Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
More sketches from my first term of John Norris Wood’s natural history illustration course at the Royal College of Art, fifty years ago in the autumn of 1972. Again, I can see the influence of Victor Ambrus, which was no bad thing. I was happiest drawing in black and white, not surprisingly as the method that I used for the colour here was to carry around three bottles of indian ink in the primary colours, red, blue and yellow.
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.
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.
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.
We’ve all been there; searching for a birthday card for a body-building plumber.
Or for a cyclist who lives abroad. Actually Harry lives in the Isle of Man, not France, but I think that Google Translate would have struggled to come up with enough cycling expressions. Motorbikes, perhaps.
Drawing some of our onions with the new Manga vector mapping pen in Adobe Fresco, using an Apple Pencil, iPad Pro and a sketchboard pro drawing board.
Growing through a dry summer and a heatwave, this year’s onions were smaller than the previous year’s – when we had a wetter summer – but they’ve kept better. One hazard last year was that the local foxes liked to pull up a few of the almost tennis ball-sized onions and stash them under the hedge. Thanks to damage by foxes and a wet spell before we lifted them, many of the onions went soft.
Guardian critic Victor Lewis-Smith once slated the “Yorkshire Fat Rascal” as ‘an obese scone’, ‘a Yorkshire indelicacy’ and characterised the “Yorkshire rarebit with chopped fresh chives in Yorkshire Cobble bread” as ‘a self-aggrandising toastie’.* Ouch.
It’ll be all right on the night.
My favourite ‘Yorkshire indelicacy’ at Bettys’ is the Yorkshire Curd Tart. No one does a Yorkshire Curd Tart like Bettys. And it’s not just me who thinks that. Last time we were at RHS Harlow Carr we took our Latino Lattes out to a bench in the gardens and a robin hopped about around my our feet and beneath the bench, hoping we’d drop the odd crumb. Some hope.
But I did select one small, soft raisin and held it out at ground level. After some hesitation the robin darted forward and took it from my hand. It then went and perched in a bush behind us and burst into song.
*Guardian, 29 January 2005.