Drawn at the dog-friendly Lakeside Cafe, Newmillerdam
Harley is the kind of dog, or rather hound, that I’d expect to see in a Breughel painting. If I had a hound like Harley, I’d be regularly pausing to draw him as his wayward curls are the perfect match for my equally wayward drawing.
He’s a labrador/poodle cross whose unusual colouring comes from his chocolate labrador mother and merle poodle dad. Merle refers to the mottled patchwork of his markings. He’s not quite as efficient as a poodle for not shedding hairs but at least they’re not the fine hairs that you’d get from a labrador.
A year old, he would make a good working dog as he can spend the entire day roaming around the Dales without tiring.
Not surprisingly, my earliest attempts to keep a diary were illustrated, although not usually as elaborately as this account of the school cross country run. Cross country was a brilliant excuse for me and my friend John to get out of football, run off down towards the gasworks, then saunter along the canal towpath enjoying the Calder Valley countryside that still provides the subject matter for my sketchbooks. Obviously, in that annual race, we had to put a bit more effort in. Thirty-sixth isn’t bad!
The reference to the ‘Hostile Alien’ (top right) was to a home movie that my brother and I had made starring my sister in the title role – disguised in a papier-mâché bug-eyed monster head – zapping the soldiers of the World Security Force with a ray gun fashioned from my dad’s chromium-plated torch. Difficult to operate with the boxing gloves that she had to wear.
I’d evidently doctored a Christmas card that we’d sent to Mrs Ruby Jefferies, who had been my Latin teacher at the school – Ossett Grammar School – for a couple of years and who, along with her husband, had rented the upstairs flat in my mum and dad’s large Victorian house.
Our Hostile Aliens, Flying Machines and a secret agent were transferred to video in the 1980s and we’ve since gone back to the original Standard 8 films and had them professionally transferred to DVD and memory stick.
I was approaching my fifteenth birthday at the time and my ‘O’-levels were already looming, so it’s amazing, reading the diary, how much time I was able to spend movie-making, writing, drawing, printing magazines, making models and staging plays and exhibitions. This might account for my rather moderate success in the following year’s exams but my indulgently creative adolescence was a perfect grounding for my years at art college and for my subsequent career which has included elements of all those activities.
With my friends Derek (‘Chic’) and John watching the hockey, with my sister blowing the whistle. Mr ‘Perry’ Mason was our form teacher.
‘Silent Spring – Bill got into fix with plugs. Mum said better than Shakespeare’ (our previous production, Richard III)
In the evening of the day of the cross country my brother and I staged our Silent Spring exhibition, a series of scenes from Rachael Carson’s book, mainly homemade dioramas, illuminated in succession, with a soundtrack that we’d recorded on tape. No role for my sister in that, but she had been referee at the school v. staff hockey match in the afternoon.
Living in the Past
I came across the diaries during a pre-Christmas clear up in the studio. Taking a box of slides back up into the attic, I found a cardboard carton which contained five fire-damaged diaries from my school and college days, dating from 1963 to 1969. I’m so glad that despite their charred edges, I kept them. Because of their condition, I haven’t taken a proper look at them for fifty years.
As I like to keep pointing out to my brother, it was his homemade amplifier, our first-ever experience of stereo, that caused the blaze on the metal shelf-unit in our shared bedroom. In return, Bill likes to remind me that when I showed the insurance assessor his partially-melted Jethro Tull albums, I should have questioned his professional opinion that they were still all perfectly playable!
Four of the diaries are National Coal Board staff issue, which my father brought home from work, and the fifth was evidently a promotional item from an engineering firm.
My after-school job: On that day I got paid for delivering 1500 leaflets for the Lion Stores supermarket around Ossett. Glad there weren’t more to deliver!
We walked past the empty stable at the back of the Bingley Arms, Horbury Bridge, on Christmas Day. The fresh straw echoed the Christmas Crib currently on display at Di Bosco Coffee, the former Ship Inn, at the opposite end of the bridge across the Calder. In recent years, the Bingley, like many pubs, struggled to retain its popularity but there are now ambitious plans to restore the grade II-listed Georgian building.
The donkey that occupied this stable has now moved on, along with the landlord and landlady of the pub. I once tried to take a photograph of the donkey in its little stable yard but as soon as she saw my camera she put her head back down and resumed feeding. You’d often see the landlady of the Bingley out letting the donkey graze on the green triangles of grass at the road junctions at Horbury Bridge and the bottom of Sandy Lane.
I enjoyed the process of tracing the drawing, or as we illustrators call it, using visual reference, on the iPad in the ProCreate drawing program. As I tried to create a sense of three dimensions by cross-hatching the shadowy areas of the stable, I remembered the techniques I once used for books illustrated in black and white line. I’d dab on a little Tippex, which was typewriter correction fluid, to create a narrow white halo around an object which was supposed to be in the foreground, like the vertical posts that serve as a frame for this illustration.
The fine white-on-black line that you can get with the eraser tool in an iPad drawing reminded me of experimenting with scraperboard, which gave an effect sometimes described as ‘poor man’s wood engraving’. The subject matter – an everyday scene of a slightly unkempt outbuildings – reminded me of some of the early etchings of my tutor Derek Hyatt and of the urban back gardens celebrated by the etcher Janis Goodman.
The Old Scouring Mill, Horbury Bridge, from Di Bosco Coffee, Christmas Eve.
It’s such a pleasure to return to pen and watercolour after all the iPad drawing. However natural the feel of virtual pen, however nuanced the wash produced by virtual watercolour, they’ll never have quite the variety that is possible with real-world media. I can respond to the feel of the grain of the cartridge paper as I draw.
Besides, my iPad is A4 size and sometimes I only want to take a pocket-sized A5 sketchbook with me. This is my new Cremede Art, landscape A5 sketchbook, drawn with the B nib Lamy Safari pen and the most compact of my water brushes. But I’m fascinated by iPad drawing, so I’ll definitely continue with that.
Beat the Barrista
Barbara bought the coffees at Costa in Wakefield this morning, which gave me the challenge, as I waited at the table, of drawing the rather uninspiring view of Cineworld while she waited to be served. I added the colour after I’d eaten my chocolate tiffin. No-one ever claimed that drawing from cafe tables would be a good way to get back into shape after the excesses of Christmas. Fun though.
Cineworld, Wakefield. They’ll soon have competition; Reel Cinema have plans to open a five-screen cinema in the Ridings Centre in May.
At first I think that it’s an alarmed cat that’s got stuck in an ivy-covered ash alongside the beck but it’s a grey squirrel chippering away and there must be a second squirrel over to the left of it somewhere because I can hear an occasional soft grunt from that direction.
I didn’t intend taking my camera but thought it would be wise to put it in my pocket, just in case, but the misty morning light and the twigs festooned with lichens were just too tempting and I took eighty-five in total. That would have run to three slide films in the old days and I would never have been so snap happy.
What to get your dog for Christmas? The cocker spaniel walking down the causey stone path towards us couldn’t have been more pleased with its new tennis ball but in contrast one of the terriers belonging to a neighbour of ours will not go out on a walk in his new Christmas dog’s jumper. He’s a terrier with good taste.
It’s 175 years since the publication of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and next month sees the anniversary of a multi-media dramatisation of the story, performed by my brother Bill, myself and a few of our friends.
A small but select audience (mainly parents) gathered on the evening of Wednesday 4th January 1967 at our Club Room (the summerhouse at the top end of our garden) for the premier.
The performance went well, or so I wrote in my diary, but the scene change from Scrooge’s office to his house didn’t go as quickly as planned and our friend Hilary, who was providing the musical intervals, got through seven Days of Christmas.
It was worth the wait. We were so pleased with our Scrooge’s room set which incorporated the old cast iron fireplace in the corner of the summerhouse and a red horsehair-stuffed armchair which had been relegated there but which was probably getting on for the right period for the play. I recognise an old dressing gown as the basis for my brother’s Scrooge costume on the poster.
I played Jacob Marley but I didn’t need much in the way of ghoulish make-up; a raking spotlight shining from below was enough to create the ghostly effect.
For scenes such as the Cratchits’ house we built animated puppet scenes, inspired by the historic tableaux I’d admired in museums in France, with a sound track recorded by our in-house vocal talents, including my sister Linda and one of her friends, Mary. I think I still have the tape . . .
We didn’t manage to stage the production for Christmas, despite my lino-cut playbill on the cover of the club news.
The Spirit of Christmas Past sported a real candle on his headgear, fashioned from an upturned brass bowl and he wore a large plastic bag sprayed with gold. I think that his headgear was part of a costume used in a previous production of Shakespeare’s Richard III (much abridged as it featured just the final scenes at the Battle of Bosworth).
A possible fire hazard? Ironically a decade or so the young actor who portrayed Christmas Past (and Bob Cratchit), our friend Richard – ‘Rag’ – worked for the Fire Service in California.
There’s a new film version of Watership Down on television this evening, which prompted me to look out this spread from my 1981 sketchbook, published as Richard Bell’s Britain by Collins in 1981. I’d walked the route taken by the rabbits from Sandleford Warren to Watership Down in 1976, so I was keen to include it in my itinerary three years later, when I started touring the country.
All that was missing was a flypast by the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight Lancaster but, after the funeral service on Thursday at St Peter’s Church, a rainbow to mark our old friend Thelma Littlewood’s last journey away from Horbury seemed suitably stylish. Her husband Jack flew Lancaster bombers during the Second World War, surviving a full tour of duty of thirty bombing raids. He was 22 years old at the time. Meanwhile Thelma was working, sometimes on the nightshift, at Sykes’ mill (later Slazengers) on the lathes, making butts for Lee Enfield rifles.
Thelma once told me that she knew when Jack was setting out on a mission because he’d come out of formation and fly his Lancaster low over Horbury (or did she say he’d do that on his safe return? I think she said on the outward flight). I’m told that this story is unlikely to be true as the RAF would never have allowed it, but who knows what happened unofficially. Possibly a roundabout route from one of the bases in North Yorkshire, such as Dishforth or Leeming, could have involved a flightpath down the Calder Valley.
Thelma (1924-2018), was a great friend of my mother’s during their retirement years, getting into all sorts of adventures on their travels, including being so keen not to miss their stop on a rail journey to the Lake District, that Thelma ended up swinging on the door of the carriage, leaning out of the open window, as the train came to a halt in the station.
As we lived not far from each other on Jenkin Road, I often walked to St Peter’s Junior School with her son, my contemporary, Adrian, especially in our third year when we were both in Mr Thompson’s class. Sadly, Adrian died over twenty years ago, in the early 1990s. Like his mother, Adrian had a sense of style and I remember being rather envious of his special pet, a beautifully marked garden cross spider, which he kept for a while in a makeshift vivarium in a mini-habitat of twigs and leaves in a Gales Honey jar with air holes punched in the brass-coloured lid. He called it Arthur (although I now realise that ‘it’ must have been the larger female of the species).
Members of Horbury’s Victoria Band were playing carols and Christmas songs at Di Bosco’s coffee & champagne bar on Thursday, which gave me a chance to try drawing them on my iPad Pro, using ProCreate.
The man on the right is playing a bass trombone but he ‘gets a lot of tenor notes out of it too’.
I like to set up pencil, wash and pen on separate layers but I found myself working on the wrong layer several times. For a drawing from life like this, I don’t think that matters, as I want the initial pencil to show through anyway, I don’t need to hide the pencil layer as I might in a more finished illustration.
The cat that is usually to be found lurking in the border by our bird feeders leaves its lair and sets off down our garden then makes its way through a gap in the hawthorn hedge. After all that waiting and watching, it’s ready for a work-out. It jumps onto next door’s trampoline and starts clawing around the entrance flap in the safety mesh. It evidently enjoys that, as it slinks in through the slit and indulges in another burst of claw-sharpening on the mesh from the inside.
Next it walks around the perimeter, then decides to attempt to climb up the netting on the far side. It almost gets to the top.
But that’s it for this session, it leaves by the entrance flap, jumps down and walks off down the garden path.
