Postcard Portraits

If portraits were postcard size, you’d be able to fit the shortlist of the BP Portrait Award into Horbury’s telephone box art gallery. This self portrait, from forty years ago, is from one of the ‘Bushey’ 7 x 4½ inch landscape sketchbooks that I used in the late 1970s, as are all but one of the fourteen sketches in this post.

The red pullover was knitted for me by my old friend John Blackburn’s mum, Barbara. Mrs Blackburn was a thrifty knitter and, when you’d grown out of a jumper, she could unravel the wool and use it again. In this way, a batch of wool could be recycled through several generations of jumpers.

In the background, you can see my home-made bookshelves in the alcove. When I drew the portrait, I sat at my work bench on a utility Windsor kitchen chair, which is why I look as if I’m leaning on a gate.

Karen

Fortunately, I wasn’t always stuck with myself to draw. Karen (then Stubbs) looks elegantly relaxed at my friends Hilary and David Stubbs’ house in Grange-over-Sands in April 1979. The tea cup looks like Denby Cotswold. I was staying with Hilary and David to draw down by the bay on a pilot run for a project for Collins publishers, Richard Bell’s Britain. I stayed with them a year later to draw on Hampsfell for the book, which was published in April 1981.

Once after I’d drawn her, Karen informed me that I’d looked up at her 140 times. She never misses a beat: she’s a music teacher and performer. And she does a bit of painting too.

New Year’s Day, 1979, The Shepherd’s Arms, Horbury: Hilary thought that Karen had given me the look of Peter O’Toole’s Henry II in The Lion in Winter. Appropriate, as James Goldman’s script includes the line:

‘I’ve given up the looking glass; quicksilver has no sense of tact.’

David

Karen’s cousin David didn’t escape being drawn but neither Karen or I gave him the full colour postcard treatment.

At that time David was making a name for himself as an acoustic guitar maker. He later switched to making Solway Dory canoes.

Bill

Not all my models reclined as elegantly as Karen. From my 1978 sketchbook, here’s my brother bill taking a break with his Rhodesian ridgeback, Rocky.

Grandma Bell

Not in colour unfortunately, but I was delighted to find this drawing of my grandma, Jane ‘Jinny’ Bell, in one of the pocket-sized sketchbooks, dating from February or early March in 1976. The previous spread shows her in conversation, bringing back memories of her gestures and voice as she got into full flow. Every time we pass a group of Victorian town houses on Bond Street, Wakefield, I remember her telling me about when she worked there as a domestic servant for a doctor and his family.

My mum told me that the first recognisable drawing I ever made was of Grandma Bell.

‘Grandma’, I informed my mum as I showed her the drawing: a shape but, my mum remembered, it really did look like grandma.

Jill

On the opposite page from grandma, my flatmate at the time, Jill Bloodworth, who’d been a painter at the Royal College of Art when I studied natural history illustration there. Her work was as energetic and spontaneous as she was and she’d take me to task for my tendency to be diffident and fussy in my paintings.

‘The last mark you make on painting should have as much impact as the first’, she insisted.

The other thing that needed sharpening up was my image (see young man in red jumper above), so Jill and our student-teacher flatmate Maureen Smith took it upon themselves to act as my stylists. If I smoked a pipe, they suggested, wore dungarees and tamed my self-cut hair that should do the trick. Luckily, they only got as far as cutting a fringe.

I haven’t seen my would-be stylists for years – decades in fact – but I did catch up with Jill’s geologist brother three or four years ago, when he gave a talk at the National Museum of Coal Mining, which is just up the road from us, at Caphouse Colliery.

Clare

But when I walked into a bird hide during the summer, I was lucky enough to bump into Clare Roberts, who was a student in John Norris Wood’s natural history illustration department at the Royal College of Art a year or two after me. In my drawing, she’s working on illustrations for Flora Thompson’s A Country Calendar. These were in black and white but her degree show featured full size botanical studies of a wide variety of seed dispersal mechanisms. She stuck to traditional watercolour techniques so despite the meticulous detail, the illustrations had a softness and luminosity about them, thanks the transparency of the medium. I once asked her, if she was faced with a plant that had white hairs against a dark stem, wouldn’t she resort to gouache? No, she’d paint in watercolour around every single one of them!

Clare has had a long working partnership with naturalist Richard Mabey, from Oak & Company to Weeds: The Story of Outlaw Plants but today, you’re as likely to find her growing plants – particularly unusual varieties of snowdrop – as painting them.

Despite her determination not to, if she was to draw me again, forty years after this ballpoint pen portrait, even Clare would have to resort to the titanium white to match the colour of the hairs in my beard.

Barbara

In April 1979, I saw an attractive young woman sitting on the next table in the Shepherd’s Arms in Horbury.

‘Do you mind if I draw you?’ I asked her . . .