Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
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.
Dame Mary Bolles was born in the reign of Elizabeth I and died, aged 81, on 5 May 1662, in the reign of Charles II. She remains the only woman to have been awarded a baronetcy, in her case the Baronetcy of Nova Scotia, bestowed on her by Charles I in 1635.
She’s probably best known in Wakefield for the Water Tower, which she had constructed to pump a water supply up to Heath Old Hall. There are suggestions that it also supplied Heath Village and possibly an ironworks.
I haven’t found a portrait of her, other than the effigy on her memorial in Ledston Church, so these are my attempts to imagine her as a cavalier lady at the time she became a baronet(ess?). The terms of her will called on her executors to open the Hall to guests and to slaughter as many of her fat sheep and cattle as necessary for the funeral feasting, which was to last six weeks. According to some accounts, she also stipulated that a particular room in the house should be left locked until 50 years after her death.
The Old Hall fell into ruin after being used as a supply store during World War II, but the original door of Dame Mary’s room, reputedly a haunted door, can be seen in Wakefield Museum.
Luckily, I had Barbara to call on when I had a bit of a scone dough disaster this morning. All it took was her cool, calm manner, a spatula and the perfectly judged addition of extra self-raising flour.
I was on safer ground with our regular half wholemeal/ half plain flour loaf.
I drew the scones with a Waverley Pen nib and the loaf with the similar looking but slightly larger Telephone Pen nib. I think that for me the Telephone Pen, with its ‘Turned up Point’ is a bit smoother to draw with, which suits me. That’s just as well because I have just one Waverley Nib but luckily I’ve got an almost full box, containing a gross (144) of John Heath’s ‘Golden Coated Telephone Pen’ nibs.
Toilet roll tubes are biodegradable so, when these sweet peas are ready, I can put them straight in the ground without disturbing the long tap root. I’ve used soil from the greenhouse, which I’d refreshed with plenty of garden compost in the autumn. I’ll probably get a little weed seedlings springing up but I’ll keep pulling those out and the sweet peas shouldn’t have any difficulty competing with them.
My illustrator friend John Welding – who, thanks to lockdown, we’ve spotted in passing on his bike just once in the past year – posted some beautifully shot ‘drapery’ studies of himself which he’d taken as reference for an illustration project (loan of flat cap by Steve Hopewell).
I needed a tonal subject to test out my ink washes on, so this was ideal, so many thanks to John.
I started drawing from his photograph with a dip pen with a Waverley nib, using De Atramentis Document Ink.
I’ve revived an ink wash system that I used on location in the Peak District when I worked on my black and white published sketchbook High Peak Drifter. The washes from then had dried up long ago, so I cleaned out the jars (they’re plastic sample jars from a pharmacy) and remixed the four greys. Since testing them out in these swashes, I’ve made the ‘Pale’ and ‘Med. Pale’ a bit lighter and the ‘Dark’ a bit darker. As with the drawing, I used De Atramentis Ink.
We’re rather unusual on our street in keeping a car in our garage but, like most of our neighbours, we use it as a store and work space. My 1976 Astro Daimler bicycle leans against the back wall but it hasn’t been used for years and when I last used it occasionally, it was to take parcels to the post office, rather than to get out touring the landscape, which was its original intended purpose.
Our favourite way to get out in nature these days is to put on our hiking boots. They’re sitting on a unit saved from our old kitchen, which has proved to be a useful work bench.
Still hanging on the shelf unit, a string of large Stuggart Giant onions. We had a bumper crop of them last year, but because of cold, damp weather when we harvested them, they didn’t keep and soon turned bad.
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.
We’ve yet to meet the latest arrival in the family, but she hasn’t had such a bad year. And after all those new experiences, this card features a pop-up of the birthday girl taking a relaxing bath . . . in a kitchen sink during a holiday in the highlands.
A card for a beachcombing marine biology enthusiast (he lives not far from The Deep, which I’ve yet to visit).