Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
Chiwetel Ejiofor directed and starred in his 2019 film The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind and wrote the adaptation of William Kamkwamba & Bryan Mealer’s tale, which was based on a true story. For his role he learnt Chichewa, the local Bantu language of Malawi.
As with the Sherlock drawing, this is from a photograph in this week’s Radio Times.
More March birthdays. This first one is totally unfair to Uncle Bill and to the innovative ‘funky grooves, 80s synth and jazzy piano a go-go’ sounds of Tom’s brother’s indie rock band but the ‘Scotsman playing Baker Street on the trombone’, was an actual incident at a wedding in Edinburgh, which I remember it well: very difficult to forget, actually!
The big birthday recently has been my brother-in-law John. For the past year because of restrictions, he’s been grounded in South Ossett, so Illingworth Park has been his regular exercise walk. Three times around the park is one mile, so during that time we calculate that he’s walked about 300 miles around the park and another 300 getting to and from it, so the full distance of the Pennine Way and back again, with just about enough mileage left over to complete The Dales Way too.
My first version of John’s card included the regular dog walkers and the occasional mums and children who we see in the park, but I thought the numbers would make more of an impact if the park was empty. I added ink washes to establish the tones but this dulled the watercolour wash that I put over it, so I drew the card again.
Ali is brilliant at sewing and was able to run up some stylish face masks in the early days of lockdown when they were in short supply.
It’s been a busy month for birthday cards, this one inspired by my niece, Sarah, who in real life really appreciates the bad boids visiting her feeders.
When Barbara Hepworth graduated from the Royal College of Art, her tutors felt that her drawing was strong but that she wasn’t going to make it as a sculptor. Sculpture at the time typically involved building up a figure as a framework and swathing it in plaster, before casting it in bronze, so it started with a modelmaking process. Barbara preferred to take a block of wood or stone and carve into it.
During her childhood and teenage years in Wakefield, she got the chance to visit the gritstone crags and tors of the Yorkshire moors, carved by natural processes during ice ages and interglacials. On holidays around Robin Hood’s Bay, she saw landforms sculpted by coastal erosion.
There are plenty of pristine-looking sheds about, but I’m not drawing in technical pen with a ruler and set-square, so this much-patched, leaning shed suits my freehand dip pen and Chinese brush better.
I tried four different nibs when starting this drawing but the one I preferred was the Clan Glengarry. I also filled in a bit with bamboo pen.
In the last of this series of live sessions on Sky Arts’ Portrait Artist of the Week, current Portrait Artist of the Year Curtis Holder drew dancer Oti Mabuse.
Also briefly appearing, Curtis’s sleepy whippet and Oti’s little terrier.
Catching up with birthdays today and this character has a walk-on part on one of my homemade cards. Not surprisingly he’s soon asked to walk-off again.
The Miss Mosleys make an appearance in my Wakefield Women in History Month series of sketches, as representatives of the women naturalists, often on the botanical side, who have made such a contribution to our local natural history records. In the days before local and national government departments were set up to monitor the environment we relied – and still do rely to a large extent – on the observations made by amateur naturalists, the original citizen’s science.
As I understand it, the Mosley sisters were natural history royalty, the daughters (correct me if I’m wrong) of an outstanding naturalist of his day, Seth Lister Mosley (1847-1929), curator of the Tolson Memorial Museum in Huddersfield. He pioneered an ecological approach to understanding the natural environment. In October 1923 he was invited to the opening of Wakefield’s museum in Holmfield House, in the city’s park.
For many years, the Wakefield Naturalists Society held an unpublished manuscript of British butterflies and moths illustrated and written by Mosley, which has now been added to the archives at the Tolson Museum.
In 1999, Miss A Allen, former leader of Wakefield Naturalists’ Plant Section, recalled the Society’s meetings of half a century earlier:
After the opening formalities at each of our monthly winter meetings, and before we settled down to enjoy the illustrated talk, individual members would tell us of any interesting observations – one of my friends likened this to a Prayer Meeting! We took ourselves seriously, guided by the 60 and 70 year olds in charge.
The summer outings were less formal. The leader for the occasion would have walked the route a few days earlier to ensure that we missed nothing of interest on the Saturday afternoon. Apart from that we just among ourselves and made our own observations.
I was 40 when the 1951 survey was made the Naturalists’ was only one of many leisure pursuits. Looking back, I marvel that I was able to do so much.”
Miss A Allen
So Nats meetings were pretty much the same then as they are now! Sadly because of restrictions, we managed just two indoor and two outdoor meetings last year.
In recent years a Wakefield Flower Group was started by the late Pauline Brook. Pauline really would deserve a post of her own. What particularly fascinated me was that, in her younger, hippy years, she had for a while lived in a cave below The Acropolis, Athens. A fascinating and funny lady.
According to the blue plaque erected by Wakefield Civic Society this week:
Ann Hurst
(1772-1832)Wakefield’s first female newspaper owner and proprietor. (1823-1830) Played a leading role in the promotion of the abolition of Slavery and was an active supporter of early medical provision for women and the poor. Her paper ‘The Wakefield & Halifax Journal’ was distributed from this property at 56 Westgate
Wakefield Civic Society, 2021, with Dream Time Creative.
I’m not sure if a portrait exists of her, so I imagined her reading galleys from her paper. I’m guessing that to do all she did, she must have been quite a commanding figure, so I thought of Anne Reid’s character, Lady Denham, in the recent television version of Jane Austen’s Sanditon. Hopefully Ann Hurst wasn’t quite so intimidating.
Angelica Kaufmann’s self-portrait hangs in the house at Nostell Priory and it is possible that she had a hand in the decorations, working alongside Robert Adam and Thomas Chippendale. The self-portrait sees her torn between her twins passions – for music and for painting, who she paints as muse-like figures.
Swiss-born Angelica (1741–1807) worked in England for fifteen years and in 1768 became a founder member of the Royal Academy. It would be another 150 years until the next female artist was elected as an academician.
If we can believe the portraits of her, Angelica looked impossibly glamorous, in a Dangerous Liaisons kind of way when she painted but I can’t believe that she dressed like that when she painted murals at Nostell, so I’ve borrowed Kate Winslet’s landscape gardener’s outfit from A Little Chaos.