My Inspiration

I think as hobbyists we all have our inspirations, people whose work we look at in personal awe. For me my greatest inspiration was my grandfather, a talented artist in every respect, a landscape painter versatile in oil, acrylic and water colour, a sculptor of scale figures and busts, both human and animal, a wood worker who could create seemingly anything from his favourite material, from a tiny bird, to an accurately scaled and fully rigged man'o'war several feet long, from tiny figures animated into life with the power of a water wheel, too vast life size golden eagles, their wings spread to their full extent. He was an artisan who would dream up an idea and then do it, using nothing but his own experience and ingenuity.

I lost my inspiration on Thursday, after a long and hard fought battle with cancer; and though we knew it was coming this has made it no easier to bear. There is so much more I could say of him, but that is for another place. So it will suffice to say, that if I can in my lifetime become half the man he was, I will have done well for myself.

I have been working on preserving some of his legacy, preserving and repairing moulds of many of his busts of military figures decades old, making new ones of others where only a plaster copy, some of them in a poor condition, remain. This I will continue to do as I have still only scratched the surface, and will almost certainly with greater frequency chart this on the blog. It was perhaps my greatest pleasure to have shared and discussed with him the fruits of those labours in the past few months as he lay in bed, to see him smile despite the pain which I know he was in. My only regret is that I did not start sooner so that he might have lived to see more of it. I plan at the moment to post some pictures of much of his work that remains within the family, though I know also there are many examples in the hands of others as far away as the US at least. I also have plans for a little hobby project to help raise money for Hospicecare and Marie Curie amongst other charities, whose nurses gave him and the rest of the family so much care and support in the past few months, and allowed him his wish of remaining at home until the end, dying in the same bed as he was born.

Rest In Peace,
Peter Jocelyn Angell
12/11/1929 - 09/02/2012