Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
More unusual visitors at our garden pond and although my cut-out characters now bear little resemblance to the Patrick Stewart and Richard Tolan as Joby and his dad in the Yorkshire Television version of Stan Barstow’s Joby, they have the folksy quality that I was after for my Redbox Gallery show.
They’ll be sitting on a riverbank, a folding screen of two A1 sheets of foamboard. Time to get out my largest brush, a varnish brush, to add the indigo blue of the Calder.
It may seem obtuse to turn my artwork upside down as I enlarge my characters from A3 to A1 with the aid of a grid, but with such a large sheet of foamboard, it’s easier to reach the top this way. When it came to the faces, I drew a tighter grid to help me get the details in proportion.
Besides, as Betty Edwards points out in Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, upside-down drawing helps you make the shift to ‘R-mode’, so that the logical left side of the brain isn’t continually saying ‘Ah, I know what this is . . .’ (a nose, for example) ‘so don’t need to look so carefully now’. When you switch over to your right side, she suggests, you draw the shapes as they are, without preconceptions.
Even so, when I came to the eyes of these characters, I could feel myself thinking, no, that’s not right, that doesn’t feel as if I’m drawing an eye.
Look forward to turning the board right side up.
You wouldn’t guess that it was midsummer from the way people are dressed in waterproofs, parkas and high vis jackets this afternoon on the windswept precinct behind the town hall in Ossett.
Figures drawn as I waited in the hairdressers. Watercolour added later from memory, but for most of the people I could remember that as the colour seemed as if it was a part of the character, as much as the way they walked.
As it’s our council leader Denise Jeffery’s birthday, I couldn’t resist a homemade birthday brownie cartoon. Congratulations too to Tracy Brabin, M.P., who celebrated her birthday yesterday by becoming West Yorkshire’s first elected mayor. By the way, her ‘vote Labour’ brownies turned out to be perfectly legal.
And commiserations to a talented bunch of runners up. What a shame that all seven couldn’t get together like the mismatched heroes of a comic book series to pool their superpowers, perhaps mentored by a wise old leader, played by former Dewsbury Reporter journalist, Patrick Stewart, to ‘promote ideals of tolerance and equality for all’ in West Yorkshire, just like he does in Marvel’s X-Men movies.
You couldn’t ask for a better bunch of candidates for the final line-up for next month’s West Yorkshire mayoral election, my only regret is that we can’t be in an alternative universe where Tracy Brabin’s predecessor in the Batley and Spen constituency, the ebullient Jo Cox, could also have a crack at it.
Therese Hirst is our candidate for the English Democrats.
Though a critic of the concept of an elected mayor for West Yorkshire, describing it as ‘an elected dictatorship, and not a proper democratic body’, Andrew Cooper, from Huddersfield, is representing the Green Party in next month’s election.
It is scarcely necessary to remind people of what a few feet rise in sea level (let alone the ultimate 200 feet which would follow the complete liquidation of the land-held icecaps) would do to to our geography. Suffice to say that it would be unwise to take a ninety-nine year lease on coastal flats!
Peter Ritchie Calder, Man and the Cosmos, 1968
That urgent advice was given over half a century ago by award-winning science journalist Peter Ritchie Calder in a succinct account of ‘The greenhouse effect’ in his 1968 book Man and the Cosmos, The Nature of Science Today.
As a student, publications like this convinced me that, if I was going to try to make a career as a natural history illustrator, I should also do all I could to campaign on environmental issues. I didn’t do very well on that one, so it’s good to see Greta Thunberg’s generation treating global warming (along with the alarming rate of extinctions) as an overridingly urgent global issue.
One of the functions of weather satellites is to make measurements of the energy which reaches the Earth and to note the circumstances in which it is lost. If records show over the years that this debit or credit is being affected, then counter measures will have to be taken. The energy budget is more important than the ledger-balancing operations of ministers of finance. The lives of people and the fates of nations will depend on patterns of rainfall.
Peter Ritchie Calder, Man and the Cosmos, 1968
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.