing anything. They are also large, and in May I would have called them big squares in your face. What has held through all of this is narrower than I expected: a picture here shouldn’t sit in a frame and it shouldn’t act out the article.

The rest of the site has got plainer to make room for them. It is mostly lists and prose, fast and free to read, which is about as close as a website gets to sixpence, with hard fields of colour and big type at the head of each section, and the paintings standing among all that with no frame and no explanation. Most people who come here will be on their way to something else, an article about agents or a project they want to check, and they will pass those paintings the way I passed Gabo’s steel outside De Bijenkorf, with somewhere to be and no name for what I was looking at. That suits me. It was a long time before I found out what it had done to me.

Chris Chabot, May 2026

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