Various

Cow skull, 1971

Goat skull, 1971

Here are some of the animal skulls we seem to have spent an inordinate length of time copying in art lessons in the early 70s. You can see why they are such effective exercises, in terms of shape, negative space, volume and shading. Today I think I would prefer to use a softer pencil for the cow skull in order to deepen the shadows, but this is being clever in retrospect. As for the goat, Mr Hicks insisted we all use ink or biro, probably because he knew of old that given the chance, most kids would spend most of the lesson rubbing things out. I knew my freehand drawing was pretty good but even I was terrified of using pen straight on the paper, because you couldn’t delete your mistake if you got the line wrong. Having said that, I’m pretty chuffed looking at this one again after such a long time. There’s a firm confidence in the top line of that skull, and the angle of the nearest horn looks plausible. I would prefer to see more darkness in the shadows to enhance the 3-D look, but the lesson was probably only a couple of hours long, and you can only do so much.

The Beatles, 1971

Mr Hicks had taken us to the Bristol Art Gallery to see an exhibition by Peter Blake, the artist who conceived the Sergeant Pepper album cover. I seem to remember there were portraits of The Beatles on show, but done in a very strange way – only parts of their faces were completed in detail, other parts had been left flat and unfinished. I complained – he could obviously do it properly if he wanted, I said, so why didn’t he? My teacher suggested maybe this was the artist’s way of reproducing what it’s actually like to look at a person, you concentrate on small areas of their face at a time, the mouth, then an eye, then an ear. I wasn’t having any of that nonsense with mine. I preferred to bugger up Paul’s right eye and flatten John’s head out of carelessness, and if I’d been a bit more careful with my drawing in the first place, they wouldn’t have got bigger going down the page. But by then I wanted to get on with the inking and didn’t want to waste time redrawing anything. Besides, the relative sizes reflect the relative importance of the members of the group, don’t they? (No they don’t actually, Paul was always my favourite.)

Test, 1972

A rare sally into colour with a deliberately restricted palette and no underdrawing, like Caravaggio. But whereas he was painting saints and martyrs, I was copying a fag advert off the back of some colour supplement. Or it could have been booze, I don’t remember. I was only sixteen. If I’d pursued this style I might have got somewhere, but such freeform improvisation made me nervous, so this kind of thing was never going to be any more than an occasional experiment. Happy with the half-tones though. It looks believable from a distance.

Rembrandt head, 1972

White chalk on black paper, a copy of a Rembrandt original, in case you were thinking it’s meant to be Ernest Hemingway or Father Christmas. At first glance it’s quite effective, but then you start counting the mouths, and it starts to look less convincing. I think I simply got a bit lost down there amidst all that face fungus. And that highlight on the right cheek as we look is literally too high, hence the obvious clumsy attempt to correct it to rediscover the eye... Ah well.

David by Augustus John, 1972

Nice pen and ink wash of an Augustus John original. Good hair and jacket, but face, not so much. It might have been more accurate if I’d taken more time with it, but again, I wasn’t too confident about how it would come out, and if you compare it to the original the drawing is all over the place. But I do rather like the (completely unintended) resemblance it has to the style of English portraiture in the first decades of this century. All the aristo paintings at the time – you know, the ones you keep seeing on the covers of Aldous Huxley paperbacks – have this informal dash and brushy texture. I didn’t know that was the effect I was going for back then, and now that I do, I probably wouldn’t be able to reproduce it if I tried. I’m still amazed I left the hands so vague – the clearest indication it was lack of time rather than any artistic decision on my part that caused it to remain unfinished – but I do quite like the shadow of the sleeve on the left wrist. It’s not solid, but it’s darkest where it needs to be darkest. Pure fluke though.

The Nightcomers, 1972

The Nightcomers was one of Michael Winner’s very worst films, billed as a prequel to Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. But I didn’t care because it featured the wondrous Stephanie Beacham doing a naked bondage scene with Marlon Brando. I watched it in the Gaumont Cinema, Baldwin Street, Bristol. It was an X and I was technically still too young for it, and as you can imagine (in fact, you don’t have to imagine, you can see) it left a lasting impression. I took the precaution of copying a black and white photograph wherein all the tonal values had been provided so all I had to do was draw. And draw it I did, completely freehand, no tracing, no scaling up with a grid.

Pen and ink turned out to be even more perfect than I anticipated for the modelling. Look at Brando’s right arm. On his bicep the strokes look like shading, but on the forearm they look like sweaty hairs. I don’t think I could have achieved that effect any other way, but if it works it’s pure chance, I certainly hadn’t planned it. The negative white highlights in the hair took a bit of working out too, and I’m glad I remembered to leave a strip of reflected light on the dark side of his arm on the left as we look. The only think I got wrong, I think, was the shadow down the top part of Stephanie’s arm – I think it’s too long and too dark – and maybe ditto the shadow down the side of her breast. But as you can imagine, by the time I got to those bits I wasn’t always in complete control of my hand. The longer a picture takes – and I think this one took me about eight or nine hours – the more nervous you get as you approach the end – one misstroke now and you can ruin the whole thing.

I still can’t believe that I, a shy 17-year-old schoolboy, actually took this in to show my art teacher, Mr Hicks. Instead of putting me in detention for bringing filth into the school, he cupped his hands around the bottom section and said it could be a drawing of a Henry Moore sculpture. There are good teachers and then there are even better teachers. Boy, did I get lucky with mine.

Wrestlers, 1973

I believe this is a Roman copy of a Greek original. How can they tell? And how can anyone do this? I mean, dig this shape out of a faceless block of stone? Anyway, I’m just glad someone could. Freehand again and I guess it’s okay, but the tonal contrasts are a bit tentative and I rather rushed the lower figure’s face and left hand. And from the looks of things, by the time I got to the upper figure’s left foot I must have been getting bored and waiting for the bell…

Belvedere torso, 1973

Taken from one of my many books on ancient Greek art and mythology. Interesting angle for this one; I believe the statue is much more often photographed from the front, which gives a very different impression of weight and brute strength and solidity. I think showing it from the side conveys a much more svelte and sinuous feel. I rather like the 3-D effect I’ve managed to give the bullet hole (?) in the shattered right buttock, and the tooth or texture of the rough paper certainly did a lot of the heavy lifting in making the shadows appear real.

L’âge de raison, 1973

Having recently seen the BBC TV adaptation of Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel sequence Les chemins de la liberté, known in English as Roads to Freedom, I thought I’d pretend to be very grown up and tackle the text in the original French, so I bought the sequence in a beautiful clean white paperback set. The paintings on their covers were all in that peculiarly French ‘dashed-off-in-a-thunderstorm’ style which I’ve always found wonderfully evocative, and this was my reproduction in powder paints of the cover of the first volume in the series, L’âge de raison. I had rarely used colour up to this point, and this thing measures nearly three feet by two, enormous in comparison to the size of the book, hence the rather wild and inaccurate drawing. But I kept telling myself it was meant to be impressionistic, so consciously tried to relax a bit and be more adventurous for once with my style and brushwork. The colours are many shades of saturation brighter than the original, and all I learnt was that colour was always likely to require more concentration than I was every likely to bring to bear. In the end I still don’t know what rush of blood to the head possessed me here, but I’m glad I took the plunge.

Satyr torso, 1974

Another fabulously compact and chunky fragment currently housed, I understand, in the Uffizi, Florence. It’s on my bucket list. Last time we were there, the queues were impossible, but with treasures like this inside to be seen, next time I intend to wait.

Erica, 1974

I spent my teens drawing women instead of going out with them because I’m an idiot. This is the lovely model and actress Erica Creer from 1974. There is also, I think, something of my favourite Pan’s Person about her too, the late lamented Louise Clarke. And you don’t see nearly enough of that kind of hairstyle these days, in my opinion, the ‘shagged through a hedge backwards’ look. The tabloid papers in the 70s used to be full of these kinds of shots – glamorous, sexy, stark shadows… I filled my boots. If I were doing this again today I might add a few more curls at the point where the lady’s lovely neck joins her shoulder, as it currently looks a little too thick to my eye. But maybe the delicacy of that necklace and the subtlety of the shading below her rotator cuff go some way towards disguising this minor flaw. They obviously did at the time I was originally making the picture, otherwise I’d have spotted it sooner.

After Eights cartoon, 1976

My very first caricature of the cast of After Eights, Oxford, 1976. Top left, actress Sue Taylor (stage name, Susan Kyd, Up the Garden Path, etc), Anne Briggs (played a policewoman in a Joan Hickson Miss Marple), front row left Piers Fletcher (producer of BBC2’s QI), Richard Curtis (Four Weddings and a Funeral, etc), Rowan Atkinson (Blackadder, Mr Bean, etc), RAS.

Knockers 2 cast, 1981

A modest pencil sketch to commemorate our Edinburgh Festival revue of 1979. From l to r: RAS, Gill Readdy, Alan Marsden, Rob Orchard, Dave Edwards, Jane Evans. I can still fit into those jeans.

Café ad, 1982

Managed to pick up a little pin money providing illustrations to a local listings magazine for a while. This was an advert for a local café. If you reverse the image the name across the door still comes out quite creditably as Bangers Factory Inc.

Owl, 1983

From a newspaper. This owl had flown into a window or got chewed by a cat or something, hence the bandages and plasters which relieved me of the effort of having to draw in every individual feather. Smart, see.

Nohant, 1985

While still experimenting with pastels, I worked this up from a photo I’d taken years before in Nohant, just next door to where the French writer George Sand used to live with the composer Chopin in the Loire Valley. I think I extended the foreground artificially in order to make it fill this oval frame, which is why it doesn’t quite convince. It’s not brilliant, but it was decent enough, I thought, to offer to a small art gallery down the road which was putting on an exhibition of artworks by local residents. My in-laws even drove all the way up from Taunton for the opening. But where did mine end up amid all the psychedelic swirls and tortured self-portraits and bland watercolours of people’s boring back gardens? Here it was, hidden behind a chimney breast on the second floor, in the darkest, pokiest little room in the place. A lesson learnt. My pictures aren’t worth going out of your way to see, let alone driving all the way up from Taunton.

Achilles and Patroclus, 1986

When I walked into the Piazza della Signoria in Florence for the first time in the mid-1990s, I spotted, in the Loggia dei Lanzi on the far side, a familiar form. It was the original of this group which I had sketched several years before in, for me, quite a large format. I thought I’d pulled it off quite well at the time, but looking at it again now – and certainly in contrast to the magisterial solidity of the original – I can see flaws. The dead figure looks like it’s been sculpted out of paler stone. I could pretend I was using the opportunity my materials afforded me to suggest the faded life of the warrior – but that would be trying to crack wise after the fact. The genitals are good but the face lacks grace. Then again, when I looked into it a little further, I discovered that the version I copied was probably not the one I was looking at in the Loggia dei Lanzi. My penis had been hacked off, as it were, whereas the corpse in Florence is still fully equipped. The reason – I now find – is because this group was one of the most frequently copied from antiquity, and various versions in various states of preservation have come down to us. There is even debate as to who the figures are supposed to represent: the one in Florence is called Menelaus supporting the body of Patroclus, others are known as Ajax carrying the body of Achilles. In Madrid there’s even a small terracotta reproduction known as Priam with the body of Hector. So I suppose you pays your money. It probably doesn’t really matter. It’s the work that counts, not what we call it.  
BTW, does that pose remind you of anything? I’ve just watched Top Hat with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers again, and that’s very nearly the exact same pose they end up in at the crescendo of the ‘Cheek to Cheek’ sequence, just before the wind-down coda which sees them saunter upstage and lean on a wall. A pose is a pose is a pose, I suppose…

Barberini faun, 1989

I think I drew this for my wife shortly after we got together. I called it Me after the bath or something. I did not quite manage to capture the stern beauty of the face the way I would have liked, but even I’m impressed by the quality of that rock pedestal. Just that bit alone could have been taken from an Edwardian photograph, I reckon. Go, me.

Pieta, 1989

Colour is hard, so I mostly stick to pen and ink or pencil. This is Michelangelo’s Pieta in St Peter’s, Rome, obviously not from life. But when you spend so much time on a drawing, you come to appreciate detail – like the slight, anguished tilt of the Madonna’s head, and the way Jesus’s hand is prevented from slipping to the floor by a single finger caught in a fold of the robe. A sharper eye than mine has also pointed out that the perennial problem in such groups, of the female figure looking more like the wife than the mother, is mitigated here by the fact that Jesus is ever so slightly smaller than Mary. Clever chap, that Michelangelo.

In the Tepidarium, 1990

Pastel copy of an Alma-Tadema original called In the Tepidarium. It’s 1:1 scale, that is, barely 13 inches wide though some sharp-eyed viewers may remember seeing a much larger version of it in the Inspector Morse episode, The Ghost in the Machine, where it was rather lamely referred to as ‘The Slave Girl’. It’s from my very favourite genre of painting, namely the ‘just-because-it’s-art-doesn’t-mean-it-can’t-also-be-filthy’ school.

Univ, 1992

St John’s Library, 1992

St John’s Gatehouse, 1992

Magdalen, 1992

A series of Oxford scenes done in 1993. Pen and ink is probably my favourite medium, and sepia gives a lovely Edwardian glow, though over time the colour can, as here in the picture of the entrance to Univ, transmute to a kind of purple. The filigree ceiling vaults were a particular challenge here, for which the technical term is a ‘bit of a bugger’. The originals measure about 13”x9”, which is about as large as you want to go with such a fine nib, otherwise it would be a toss-up as to which ran out first, your patience or your interest.

Leigh and Olivier, 1995

From a publicity still, I imagine, for That Hamilton Woman (1941), I assume. Vivien Leigh as Emma Hamilton and Laurence Olivier as Lord Nelson. Aaand moving on… (All right, her left eye is too small, her ringlets are very poorly rendered, and as always I was too tentative with the modelling of the face, scared to put shade onto a woman’s skin, and besides the original was so overlit that there were hardly any shadows to be seen anyway. Olivier shouldn’t be sneering like that at all, things were still okay between them at this point, I believe. His foulard looks okay, I guess, but who the hell left a bit of old Sellotape stuck to his collar? Just as well I wasn’t too invested in this one…)

The Last Watch of Hero, 1990

… by Lord Leighton, the leading classicist of the Victorian era and the first artist to be raised to the peerage. I was working in pastels from a black and white reproduction in an Arthur Mee encyclopaedia which had first got me interested in Greek and Roman myths around the age of five. The original is in the Manchester Art Gallery, many times larger than my version, and when I eventually managed to see it, I realised I’d got the colours all wrong. But it was a sincere effort, and I’m not looking for a peerage anyway. (This was his favourite model BTW, an actress called Dorothy Dene. He particularly liked her long, expressive arms. She was something of a muse to him, and the artist frequently painted her and her sisters in various classical poses, both in and out of clothes, but always with elegance and chastity. It is Ms Dene here who sat for Leighton’s fabulous Flaming June, a large reproduction of which has hung in my house for thirty years.)

Nausicaa, 1990

Another Leighton. Nausicaa – whose name, bizarrely, means ‘burner of ships’ – was a princess in The Odyssey who tended the hero when he was washed up on the beach at Phaeacia and ended up marrying his son Telemachus. I believe the pose is meant to convey the maiden’s maidenly modesty, hence the tentative right hand and the hovering left foot. And again, working from a black and white reproduction I made the colours far too bright. But I’m pleased with that right arm and the shadow on the step.