I was obsessed with drawing from an early age, especially horses. Out of the blue at a primary school medical, the district nurse said, ‘I hear you can draw a horse in three lines. Show me.’ At that she pushed a sheet of paper and a pencil across the desk. The three lines thing bothered me. You can’t draw a horse in three lines. I did my best then pushed the paper back to her.
My mother and grandmother conducted my upbringing. My father had almost nothing to do with it. The two matriarchs spent a lot of time worrying I would waste my life by taking up something inappropriate as a career – such as art or music. When you have ‘surgeon’s hands’ as my granny put it, you ought not to squander your gift playing the piano or doodling. ‘Very nice for a hobby dear, but not for a career,’ was a remark I heard frequently. Nevertheless a piano was bought and I was given art materials for birthdays and Christmases. I spent so much time playing the piano my mother would sometimes lock it.
Compared with drawing I found painting much more difficult, particularly with colour-blindness lurking in the background. At school I would ask the girl next to me to tell me which crayon was the green one and which brown; then I would carefully place them on opposite sides of the desk. I always preferred drawing to painting.
Before dropping art as a subject, I would sometimes get picked to take part in school art competitions. One of these was at the Kelvin Hall Museum in Glasgow. My mother packed the usual ham and egg sandwiches into a Tupperware box and off I went in the bus. I wandered around the museum looking for inspiration. I just couldn’t decide what to paint, and in the end I chose some stuffed mallards in a glass case. The result was appalling. I vividly recall my art teacher’s crestfallen expression as he asked me why on earth I’d picked that for a subject. I was ashamed of my ineptitude and began to think surgery sounded like the easier option.
Even after I’d escaped the clutches of the Art Department I kept drawing. I had an interest in the work of Velasquez and Rodin and tried copying various images from books. Many years later on holiday in New York we were on a tour of the Metropolitan Museum conducted by a friend, Eyal. An artist himself, he did tours regularly with art students and visitors. I recounted my past efforts to him and mentioned copying Velasquez’s portrait of his assistant, Juan de Pareja.
‘You do know that’s here?’ he asked. I did not. A bell rang; the museum was closing. ‘Come on, I know where it is,’ he said, grabbing my arm. We ran up a staircase. The guard at the top held up a hand and said, ‘Gentlemen, we are closing.’ ‘I know,’ said Eyal, ‘We just want to see one picture.’ Skidding round a corner into a big first floor gallery, we arrived in front of the painting. It was surprisingly small, but so beautiful. I was thrilled.
Later, at university I doodled during lectures – something I pursued compulsively for the rest of my career whenever I became bored in meetings or talks.
I occasionally drew illustrations for student magazines and toyed with cartooning.
Once qualified, I started my house officer jobs. I had experienced a very stressful student locum on a general surgical unit and (despite my hands) had no desire to become a surgeon. I took one of the less popular posts in orthopaedic surgery just to get that part of the preregistration year out of the way. I spent two months at the Princess Margaret Rose Orthopaedic Hospital, Fairmilehead. My responsibilities were confined to the wards that had been allocated to me and did not include other firms whose registrars were meant to clerk in their own patients. Despite this, one very well-spoken registrar tried to get me to admit the professor’s patients. I refused, whereupon he called me ‘a slimy rat’ and stalked off in the huff.
On call that night and bored, I decided to depict the ‘slimy rat’ that I had become. An Australian registrar looked at my drawing and asked if he could have it for a few minutes. It turned out he was not a fan of my antagonist. Unknown to me, he photocopied my drawing and pinned it up on various noticeboards throughout the hospital.
The next morning I was confused to encounter various paramedical staff expressing their sympathy for the awful thing that Mr Court-Brown had done to me. Once I spotted the copies of my masterpiece on the wall I realised that they assumed I had been the victim of a nasty prank. I felt a bit miffed that they thought CCB could have done the drawing. Irony is never easy to convey non-verbally.
Despite her iron grip on my future, my mother failed to stop me hanging about with artists and musicians. I even married an artist. My interest in birds encouraged me to return to drawing later in life and I started recording the more interesting ones I’d seen. I would draw them, cut them out, and fold back the base so I could stand them up on my bookshelves. I also took a small drawing book with me on holidays and birding trips.
At work and bored in meetings and lectures, I continued doodling. Birds in flight were my favourite subject. I really like watching gulls, birds that many people detest but which are masters of their element and endlessly graceful in form and movement. The complex structure of their wings from different angles is a delightful challenge.
The Bohemian Waxwing 