Category: Art

Mason Bee

walltilemasonbeesAt the top of Quarry Hill, mason bees are busy around their nest holes in the mortar of an old stone wall. At first I think they’re a yellow and brown insect but the yellow appears to be the pollen sac on the leg. When I look at photographs of mason bees, they mostly carry the pollen on the underside of the abdomen, so I need to check out that detail when I see them again.

They stock the nest holes with pollen then seal the entrance with mud. The larva grows, then pupates in the hole. Several bees might use the same hole, one after another, so when it comes to emergence it must be a case of ‘first in, last out’.

mason bee mason beeYou can now buy bee nest boxes at most garden centres and bird reserve gift shops, so perhaps it’s time for me to invest in one (or make my own) so that I can take a closer look. Bumblebees have already taken over the blue tit box, a hint that I ought to start thinking about insect homes.

Tilly

TillyTillyIt’s so difficult drawing Tilly the bookshop border collie because she’s always alert to what’s going on so, even if she’s quite settled, her ears keep changing the direction they’re pointing in, which gives her a different expression.

I try using the brush pen version of the Pitt Artist Pens that I’m using in my current sketchbook but it’s a marker pen version of a brush, so it’s difficult to get the same life into the line that you would with a more responsive sable brush.

Tillysugar and saltBesides, it’s detail that I like. I’m always aware that I’m failing to catch what’s in front of me but a character like Tilly is a real help in that whatever I do manage to catch of her takes on a certain character on my page. It’s as if she has the ability to project something of her presence into the sketch.

Adding the black and tan watercolour also helps give the right impression.

Chiff-chaff

weeping willowchiff-chaffWe’re so used to our resident birds that the warbler, probably a chiff-chaff, recently returned from north Africa, in the freshly green hawthorn hedge doesn’t seem to belong.

starlingA pair of starlings regularly come down to the pond, bathing and foraging around it.

sparrows and blackbirdHouse sparrows and a blackbird are busy on the bean bed where we spread the tomato compost. Ants were starting to nest in the buckets of dry compost.

The big news at Wakefield Naturalists’ this evening; there’s been lots of peregrine activity around the cathedral. A young male seems to be making a claim to the nest platform attached to the tower.

Published
Categorized as Drawing

Storrs Hill Seed-bank

Storrs Hill, summer 2012
Storrs Hill, summer 2012

gorseOn Storrs Hill, between Horbury and Ossett the gorse is at its best, yellow against an intensely blue sky.

pigThe pigs that have been grazing on the hill have recently been removed, no doubt to fill a freezer or two.

They haven’t made inroads into the gorse but, according to a smallholder friend of mine, they’ve cleared away rank vegetation exposing the ground beneath. He thinks that if the hill isn’t intensively grazed from now on, the original ground layer of vegetation will be able to re-establish itself from seeds that have been lying dormant in the soil.

Storrs Hill c.1890 by Frank C.J. Cockburn, from 'Cockburn's Ossett Alamanac'.
Storrs Hill c.1890 by Frank C.J. Cockburn, from ‘Cockburn’s Ossett Alamanac’.
sofa
Sketches while visiting Barbara’s brother in Ossett today.

Summerhouse

summerhousebrushpen branchI’ve got another chance this morning to sit and draw my mum’s leafy garden. The summerhouse was built in the 1930s. I remember meeting Enid Baines who had lived at Smeath House before the Second World War and she told us that they’d built it. A neighbour across the road, John Haller, engineer, keen golfer and founder member of Horbury Pageant Players, told me that he remembered playing tennis in the back garden at Smeath. When we moved in we found the net stored in one of the outhouses but by then a large rectangular rose bed had been cut out of the middle of the back lawn.

fir top limeWe’re going back to the era when ‘who’s for tennis?!’, garden parties, Agatha Christie and Jeeves and Wooster.

As boys, my brother and I adopted the summerhouse as our clubhouse. Don’t think William and the Outlaws; this was the headquarters of the ambitiously named Horbury Junior Naturalists’ Club, modelled on the British Junior Naturalists’ Association.

A great garden to grow up with.

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Categorized as Drawing

Buzzard

buzzard I-SpybuzzardA buzzard circles above the wood then heads over the meadow and garden towards the house. Looking up through my sloping roof-light window I can see it almost vertically overhead as it passes over my studio, the pancake patterns beneath its wing picked out by the afternoon sun.

However many times I see it fly over, I don’t think that I’ll ever get over the excitement that I feel when I see a buzzard. Even when it’s flying over our suburban street, that circling silhouette conjures up wild places for me.

I-Spy BirdsI saw my first buzzard in the Lake District, aged nine, on Wednesday 31 August 1960. I know the date because I still have the I-Spy Birds booklet that I started on that holiday.

I-Spy BirdsBirds of prey in general made a big impression on me, so much so that I chose them as the subject for a school project.

Birds of Prey

 Aged of nine or ten I already had big ideas about the kind of books that I’d like to write and illustrate. The gold label and ambitious title suggest that I was aiming for something authoritative.

I was struggling to work out how to produce the stand-out illustrations that I saw in books and on the Brooke Bond tea cards that I collected. Using large hogs-hair brushes and school powder paints wasn’t going to help.

from my Birds of Prey booklet
There’s some evidence in this handwriting of the essential tremor that I remember having since age seven. No wonder I’ve always found drawing and writing something of a challenge.

The method used for teaching joined-up writing or ‘real writing’ at my junior school was to keep the pen in contact with the paper throughout the word then go back to dot the ‘i’s and cross the ‘t’s. By the age of nine I’d already given up this method for my personal projects, preferring more compact block capitals which allowed me to fit my text in amongst my drawings. 
Observer's Book of BirdsI treasured a copy of The Observer’s Book of British Birds which I kept in my gabardine pocket, even though it was unlikely that I’d spot a Montagu’s harrier or a Dartford warbler in the school playground.

buzzardUnfortunately I found myself unable to emulate Archibald Thorburn’s elegant illustrations in the wax crayons available to me in Mr Lindley’s class. But I’ve added my own touch with the background; the Lakeland hills and crag where I’d recently seen that first buzzard.

The Woman over the Window

caryatidThere are carved heads on keystones above the entrance and the windows of this Venetian palace style branch of the Wakefield and Barnsley Union Bank (now occupied by Barclays) built in Ossett in 1870. The Santa Claus lookalike above the door seems to be a portrait, perhaps of the first manager, but this woman over the window has classical proportions and probably represents a mythological figure.

The man in a winged helmet over another window is probably Mercury but it would be nice to think that he was Osla the Viking, who, according to one interpretation of the town’s name, settled at ‘Osla’s seat’ or ‘Osla’s ridge camp’ a century and a half before the Battle of Hastings.

Frankie

frankieYou wouldn’t want to mess with this guy. As he’s one of two bronzed characters looking out from the kitchen in Frankie & Benny’s, I’m assuming that this must be Frankie.

He’s part of the late 1940s, early 1950s New York Italian decorative scheme. The retro soundtrack at breakfast-time (we shared maple syrup pancakes with bacon) includes Tell Laura I Love Her. The music pulls a thread in my memory. I can picture myself in a coffee bar in Carlisle on a family holiday to Scotland and the Lake District, aged nine, in 1960, listening to the Ricky Valance version, which was number one in the singles chart for three weeks.

carlisle 1960In this 1950s ambience, I feel as if I’m being regressed under hypnosis. I have an impression that we were eating soup (cream of mushroom?) from white pyrex bowls somewhere towards the back of the long and airy coffee bar.

Weston Master III

weston master III exposure meterThis is the exposure meter that my dad used with the Akarette 35 mm camera that I drew yesterday. The Weston Master III Universal Exposure Meter was made in England by Sangamo Weston Ltd, Enfield, Middlesex and distributed by Ilford Ltd. This was model no. S141·3, serial no. T5385.

In low-light situations you flip out a filter at the back which is simply a plastic disc perforated with small holes. As you do this, the light scale flips over too. Taking a reading here on my desk I would have set the Akarette to 1/5oth of a second at f5 if I was using 64 ASA film, which is what I’d set the dial to when I last used this meter in the 1970s. ASA is referred to as ‘Weston Rating’ on the dial.

It was built to last, no batteries required and the photo-electric cell is still working fine, but I’m glad all of of all the exposure options that are built in to my current digital camera. The meter is bulkier and heavier than the Olympus Tough that I keep in my art bag.

Akarette

Akarette 35 mm cameraThis German Akarette with an Isco-Gottingen Westar 1:3.5/50 mm lens was my dad’s first, in fact only, 35 mm camera. It’s not an SLR so focussing involved setting the shutter speed and aperture then rotating the outer ring of the lens to select the estimated distance in feet. It focussed from 3.5 feet to infinity but for close-ups you had to allow for the parallax between viewfinder and lens.

You could switch to a second viewfinder if you fitted a 75 mm lens, which we never had. I believe my father bought the camera secondhand from Wallace Heaton, London. A big advance on our box camera.

It’s powered by clockwork, wound up every time you wind on the film, so the sound of the shutter is a retro delight. It also has a satisfyingly retro shutter delay of up to ten seconds. My dad once set it up to photograph my mum in a formal garden then had to leap over little box hedges and flowerbeds to get himself into the picture. I can’t remember now whether he quite made it into position but if he did it was by a hair’s breadth.

I more or less took over this camera when my dad started taking cine film. The most frustrating thing for me was its inability to take macro photographs. It travelled with me to Iceland on a college field trip (just me and my tent, I didn’t go with a group) but by then its days were numbered because I’d discovered the delights of using the Pentax Spotmatic – with macro lens – on the college photography course.