Always Open to Beauty

‘Unusually wide range of media for me,’ notes Richard Bell beside an illustration of Skokholm’s Mad Bay. ‘Pen & ink, bamboo pen, watercolour, a bit of gouache and a gull dropping.’

It’s a line that encapsulates Bell’s approach to his art, and his view of nature as something dynamic, in constant motion, to be captured, if possible, at the gallop. It takes more than a splodge of seagull poo to throw him off his stride. Bell has described his commission to write and draw Richard Bell’s Britain as ‘a dream job’. He had walked into the offices of Collins in 1979 with a copy of his locally printed first book, The Natural History of Wakefield (his – and my – home city). His pitch was straightforward: this, but for the whole country. To his surprise, they went for it. ‘We’ll send you out for a year and see what you come back with,’ Bell was told. He was given £200 a month in expenses. Travelling by public transport, and staying in youth hostels, he undertook ‘a clockwise tour around England, Wales and Scotland, starting at my own doorstep in Yorkshire and finishing there a year later’. He soon abandoned his original plan to focus on ‘some appropriate theme’ in each place he visited. The real world, he realized, doesn’t work like that: ‘It became clear that if I spent the time looking for textbook examples of botany or geology I would miss the spontaneous and unexpected events that make the country so refreshing and enjoyable.’ So Richard Bell’s Britain (1981) became not a lecture but a learning experience for Bell as much as for the reader. On almost every page, Bell – who clearly knows his stuff – has questions to ask, and new discoveries to report: why is the clover forming a three-foot hedge at Wentbridge in Yorkshire? Did you know skylarks sing from fenceposts, not just in flight? Sedge warblers at Cley are smaller than he thought they’d be; a mystery bird at Charnwood Forest is never identified (‘I have heard it several times up in tall trees and not seen it fly out’); an ‘ethereal hand beckoning from a hedge’ at Pendle is revealed to be a farmer’s lambing glove; at Tintagel, he stumbles across the grim aftermath of the Skopelos Sky oil spill. Sometimes even he has to admit defeat. ‘The first version of this landscape got washed off the page by a heavy shower,’ he notes from Castle Douglas in Galloway. It’s an endearing reminder of how an artistic philosophy that is often so fully in sympathy with the wild landscapes it depicts – dynamic, unpredictable, sometimes occluded, never quite still – can also put the artist at odds with his surroundings. Attempting to draw on rain-lashed Dartmoor also gives him pause: ‘I spent most of the time crouching under a massive granite boulder . . . Drawing was almost impossible . . . I began to wonder if my ideal of drawing from nature was really such a good one.’ Not long after the publication of Richard Bell’s Britain, Bell and his wife made plans to relocate from West Yorkshire to wild western Scotland – the kind of place, he felt, where a wildlife artist should live. ‘We went up to Ullapool for a recce,’ he later recalled, ‘and it literally didn’t stop raining. And I thought hang on – how much work am I going to get done from nature if it’s like this? I think that was in August, too.’ But the philosophy persisted, even when the watercolours were rinsed away by rain.

I decided that I would rather be out experiencing the country at first hand than stuck in a studio in London trying to recreate hedgerows and rabbits from photographs and drawings. Perhaps I could have taken a few small things – a branch covered with moss, a piece of granite – back with me [from Dartmoor] to draw indoors, but I doubt they would have given much of an impression of this extraordinary place.

For Bell, being a wildlife artist has always been about more than just paint on the page. He studied at Leeds in the late 1960s: the university had a good reputation for ‘fine art’ (‘it was all “happenings” and Dada constructions’), but he wanted to learn to draw, and so studied graphic design instead. Then came three years at the Royal College of Art in London, where he enrolled in the Natural History Illustration course led by the legendary John Norris Wood. These were transformative years. ‘We really did have a mission,’ Bell says now. ‘It was one of those things in your life that feels seminal, significant.’ Norris Wood founded the Natural History Illustration and Ecological Studies course at the RCA in 1971. A gifted illustrator, he had earned a scholarship to the College through his paintings of animals and was given a silver medal for zoological drawing on his graduation in 1955 (one of his RCA classmates, the novelist Len Deighton, recalled his remarkable ability to ‘capture the life and character of even the smallest of animals without the slightest distortion or departure from accuracy’). RCA life-drawing classes had taught him the importance of rendering his subjects as whole beings (‘Walk around her, walk around her,’ tutor John Minton would urge), and he passed on to his own students – including Bell – a commitment to drawing from life whenever possible. Just as importantly, Norris Wood urged his students to be conservationists, active ecologists, as well as artists. This has clearly informed Bell’s work. In Richard Bell’s Britain he writes drily of ‘the black scum on the bricks and sandstone’ of his Wakefield home, ‘representing 100 years of progress’. In the Weald he draws vast industrial vehicles crashing into woodland, ‘a perfect symbol of the relentless momentum of an economy greedy for energy’. ‘Every part of the country I visited’, he observes in a postscript, ‘had some kind of threat hanging over it. I saw hedges being grubbed up, oil pollution on beaches . . . On balance Britain is becoming less green and pleasant.’ And yet there is always, always, something to see, something to write about, something to draw. Bell – who learnt his birds and botany amid the grimy post-industrial landscapes of West Yorkshire – is always open to beauty. In Worcestershire in March he sketches a ready-mixed concrete depot screened by leafless trees (‘this half-land has a wildness of its own’). He watches bullfinches under a rush-hour overpass in Solihull. At Peterborough’s derelict brickyards he finds ‘more of interest . . . than in the huge fields of open fenland farms’ (and also, in passing, captures a wonderful snippet of folk-ecology from a local landlady, who tells Bell that in the flooded brickpits ‘fish will appear and often it’ll be pike, big pike. Nobody puts them there, they form themselves like woodworm form in wood. Mice do that as well, they’ll form themselves where there’ve been none before’). Even in places of great and obvious natural beauty Bell’s eye doesn’t always fall where you think it might: in Wistman’s Wood, a celebrated stretch of temperate rainforest on Dartmoor, he focuses intently on the fate of a ‘dull-coloured dung-fly’ that falls into the web of an orbweb spider. Bell’s attention to detail, to the small things, is remarkable, but it has a solid underpinning that goes beyond an understanding of the lives of living things. Animals and birds, he writes, ‘are a living expression of the landscape that supports them’: ‘The key subject is geology. The country is made up of layer after layer of history that can be read like a book . . . As you learn a little about our island’s journey through time, reading the landscape becomes addictive.’ And so we learn, as we go, about the Portland stone of Chesil Beach, the Ice Age origins of the Long Mynd, ripple-marked red sandstone on Skokholm, the formation of Galloway granite – it’s never a lecture, seldom really more than a remark, a note in the margin of a landscape, but it all feeds the sense of interconnection in the book, a feeling of meaningful commonality that infuses even the most disparate of Bell’s subjects (a dead shrew, kids on dirt bikes, lugworm casts, a rusted lorry, a ‘polite and friendly drunk’ beside the Clyde at Gourock). Bell himself, of course, provides the book with another kind of connective thread. The title may seem generic but this is absolutely Richard Bell’s Britain, each page entirely unique and entirely his (his eyes, his voice). As Alfred Wainwright did, not very long before, he explores the geology of Hampsfell in Cumbria, and indeed his neat hand-inked lettering does recall Wainwright’s – but Wainwright doesn’t pause to peer at ‘some kind of sandwort? I am unable to identify this little plant’, or stoop to check on a sunbathing lamb, or bother to draw ‘a sedge going to seed’. Bell and Wainwright draw the Hospice on Hampsfell, too, and from the same angle – it’s not fair to compare, of course, but here again Bell makes the landscape his own. Drawing, it becomes clear, isn’t just how Bell depicts or reflects the living landscape; it’s how he understands it. At Shaftesbury in Dorset another marginal note offers a telling insight:

Cézanne had an idea that nature consists of spheres, cones and cylinders. Well, I expect nature is based on geometry in close-up, in the structure of a leaf or a snail shell and in the distance trees and outcrops of rock have geometric forms. It’s in the middle distance [that] there are complications. There is so much randomness that the pattern is lost. That’s why I find tangles of vegetation so difficult to draw; how can I be selective and simplify randomness? Why should I want to? In nature the ‘background noise’ is as important as the ‘message’. The universe may be comparatively simple and homogeneous at the scale of expanding galaxies and at the atomic scale but much of the interest lies in knots of complexity in between.

Much of this country was in a state of post-industrial flux when Bell wrote and drew Richard Bell’s Britain, but when, since the last war, has it not been? Landscapes change by the day (‘Already the dunes at Forvie will have drifted into slightly different shapes,’ Bell writes in his postscript. ‘The reedbeds will have extended a little further into Martham Broad.’) What Bell seizes on in this book is the headlong onward motion of all landscapes, wild and human. The book emerged at a time when rural nostalgia was in vogue – Edith Holden’s The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady, originally written in 1906, had been a huge bestseller a couple of years earlier. Bell feared being lumped in the same bracket (one of the reasons he resisted his publisher’s decision to print Richard Bell’s Britain on greeny-tinted stock). But though this is natural history in its literal sense, there’s precious little nostalgia here. This isn’t really a book about what was, or even about what is – it’s a book about what’s happening.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 86 © Richard Smyth 2025