This morning we walked alongside this meander of the River Calder although in the 45 years since I drew this trees have grown up along the bank, obscuring the view across the river.
It’s rare for me to bump into anyone who I remember from 50 years ago at the Royal College of Art when we’re down by the river but this morning we stopped and had a chat with Sarah, Gardner as was, who lived in a slightly larger room than mine (above) in the college hostel at Evelyn Gardens, South Kensington.
She doesn’t remember me from that time but she was just 4 months old as the term started, so that’s not surprising. Her dad Roger was in his second year in the painting department.
This drawing was in my A4-sized notebook, so the drawings in it are mainly doodles that I got distracted by when I should have been getting on with some writing. I wish that I’d taken the doodles further, I prefer the playfulness to some of my more serious work from that time.
The drawing of my table is so evocative, a reminder me of once-familiar objects such as a pint-sized milk bottle, my long-gone brown teapot and the small transistor radio which wasn’t really up to the job and which I soon replaced, calling in an electrical shop on the Edgeware Road to choose it.
Finally, from that same notebook, an early rough for my mural of birds in the college greenhouse on the top floor of the RCA’s Kensington Gore building. You can see that I was keen to include lettering. I think that I was in awe of the work I saw in the painting school, suffering ‘agonies of diffidence’ (to quote comic artist Frank Bellamy when he found himself in a similar context) when I took my work in there.
The lettering was my way of saying this is intended as an illustration, a drawing that’s here to do a specific job – help people identify the birds – not a serious painting.