The Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum here in Bournemouth is a pretty good place to go if you need to fill up some sketchbook pages. I didn’t realise this until some time last year, when I spent an inordinate amount of time in the Japanese room drawing what looked, to me, like teapots:

Very heavy tea-pots made from cast iron.
Also there were some things with little dragons on, which are fun but time-consuming to draw.

Following that visit I have been back several times since, whenever I felt like I hadn’t been doing enough sketching. Up until recently the museum has been free, with a suggested donation that certainly isn’t unreasonable if you’ve spent over five hours there. They intend to introduce an entrance fee over the summer months, which doesn’t affect me so much since I live here all year round. It does makes me a little sad that society can no longer afford to use public money to fund art and culture, at least not to a large extent; but then I would think that, being an artist (though not a publicly funded one)!

I saw two documentaries recently which featured the museum, and both focussed on the amount of nudity in the Russell-Cotes’ art collection. Here’s one you can still view. I was rather under the impression that statues of naked people were not uncommon, but apparently they’re worth making a film about. At any rate, there are statues and paintings of clothed people, too, and the whole place is interesting and full of things to draw.

A word of warning, they don’t like it if you sit on anything not specifically earmarked for the purpose of sitting on. I perched on a handy and solid-looking low bannister rail to draw that sketch of Annie Russell-Cotes and was politely told please not to. I must have assumed an appearance of weightfulness on that day. Lesson learned, will use chair in future.

At some future point I will post my more recent drawings from the Russell-Cotes, including scary elephants and more teapots than you can shake a publicly subsidised stick at.