Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
Yesterday’s Baines recital in Ripon Cathedral went well so next up is the recital in his home town Horbury on the anniversary of his tragically early death, aged just 23 years, two weeks on Sunday, on 6th November.
I’ve designed some A4 posters for the library and the local shops and also printed some postcard-size handbills. Please spread the word . . . and if you’re local and you can display a poster, I’d be glad to drop one in.
From my A6 Seawhite Travel Journal.
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.
I’d normally assume that this was scentless mayweed but as it was growing at the top of the sandy beach at the foot of the sea wall at North Beach, Bridlington, I’m going for its near-identical relative, sea mayweed, Tripleurospermum maritimum.
As always, at Bridlington last week, I was amazed how tolerant turnstones are of people and dogs walking by just a few yards away.
Bridlington may be ‘West Riding by the Sea’, the most traditionally familiar of Yorkshire’s seaside resorts, but with Flamborough Head jutting out at the end of North Bay, you’re soon on a wilder-looking stretch of coast. I was sorry to hear that the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust had reluctantly decided to close their Living Seas Centre at South Landing to all except booked-in parties but we’re glad that RSPB Bempton is so popular.
Card for a sound recording expert who happens to live near The Deep. Happy birthday to Richard.
And happy birthday last Friday to Michelle who is a bit of an expert at taking a dog for a walk on the other side of the Channel. Me, I had to head for Google Translate to check out these useful phrases.
Maple keys, botanically samaras, and leaves. Each winged seed was connected to the stem by a thin tube. You can see remnants of these tubes in my drawing, one on the seed end of the maple key on the right and the stub of one on the nearest stem.
A low tide had exposed all the mud in Bridlington Harbour, attracting turnstones and redshank. This adult herring gull was in streaky-headed non-breeding plumage but it had raised a chick during the summer, which was still following, hunching itself up as it begged, fairly continuously, for food.
The adult looked embarrassed by the attention but I didn’t see it offer the youngster any food.
Happy Birthday to Lenny earlier this week. Hope he’s worked this one out by now.
Google Translate is so useful when you need to find the Polish for ‘birthday’.
Just after I’d put this card in the post to Thalia in Glasgow we heard that Liverpool had been chosen to host Eurovision.
Lightning sketches from an engagement party, Normanton Market and a lightning-struck birch tree by the car park at the Seed Room, Overton. You can see the split running the full length of the trunk of one of these trees.
