Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
I drew the bookstalls on Farringdon Road in August 1982 for a proposed book on London street markets, which sadly never got published. While drawing this I spotted Colin West, from my year in illustration at the RCA, in his natural habitat, browsing for a bargain.
St Jude’s, Eldon Street, stood ten minutes walk from Sheffield city centre. On Sunday, 22 June, 1902, Robert and Jane – my grandad and grandma made there way there from nearby Fitzwilliam Street.
It’s good to have Robert’s and Jane’s signatures on the Marriage Certificate. At the time Robert, then aged 24, was a conductor on the Sheffield Trams. When he’d started work, the trams were still horse-drawn. In the previous year, at the time of the 1901 census, he’d been employed as a groom at Bawtry Hall, 25 miles east of the city.
Jane, 19, lists no occupation on the wedding certificate. In the previous year she was working as a cook in a household somewhere in Sheffield. In the census returns the only likely match that I’ve found is a Jeannie Bagshawe, aged 22.
Jane and her relatives who act as witnesses spell their surname with an ‘e’ at the end, in every other document I’ve come across it’s down as Bagshaw without the ‘e’.
Frederick was an older brother, Ruth as younger sister.
Her father was William Bagshawe, a maltster.
We recently visited Blako Hill Farm, Mattersey, where Robert’s father, John, worked as a gardener.
The Rev. George Wakefield Turner (1850 – 1932), M.A., Vicar of St. Jude’s, performed the ceremony. The Rev. Turner had been a member of the Sheffield Education Committee since its inception.
Last Sunday morning we had a gentle summer shower, a rare event so far this month, and I spotted a garden snail emerging from the edge of a riverside path: a determined-looking snail.
But when I stopped to photograph it in its dynamic (for a snail) pose, it immediately adopted this startled, slightly withdraw pose.
Drawn in Procreate on my iPad Pro.
I drew the backgrounds for the Cowslip’s Warren sequence for Martin Rosen’s 1978 animated version of Watership Down. At that time I often drew with a dip pen with a fine Gillot 1950 nib using Pelikan Special Brown Indian ink and, as we wanted the feel of an oppressively sinister Victorian vicarage for this scene, we decided that would be an appropriate medium.
Because of the scale I worked at, my original drawing was photographed to be enlarged to production size and printed on matt finish photographic paper which was sepia tinted. The colour was added by another background artist (the one who wore headphones as he worked, but I’m afraid that I don’t remember his name, as he started work on the production after I left to complete my Sketchbook of the Natural History of the Country Round Wakefield . . . using my dip pen with the 1950 nib).
I’ve published some of my work on the film before but I don’t think that I included this drawing, which I’ve just come across in a box file of artwork from a 1980s folio which I was looking through in the attic.
I’ve been doing a few exercises to strengthen my right thumb over the past year but after a session with the physiotherapist I’m now adding exercises to improve flexibility in the thumb joints.
It surprises me how relaxed the joints feel after a few repetitions of these simple stretches.
I’d always that strength was the thing I needed to improve but flexibility, resilience and movement are equally important.
Erik Satie, who died 100 years ago last Saturday.
A young Triceratops was the star of the opening film in Walking with Dinosaurs #2.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Fred was the oldest, my dad the youngest and in between was my Aunt 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.