Month: June 2025

Triceratops, Albertosaurus and Satie

Erik Satie, who died 100 years ago last Saturday.

Triceratops

A young Triceratops was the star of the opening film in Walking with Dinosaurs #2.

Albertosaurus

I like the way the series links new discoveries and speculation about the lives of dinosaurs with the fossils themselves, filmed at digs in America, North Africa and Portugal.

Brought up on Ray Harryhausen dinosaurs, I would never have assumed that Albertosaurus might be lilac with a ginger crew cut but at that time we thought of dinosaurs as giant lizards. Now that we’re aware how closely they were related to birds the colouring makes sense: it reminds me of the prehistoric-looking cassowary.

sketches

Turner’s Watercolour Box

watercolour box

At the current Harewood House exhibition Austen and Turner: A Country House Encounter I got a close look at this watercolour box that belonged to Turner, dating from around 1842, so possibly a set he used on one of his visits to Harewood.

watercolours

As in so many watercolour boxes, it’s the darker earth colours that have been neglected and he’s gone for the reds, blues and yellows.

Watercolour cakes were something new but I’m wondering what the three white trays – two of them all but empty – are made of. In a modern box they’d be plastic but these don’t look to me like ceramics or enamel.

Fred and Constance Bell, 1926

wedding photo
original photo
The original.

I’m fascinated to see this photograph of my Uncle Fred’s 1920s wedding.

My thanks to my cousin Kathleen for looking out this record of the 1926 marriage of her parents Fred and Constance Bell, which I’ve restored and colourised in Adobe Photoshop.

Fred and Constance

The cheeky eight-year in the foreground is my dad, Robert Douglas Bell. I don’t have many – if any – photographs of him as a child, so I’m pleased that this one has turned up.

Robert Douglas Bell

Fred was the oldest, my dad the youngest and in between was my Aunt Norah.

Norah

The guests aren’t arranged in strict family order and Constance’s mum didn’t hold with new-fangled inventions like photography, so she doesn’t appear at all, so the guests, as identified by my cousin Kathleen are:

Back row: Robert Bell (my grandad); Lena, his sister; the best man, a friend of Fred’s; Fred Bell; Constance; Edwin, her brother; Jack, husband of May on the front row; Nellie Ogden; Tilly Ogden.

Front row: May, married to Jack; Norah Bell; Robert Douglas Bell; Helen, sister of Constance (died 1942, aged 47); Jane Bell (nee Bagshaw) my grandma – did she end up seated here, diagonally opposite her husband Robert when Constance’s mum refused to be on the photograph?

Maris Peer

new potatoes

My sketch of Maris Peer first early potatoes is anthropomorphically compromised because almost every potato has inadvertently ended up with an expression on its face: cheeky, vacant, dim, confused . . .

But they were delicious and in texture – I’d say – exactly at the halfway point on the scale from waxy to floury. We preferred them to some Jerseys we treated ourself to a month or two ago.

fruit

When I set up to draw the orange, lime and the two Pink Ladies, I’d been planning on leaving the background blank but, as has happened before, the random debris in the background proved to be more interesting than my artfully arranged still life.

foot

I’m convincing myself that it is never possible to draw an ankle accurately. Toes are a bit easier: they have definite edges.

Our non-plastic washing up and veg brushes.

Staying Afloat

still life

Explorer Thor Heyerdahl wrote that he used to worry about the deep ocean until he realised that the ocean wasn’t there for him to sink into: it was there to keep him afloat.

Like him, my natural tendency is to default to panic mode and to tense up, assuming that the worst is going to happen, which is a self-fulfilling worry if I’m writing or drawing as I’m not going to do my best work if I’m tense. Like Heyerdahl, I’ve just got to develop a relaxed but unshakeable conviction that I’m going to stay afloat.

Basic Drawing

hand sketch

I feel that it’s a good time to go right back to basics with my drawing and writing after the slight uncertainty that I’ve felt over how far I should push it with my problem thumb.

ink
De Atramentis ink bottle, original drawing 2.5 cm, one inch, across. Even enlarged, there’s no sign of the ink running into the watercolour wash.

I’ve been struggling with my drawing and writing pens too. Sometimes I’ll try several before I find one that actually works. I now realise that the dregs of old ink that I’ve been filling them with is the problem, clogging up the nib. I’d poured the last remnants of both the sepia and the black into the same bottle, but I think that the time has come to make a clean break.

I’m now going steadily through the process of squeezing out all the old ink from each of them and refilling with the fresh ink that I bought recently.

My Problem Thumb

Drawing hands

This morning I went to see a physiotherapist about my problem thumb and he observed that I’ve got a high level of arthritis in my thumb joints, along with crepitus – a grating sound or sensation in said joints.

I felt this grinding and grating most when he manipulated my right-hand thumb joints:

  • The MCP, the Metacarpophalangeal joint, midway on the thumb
  • The CMC, the Carpometacarpal joint at the base of the thumb

When he performed the same actions on my left hand, I didn’t feel a any ache or pain whatsoever.

“Have you ever had a hand injury?” he asked me.

I couldn’t think of a specific injury so I suspect that my main problem is wear and tear over the years and possibly my misguided attempts to strengthen my thumb joint by overdoing the hedge trimming with a basic pair of secateurs just over a year ago. That led to pain and swelling around and beyond my thumb joints.

The good news is, provided the pain stays below 5 on a scale of 1 to 10, I can keep on as normal, drawing, gardening etc, meanwhile doing some fairly undemanding exercises to keep movement in the joints and very gradually to add some strength to them.

I’m not doing myself any harm by working with a lowish level of pain, provided I don’t overdo it.

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy

As for my essential – also known as familial – tremor, in recent weeks I’ve made good progress, not on the tremor as such, but in controlling my frustrated reactions to it using Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.

hand

CBT is pretty similar to the process I go through every time I draw, you find a calm space while staying alert and aware.

Ironically it could be that all the drawing I’ve done over the years and perhaps my attempts to control the tremor that have contributed to my high level of arthritis.

I was reassured to see that even my physio – who I guess was half my age or less – had a small level of tremor as he demonstrated some of the exercises for me. It’s natural he assured me.

Educating Horbury

Educating Horbury

My thanks and congratulations to Helen Bickerdike and the Horbury People’s Museum team for putting together the latest exhibit in the display cases in Horbury Library.

St Peter's School staff

It features the surprising number of educational institutions associated with the town over the years, including St Peter’s Church of England primary school, where I was lucky enough to have a series of remarkable form teachers between 1958 and 1962:

  • Miss Andrassy, who was so keen on art
  • Mr Harker who took us rambling and Youth Hostelling
  • ex-professional footballer Mr Thompson who was a terrific storyteller (even when he was really supposed to be teaching us whatever the curriculum was at that time)
  • Mr Lindley who encouraged us in drama, puppet shows and giving short talks to the whole class in the regular Friday-afternoon Storyteller’s Club
  • keen fell-walker Mr Douglas, the perfect example of a pipe-smoking headmaster with a voice like Gandalf with a Yorkshire accent.
junior artowrk
Clay head from my third year in Mr Thompson’s class, booklets and painting of the rebuilding of Golden Square, Horbury, from my fourth and final year at St Peter’s in Mr Lindley’s class (called 4D rather than 4L, we might not have been the perfect class, but we weren’t that bad).

Link

The Horbury Tapestry