If you’re standing in the queue for the Science Museum on Exhibition Road you might spot this inscription above the large and imposing archway opposite:
SCIENCE AND ART DEPARTMENT SCHOOLS ** MUSEUM A.D. 1852
The date is misleading because the building – now the Henry Cole Wing of the Victoria and Albert Museum – was constructed between 1899 and 1909.
I was seven years old when I first joined the queue at the Science Museum (I can be sure of the date because I remember a poster for Kirk Douglas’s film ‘The Vikings’ – released in August 1958 – on hoardings around the Natural History Museum gardens).
The Royal College of Art
At that time there was an arts and crafts-style mosaic in the frame to the right of the archway. Several muses reclined elegantly beneath an inscription indicating that this was then the ‘Royal College of Art’.
A few more sketches from 1973. I’d been hand lettering my Sketchbook of the Natural History of the Country Round Wakefield and I was worried about my shaky hands:
. . . `I didn’t get very much work done on the book. It’s the energy flow chart I’m doing. But my hands are so shaky when I try to do letter forms. I have to practice quite a bit to get it right, but it’s so maddening; a real curse. Depending on how this book goes I think that I shall have to give up hand lettering for good; or have the operation for Parkinson’s Disease . . . or try a different pen or pen nib.
When I’ve calmed down and don’t worry too much about each letter and curve I can produce readable lettering . . . it’s like walking – if you start thinking about each step you soon trip up
My diary for Wednesday, 15th August, 1973
Fifty years later I’m still hand lettering and still worrying about my shaky hands, although it’s nothing to do with Parkinson’s Disease, it’s just the regular Essential or Familial Tremor (which can be controlled by drinking red wine!)
It wasn’t all agonising about artwork though: I recorded ‘!! SEVEN REDSHANK !!’ on the Wyke and 3 sandpipers on the river.
Jenny, natural history illustrator, drawing by our pond. She recently completed a commission to illustrate an information board about the wildlife at a pond on a nature reserve in West Sussex.
Jenny’s drawing of the vegetation around our pond
She started on John Norris Wood’s natural history illustration course at the Royal College of Art a year after I left, in 1976 and graduated in 1979, focussing on the Chelsea Physic Garden, it’s history and plants.
Royal College of Art, Valentine’s Day, Wednesday 14 February 1972: Today at 11 o’clock a dreadful fire. The College shop on the Ground Floor was in flames. Painting my mural in the college greenhouse, I at first thought the alarm was a distant circular saw but I was puzzled by why so many people were hurrying through.
The smoke was funnelled up the stair well and got into the greenhouse. From the courtyard I could see it billowing out of the windows. At least 7 birds are dead. Of course small birds are very susceptible to fumes.
I sketched four of the dead birds on the following Friday.
(adapted from my student diary and sketchbook)
Photography Course
The following week, I had a break from the painting when I took the college’s three-week photography course, which I’ve written about previously in this Wild Yorkshire blog.
On the following Thursday, after a morning of photography at the Chelsea Physic Garden, I met up with my tutor John Norris Wood. Judging from my conversation with him he’d spotted the flaws in my workflow and I haven’t changed much fifty years later!
The Demise of the College Greenhouse
In 1985 this appeal for help in the college greenhouse appeared in student newsletter. My thanks to Sarah Mercer, Digitisation Officer (Special Collections), at the college library for spotting this and to Henrietta Goodden for passing it on to me.
The greenhouse would soon be repurposed as a drawing studio. The Rector, Jocelyn Stevens offered to rehouse the birds in his own greenhouse.
Tchaikovsky Concert
A visit to the bank . . . luckily I wasn’t overdrawn (just sketched in very quickly).
And just one more piece of ephemera: ‘The highlight of today,’ I recorded in my diary for 11th February, ‘was the Tchaikovsky concert; Nutcracker, Piano Concerto No. 1, Capriccio Italien, Swan Lake and, with cannons and the Coldstream Guards, the 1812 overture.’
My thanks to Henrietta Goodden, senior tutor, in Fashion at the Royal College of Art, 1991-2010, for the questions and prompts
Why is it that some people can draw naturally?
One of my student sketchbooks, Royal College of Art
Drawing does seem to be with some people from a very early age, and the same seems to be true about music. My nephew could follow a tune before he could talk and he went on to make a career of performing, composing and arranging music.
I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t fascinated by drawing. My older sister Linda once said that as a child as soon as I woke up I’d have a pencil in my hand.
River in Inverness, 2011
There are cases of people taking up art later in life but I think that for most of the illustrators and painters that I’ve known the urge to draw started very early but I’d struggle to say why.
My mother was keen on drawing, painting and various crafts. On on her side the family I had ancestors in Sheffield who made and designed spring knife blades, so perhaps there’s a genetic element.
In some ways I don’t find drawing and painting easy as I’ve got shaky hands and a mild red/green colour blindness. Perhaps pushing against those physical disadvantages made me a bit more determined and fascinated by the process than my school friends who could draw straight lines and match colours with a greater facility than I could.
Is it from a wish to record observations?
The walk to school in 1965; there were 7 factory chimneys at Horbury Bridge, plus hundreds of domestic coal fires even, happy days, steam trains on the railway and marshalling yards, so you can imagine blackened trees and buildings were.
There’s an element of that. I’ve got a notebook from 1960, written and illustrated when I was eight or nine years old and it’s full of observations of birds, flowers, fish, rocks and landscapes. I even wrote a little article on how to keep an nature notebook and how to set up a little museum of natural history finds: feathers, shells, seaweeds etc.
But the other strand in my work was creating imaginative worlds, although I wasn’t drawn to fantasy and fairy stories instead I tried to create comic strip versions of films and books I’d been inspired by including Moby Dick, Ben Hur and The Long Ships.
Illustrators often seem to be good narrators
I tend to go blank when I try to think up an imaginative story but I soon get into writing mini-scripts if I start with a vivid character first. During the first lockdown, when ‘non-essential’ shops shut down and we couldn’t go browsing for suitable birthday cards for relatives, I took to drawing homemade cards.
Once I’ve got a few starting points I can start to create a character and a world for that character to inhabit. Apart from the fun of drawing the characters and settings, the fascination is in trying to get a gag to work in a clear way, in effect to tell a little story in one cartoon or a few frames of a comic.
For me drawing seems to relate to memory. I always feel that I tend to remember details from years ago that some of my friends and relatives forget. I kept a diary from my secondary school days, through college and in a way I’ve continued that through my Wild Yorkshire blog.
And do you think it can be taught from scratch? It’s such an important part of a designer’s tools and nowadays I get the impression that art schools don’t consider it important.
My first job on leaving college was teaching life drawing and illustration to a class of graphic designers at the local art school. I couldn’t believe how little interest most of them took in drawing. They were enthusiastic about graphic design but seemed to consider a morning drawing from life as a side issue.
If people have the manual dexterity to write I don’t see why they shouldn’t be able to learn to draw. I’ve tried going through the exercises in Betty Edwards’ Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain and I think that should work as an introduction to drawing. I also tried John Ruskin’s Elements of Drawing. And today I picked up two attractive large format Dorling Kindersley books from the library, Sarah Simblet’s Drawing for the Artist and Botany for the Artist.
Drawing is a great subject as a child can just wade in and produce characterful drawings without any training but, if you want to go deeper, there’s always more to learn.
Do you remember who else was on your course when you were there, and who else was teaching?
From my year at the Royal College of Art, I’m still in touch via social media with printmaker John Ross and illustrators Colin West, Jacqui Atkinson, Hazel MacIntosh and Shelagh Wozniak (formerly McGee?). In recent years I’ve also heard from painters Elizabeth Butterworth and James Horton.
Wise advice from John Norris Wood
My main illustration tutors were Brian Robb, John Norris Wood and to a lesser extent Quentin Blake. I met up weekly with graphic design tutors Malcolm Winton and later Doug Coyne.
As I was painting the ‘mural’ for the greenhouse, I also had advice from Bateson Mason, Leonard Rosoman and Colin (surname escapes my memory). In printing I think the main tutor or technician who advised me was Harry Greenway (?), but one of his colleagues was equally helpful.
Fossils
When working on projects involving fossils I was able to speak to some of the experts just across the road in the Natural History Museum, particularly fossil plant expert Cedric Shute.
Just in case you were wondering how I was getting on fifty years ago today in my second term at at the Royal College of Art . . .
On the morning of Friday 19 January 1973 I got to my first concert at the Royal Albert Hall, next door to the Kensington Gore Darwin Building where I was painting my ‘Greenhouse Mural’.
Met Judith Chapman a school friend of my brother’s when I went to buy my ticket
What splendid acoustics the Albert Hall has. There was a sharp noise at the beginning of Fidelio Overture which echoed . . . very dramatic. Andre Tchaikovsky played the piano in Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini by Rachmaninov . . .
Andre Tchaikovsky died in 1982 but his name still appears on the programme ofr productions of Hamlet because he bequeathed his skull to Royal Shakespeare Company.
In the afternoon I’d been in the Illustration Department discussing various projects with typographer Malcolm Winton. My idea that if I had a distraction-free month (in a lighthouse) I could finish my Natural History of Wakefield was mistaken. It took me another five years to get it into print.
So not surprisingly, back my room at the college student hostel, at 14 Evelyn Gardens, I was considering what progress I’d made and what I’d like to do next. Fifty years ago, in my diary for Monday 22 January 1973, I was contemplating the next fifty years:
Where am I now? Or, where would I have been if I hadn’t succeeded in getting a place here, for, as it happened, I didn’t manage to get a place on Post-Diploma.
Would I still be hawking round with folder and photocopies, staying with Dave and Linnie while I toured the London publishers?
Or would I be buried in a Northern Agency . . . or school museums?
Home: Poppleton’ Mill, Horbury Bridge, from my January 1972 sketchbook
Probably for I do not feel my illustrations or myself are competent or confident enough to take on real life. So I must get some work and working out done during this next 3 years . . . and get some outlets for my work going.
Planning for the next 50 years!
Perhaps I shouldn’t worry if I don’t work out everything of my art and attitude . . . if I did the next 50 years would be rather dull.
I think that my attitudes have hardly changed since I was seven or so.
This morning we walked alongside this meander of the River Calder although in the 45 years since I drew this trees have grown up along the bank, obscuring the view across the river.
My room at 14 Evelyn Gardens, October 1972
It’s rare for me to bump into anyone who I remember from 50 years ago at the Royal College of Art when we’re down by the river but this morning we stopped and had a chat with Sarah, Gardner as was, who lived in a slightly larger room than mine (above) in the college hostel at Evelyn Gardens, South Kensington.
She doesn’t remember me from that time but she was just 4 months old as the term started, so that’s not surprising. Her dad Roger was in his second year in the painting department.
This drawing was in my A4-sized notebook, so the drawings in it are mainly doodles that I got distracted by when I should have been getting on with some writing. I wish that I’d taken the doodles further, I prefer the playfulness to some of my more serious work from that time.
The drawing of my table is so evocative, a reminder me of once-familiar objects such as a pint-sized milk bottle, my long-gone brown teapot and the small transistor radio which wasn’t really up to the job and which I soon replaced, calling in an electrical shop on the Edgeware Road to choose it.
That looks like a plastic butter dish in the foreground, I’d forgotten that. In those days margarine came in a silver paper wrapper rather than in a plastic tub.
Finally, from that same notebook, an early rough for my mural of birds in the college greenhouse on the top floor of the RCA’s Kensington Gore building. You can see that I was keen to include lettering. I think that I was in awe of the work I saw in the painting school, suffering ‘agonies of diffidence’ (to quote comic artist Frank Bellamy when he found himself in a similar context) when I took my work in there.
The lettering was my way of saying this is intended as an illustration, a drawing that’s here to do a specific job – help people identify the birds – not a serious painting.
Rough for my Greenhouse Mural, an elaborate identification chart for tropical birds that my tutor John Norris Wood kept in the college greenhouse. Yes, that is the Royal Albert Hall in the background, the Greenhouse straddled two floors at the top of the College’s Kensington Gore building.
Saturday 30 September 1972
We set off at 8.30 or so and whisked down the M.1. to Linnie & Dave’s
My sister Linda and David’s first home in Southall
Where we had lunch before going and putting my things in my room at Evelyn Gardens.
My room on the first floor at 14 Evelyn Gardens, London SW7
Then Shopping – Mother bought a bright Red Trouser Suit.
I’d painted the Java doves in my ‘Greenhouse Mural’ during the previous week
I prefer lurking in the background . . .
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?”
Fellow student Colin West’s pithy answer when I suggested that there wasn’t much drawing from life in his Degree Show (from my diary, Saturday 14 June 1975). 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:
My initial sketch for the greenhouse mural. I thought that I might finish it in six weeks . . . it took me three years!
Goodnight to Flamboro’
My illustration for “. . . Poppies gleaming by moonlight . . .”, opus 136, the fifth of ‘Seven Preludes’ for Piano by William Baines.
‘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.
Quentin Blake and head of illustration Bryan Robb photographed by Colin West at the Kensington Gore building.
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.
On the reverse side of my sketch for the ‘Greenhouse Mural’ John drew suggestions of how I could incorporate the greenhouse’s frogs and lizards into my painting.
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:
Jill made this sketch to explain to me one of her paintings of the windmill: a sort of x-ray, looking up and down simultaneously.
“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.
Illustration picnic, Cookham, Thursday 26 June 1975, with me at the prow, and Quentin astern.
Where are they now?
Ian Pollock takes the oar in a boat hired from Turk’s Boatyard, Cookham.
My sketch of one of Liz Butterworth’s scarlet macaws, this must be either Lou or Oscar.
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
Colin West, 26 June 1975. Colin had already written and illustrated ‘Winslow and the Bath Tub’, which had been published in a first black and white edition as an Inkling by the Illustration Department.
As we entered this archway under by the Serpentine in Hyde Park, a man was feeding the birds on the bridge above us. Along with bird seed for the pigeons, he’d brought a can of sardines; he flipped open the lid as a heron warily sidled up to him along the parapet and it leant forwards to take one from his hand.
For me, walking through this archway from Hyde Park into Kensington Gardens is like stepping back in time; for three years I was lucky enough to have this as my lunchtime walk. After a morning of close-up work as a natural history illustration student at the Royal College of Art, next door to the Royal Albert Hall, all I had to do was cross Kensington Gore by the Albert Memorial and I could walk under ancient elms (soon to succumb to Dutch Elm Disease) and sweet chestnuts, down to the lake near the Peter Pan statue.
We were back in London for the day in December for the preview of Elizabeth Butterworth’sWings and Feathers, a collection of new paintings, at the Redfern Gallery on Cork Street. As usual when we’re in a city, we walked for miles, ten miles in total, from Kings Cross, much of that through parks: Regents Park, Hyde Park, Kensington Gardens and Green Park although Barbara insisted that we take the bus from 221B Baker Street to Marble Arch.
This park shelter on an improbably lofty scale, near the fountains at the top end of the Serpentine, stuck in my memory from my first visit to London in 1958, when I was aged seven. What also stuck in my mind, and apologies if I’ve told this story before, was that as we queued up outside the Science Museum on Exhibition Road, my mum explained to me that the building across the road, the one with the Arts & Crafts mosaic sign and its intriguing entrance through an archway, was the Royal College of Art.
Sweet chestnut, Kensington Gardens
“If you work hard at school, you might go there,” she suggested.
The prospect of drawing every day was enormously appealing to me! On that day we also visited the Natural History Museum where a group of students were laboriously drawing the dinosaur skeletons. I remember thinking that, if I was drawing there, I’d make things a bit more exciting and I’d bring the dinosaurs to life.
A day in my life as a student in my next post . . .
