Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
I had probably held more birds than stringed instruments, and the feeling reminded me of scooping a hen from its perch, its body always lighter than I expect, and pulsing with life.
Helena Attlee, Lev’s Violin, 2021
Helena Attlee, author of An Italian Adventure and The Land Where Lemons Grow, The Story of Italy and Its Citrus Fruit, appears on the Books Page of this week’s Radio Times, on the trail of the “mongrel history” of a worn and weathered violin in her new book Lev’s Violin.
In a photograph in this week’s Radio Times, Maria Schrader’s character Lenora has the detached, intense look of one of a woman in a Stanley Spencer painting. Deutschland 89, a German-American spy drama, is currently showing on More4.
Emil Hostina is a Securitate agent, hunkered down with her in a safe house in Timisoara, Romania, at the time of the fall of the Ceausescu regime.
I love the theatricality of the production. I wouldn’t want to stay with these two if they opened and bed & breakfast in Scarborough, but they’re wonderful characters to draw. Perhaps Deutschland will be looking for an artist in residence for their next series?
Writing was a political act and poetry was a cultural weapon.
Linton Kwesi Johnson
That makes it sound as if his work could be a bit tough, but he’s just as likely to get audiences laughing and applauding as he is to get them fired up with indignation or empathic and thoughtful.
Linton Kwesi Johnson, poet and best-selling reggae artist, is only the second living poet and the only black British poet to have his work published as a Penguin Classic.
Mary Creagh was Wakefield’s first woman MP, elected in 2005, so she’s one of my local Women in History. She’s invariably more upbeat than in my drawing but this is from a still from a Channel 4 interview, live from the Palace of Westminster, in December 2019, a week after she lost her seat to Imran Nasir Ahmad Khan, our current MP, who was literally parachuted in – yes, really, landing on a school playing field – to stand for the Conservative Party.
In the interview she reflected that the then Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn had been guilty of ‘preening narcissism’, so here she reminds me of a distraught character in a Samuel Beckett play or as Cordelia, banished by the folly of her father, in King Lear.
Mary Creagh has always taken a keen interest in environmental issues and during her time at Westminster she was chair of the Environmental Audit Select Committee. She’s now chief executive of the national walking charity Living Streets.
Living Streets the UK charity for everyday walking
Hard to believe that it’s now six years since I last saw Kate Taylor, Wakefield historian. On Saturday mornings, she and archivist John Goodchild used to treat themselves to breakfast at the Cottage Tearooms in Horbury then call in at the Rickaro Bookshop on the High Street. Barbara worked there at the time.
In the 1970s Kate wrote articles on history and architectural heritage for the Wakefield Express, so it was a big thing for me when she called to interview me when my first book A Sketchbook of the Natural History of the Country Round Wakefield was published. It meant a lot to me that she took my work seriously.
I liked Kate’s uncompromising support for architectural conservation and always felt that she had an air of quizzical scepticism about her and a twinkle of mischief. She was force to be reckoned with and I couldn’t finish my Wakefield Women in History month without including her.
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.
Jill Nalder, actress and activist, was this week’s sitter, painted by Gregory Mason on Portrait Artist of the Week.
Jill has been taking part in hedgehog surveys in Regents Park. In the area between Primrose Hill and Regents Park she says there should be about 300 hedgehogs but the surveys have revealed that they’re down to just 27 individuals. Rather than doing a hedgehog rescue, the group are looking at ways to ensure the population is sustainable.
I was at ‘The Towers’ working for Doctor Fred Walker. He had a surgery out at the other side of the road, some distance away. As kitchen maid I didn’t get out much. The housemaid used to take the child out, so she got out more.
I had a weekend off each month and then I’d go back home. No, I don’t think there were any trams. The doctor had a pony and trap and a groom to look after it.
No, I haven’t seen Upstairs, Downstairs . . . the people next door say I ought to look at it.”
Jane Bell, 7 March, 1974
This was my grandma on her 91st birthday, when we visited her at Sutton-cum-Lound in Nottinghamshire on Thursday, 7 March 1974, reminiscing about the brief period in her life when she worked in Wakefield. I’d been showing her Harold Speak and Jean Forrester’s book of photographs of Old Wakefield. From what she said, it’s hardly surprising that she didn’t have more memories of the city at that time.
By the time of the 1901 census she’d moved up to being cook, for a family in Sheffield, so her time in Wakefield must have been towards the end of the 1890s or 1900.
Kayoon Anderson painted journalist Clive Myrie on today’s live session of Sky Arts’ Portrait Artist of the Week.
Kayoon reused a canvas, the first portrait that she’d ever painted from life.
The presenting team included Kate Bryan and Tai-Shan Schierenberg.
Thanks to Sky Arts, I got a chance to draw actor and one of this year’s Turner Prize judges, Russell Tovey, today in a one-hour session of Portrait Artist of the Week. I won’t be standing by the phone next week to find out if I’ve won the coveted title as I’ve already seen some of the competition, however some artists had an advantage as they took the chance to start 3 hours earlier as the live programme was preceded by a podcast session. One hour drawing from a screen was enough for me.
At first I thought that perhaps I’d do better if he just sat still instead of chatting to the artist painting his portrait but really that was the point of the session. I could have drawn from a photograph otherwise. The way his expression changed and the way the light changed made the session feel similar to drawing someone in real life.