Thursday morning, 17 October, 1974, the Blue Room, Illustration Department, Royal College of Art, Exhibition Road:
“And what do you think, Richard?”
I prefer lurking in the background, but illustration tutor Quentin Blake is keen to bring me into the group discussion. Dennis Leigh, another student in our year, has been telling us the stories behind his work-in-progress. Put on the spot, I fall back to my default position and ask him:
“Don’t you ever go out into the country? All your subjects take place in the mind. Don’t you ever think of drawing from Reality, from Nature?”
It’s not surprising that I had so few friends at College!
“The countryside makes me feel uneasy,” Dennis explains, “It’s human relationships that I’m interested in, taking place in situations, in rooms . . .”
But one of his stories starts with a couple who are taking a walk in the country:
“They find the partly decomposed remains of an angel on the moor and take it home and put it in the attic, but the man gets . . .”
And frustratingly, that’s as far as I got in my diary in recording Dennis’s story.
It had been a busy day for me:
Goodnight to Flamboro’
‘Mother Baines would have approved of the illustrations.’
Roger Carpenter
I’d had a good reaction to my illustrations to Goodnight to Flamboro’, the biography of Yorkshire composer William Baines (1899-1922), in a letter that arrived that morning from its author, Roger Carpenter, so I arranged to meet up with the one-man-band publisher Lewis Foreman of Triad Press to discuss what would be my first book illustrations to be published.
I was also ploughing on with my Greenhouse Mural, struggling with one of the life-size birds that I was painting, the singing finch.
Darwin’s Old Studio
Apple Maps 3D city view
Because of the Blue Room meeting, I’d missed out on a visit that the college’s general studies environment group had made to the Geological Museum but when I met up with my natural history illustration tutor John Norris Wood later, he had some encouraging news. There were just two of us in John’s department: botanical illustrator Gillian Condy and myself, and we’d been slotted into temporary corners of the Textiles Department but John had found us a room right next to the college greenhouse, on the top floor of the Kensington Gore building.
The room had been the studio of Sir Robin Darwin (1910-1974), who was Rector of the college for more than three decades. The last appointment he made was to put John in charge of the greenhouse and of encouraging the study of natural form throughout the college. John thought that Sir Robin’s decision when designing the Kensington Gore building to put nature at its centre must have been the result of the genes of his naturalist great-grandfather, Charles Darwin, coming through.
Landscape into Art
Lunchtime, 17 October 1974, Royal College of Art, Kensington Gore Building:
On quick visit the Landscape into Art exhibition I met Michael Lloyd a student in the silversmithing department. Like me, he’d headed for the hills during the summer vacation but had also taken his narrow boat up to Rochdale and down to Bristol.
I was so impressed with his narrow boat, which he’d fitted out himself for his accommodation before he started his course at college. By the autumn of 1974 he’d moored it on the Grand Union Canal at Rickmansworth. Rickmansworth featured in the London Transport Book of Country Walks, so it was one of the places that I used to head off for on a weekend, along the Metropolitan Line from St Pancras.
Also at the exhibition I saw Jill Bloodworth from painting, who joined me on my regular lunch-break walk around the Serpentine. One of the plans in the Landscape into Art exhibition was for a farm in Hyde Park. Jill wasn’t convinced by this idea:
“Wouldn’t that be rather impractical? You’d have to keep the public out. But some people haven’t seen a farm.”
I liked the idea of putting people in touch with where their food comes from so I included a suggestion for an urban farm in my first book, A Sketchbook of the Natural History of the Country Round Wakefield. But I’m so glad that the Park hasn’t been ploughed up or turned to pasture.
Jill was working on large canvases of the moody, ruinously disarticulated interiors of Northumbrian castles in the Mural Room at Exhibition Road. The grey skies and autumn colours in the Park prompted her to mention that she intended go and sketch at the Tower of London.
A Walk in the New Forest
The next day, after a morning sketching birds in the greenhouse, I headed off to Southampton to see my friends from one of my stints as a volunteer warden at the RSPB Loch Garten Osprey Reserve, Tony & Jutta Manser. We took a walk in the New Forest where we spotted a fallow stag in dark autumn pelage and later found ourselves on the fringes of a fox hunt.
As I mentioned, one of my favourite escapes from London on a weekend was to take the Metropolitan Line towards the Chilterns in the north, but I’d sometimes head for Epping Forest or Broadstairs to the east or to Boxhill or Darwin’s Down House to the south. Even nearer my base in South Kensington, were the open spaces of Hampstead Heath and Richmond Park.
Where are they now?
Jill Bloodworth’s award-winning degree show the following summer featured the wrap-around, and, when I attempted to draw it, disorientating, interior of the Brixton Windmill. She’s since gone on to work in printmaking, constructed collage and historical re-enactment.
Gillian Condy, was awarded the Royal Horticultural Society gold medal for her botanical illustration. In 1983 she became resident botanical artist with the National Botanical Institute in Pretoria.
Dennis Leigh became the lead singer in Ultravox and later had a solo career as John Foxx but he never gave up on illustration.
I last saw Michael Lloyd’s work on a visit to the Scottish Parliament at Holyrood: in 1999 he was commissioned to make the mace, which was presented by HM The Queen to the New Scottish Parliament.
Poet and children’s author Colin West has written and illustrated sixty books. Thank you Colin for looking out the photographs for this article. Apart from a degree day photograph where I’m wearing a gown, I think they’re the only photographs taken of me during my time at college, so I’d been quite successful at lurking in the background.
Sadly my natural history illustration tutor John Norris Wood died in 2015. At the Wings and Feather’s exhibition that I mentioned in my last post, I was saying to Elizabeth Butterworth (who graduated in painting in 1974) how much I missed him. She agreed:
“I think we all miss John.”
Links
John Norris Wood, obituaries in The Independent and The Guardian