Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
Two more mayoral election candidates: Waj Ali, standing for Reform UK, looks rather formal in his studio portrait, so I’ve drawn him on location too, in a selfie taken at the Hepworth.
No studio portrait for the Yorkshire Party: they decided the best place to launch their candidate, Bob Buxton a parish councillor in Rawdon, would be a windswept moor.
We’re spoilt for choice in next month’s elections for our first ever mayor for West Yorkshire so here, in alphabetical order to avoid political bias, are our candidates from the three main parties (the other four contenders to follow). Tracy Brabin, MP for Batley and Spen, is standing for the Labour Party.
Stewart Golton, a councillor for Rothwell on Leeds City Council is standing for the Liberal Democrats.
Matt Robinson, the Conservative Party candidate, is drawn from a photograph taken before his post-lockdown haircut, so you won’t recognise him now.
In 1977, during my lunchbreak, when I taught illustration at Leeds, I walked into Austicks’ Headrow Bookshop and was surprised to see Peter Ustinov at the back of the shop with the manager. The ideal opportunity to get a signed copy of this autobiography, Dear Me, for my Mum’s birthday.
“Who should I sign it to?” he asked.
“That’s a problem, she hates her name, Gladys.”
“That’s just like the Gladyses that I know.”
It wouldn’t look very friendly signed ‘To Mrs Bell’, so we went for:
‘Happy Birthday
to Richard’s Mum’
My Mum finally found a way around this. When she found herself far from home in the West Country, having broken her leg during a holiday she gave the nurse her middle name Joan, as she didn’t want ‘Gladys’ on the notice above her bed, so when she’d recovered enough to be transported by ambulance back to our local hospital, Pinderfields, in Wakefield, she stuck with her new name. From then on her friends called her Joan.
I’ve drawn this, as with previous sketches, from the Radio Times. This week the 1964 comedy heist movie Topkapi gets a showing. Ustinov won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his role as Arthur Simon Simpson, a small-time crook who finds himself out of his depth.
A man carrying a box: it says something for Jonah Hill’s talents that he can conjure up a character – in fact a little short story – in one expressive pose. In Rupert Goold’s True Story he plays real-life New York Times journalist Michael Finkel acting ‘on well-intentioned-schlub setting’, as Radio Times film critic Andrew Collins puts it in his review (schlub is North American derogatory slang for a ‘talentless, unattractive or boorish person’, so definitely not like Jonah Hill).
Katherine Waterston’s character Daniels, has all the kit she needs to terraform a lush alien planet. What could possibly go wrong?
Good to see Michael Rosen smiling again in last week’s Radio Times. This time last year, he was in an induced coma with a 50-50 chance of surviving Covid-19. In his latest book, Many Different Kinds of Love A story of life, death and the NHS, he recounts his near-death experience, illustrated by Chris Riddell.
this is a beautiful book about love, life and the NHS that celebrates the power of community and the indomitable spirits of the people who keep us well.
Waterstones’ website
Martin Luther King features in a couple of television documentaries this week, giving me an opportunity to draw him from two small black and white photographs. That rather unusual angle, looking up at his face, might explain why I struggled with proportions in my first attempt.
“Jolly nice meeting you but I’m sorry, you won’t ever make a film because your face is wrongly arranged.”
Director giving Judi Dench advice after an audition in 1960, as recalled in conversation with Richard Eyre on the BBC.
Glad that she didn’t listen to the advice. In Lindsay Shapero’s Red Joan, a spy drama based on actual events, she plays Joan Stanley, accused of passing nuclear secrets to the Russians. So a complete contrast to ‘M’.
I enjoyed John Malkovich’s older Hercule Poirot solving The ABC Murders a few years ago, introducing a rather darker version of the detective and convincingly evoking what I imagine a 1930s atmosphere should be. I loved that he had an apartment in the mansions near the Royal Albert Hall, as that was such a familiar spot in my student days as I walked to and from the Kensington Gore building of the Royal College of Art.
I’m studying Quentin Blake’s approach to illustration at the moment which is why I’ve tried to free up my drawing here. Blake’s hands are rarely observed with anatomical precision but they’re so confidently drawn and so expressive of the individual character that they look completely convincing.
But I feel uncomfortable deliberately drawing hands so rapidly, without attempting to observe every individual joint. Folds in material I’m happier with, as they’re fluid and semi-abstract anyway.
Yes, he has turned out looking rather like Ralph Vaughan Williams in my drawing but this is rumpled Detective Chief Inspector John Barnaby, Neil Dudgeon’s lead character in ITV’s Midsomer Murders.
Hopefully the good inspector won’t have any trouble from these characters, Riz Ahmed’s Omar and Kayvan Novak’s Waj, the hapless northerners in Four Lions who attempt to train crows as bombers. I love the expression on the crow’s face.
And I’m sure that no crows were harmed during location filming in the hills around Sheffield.
These were all drawn from photographs in last week’s Radio Times, as was Sunny, played by Sajeev Bhaskar, another character from Unforgotten. Professor John Wright is a clinician and epidemiologist at the Bradford Royal Infirmary.