EP 549. Wildlife Artist a Natural Historian

“Welcome back to Mojo’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast. Where I am in the UK, I’m in the country, I guess, of Wales, which is just north of England. Is that right? North of England or south of England.”

Ramsey Russell: Welcome back to Mojo’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast. Where I am in the UK, I’m in the country, I guess, of Wales, which is just north of England. Is that right? North of England or south of England.

Terence Lambert: It sits northwest of England.

Ramsey Russell: Northwest of England.

Terence Lambert: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Joining me today is Mr. Terence Lambert, an artist, a fine artist. Terence, are you a bird artist or an artist?

“I suppose the career has been based around illustrating bird books, but no, I’m a natural history painter, I think.”

Terence Lambert: I suppose the career has been based around illustrating bird books, but no, I’m a natural history painter, I think.

Ramsey Russell: Natural history painter.

“Because birds don’t exist in a space, do they? They exist in an environment, and that environment’s important to them, and it’s important to me.”

Terence Lambert: Yeah. Because birds don’t exist in a space, do they? They exist in an environment, and that environment’s important to them, and it’s important to me. So it’s not about just painting a bird accurately. You know, that stem or that branch or that flower that it’s sitting on, it’s got to be correct as well.

“That’s as important as the bird itself.”

Ramsey Russell: That’s as important as the bird itself.

Terence Lambert: Absolutely, absolutely.

Ramsey Russell: Because I noticed when I look at some of your drawings, yeah, it’s always got an element of habitat that’s as important as the bird itself.

Terence Lambert: And the bird can’t just be a generic. It’s got to be a bird that’s lived, you’ve met, that survived on a branch alongside.

Ramsey Russell: You got to be the real deal.

Terence Lambert: It’s got to be the real deal.

Ramsey Russell: Have you ever drawn a bird or anything just purely from the figment of your imagination?

Terence Lambert: No, because the create that world out there is enough to manage anyway. The whole wildlife is just so Sincredibly stimulating. I don’t need to make stuff up. If you want horror, take a look at the insect world. You know what I mean?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Never thought about it that way.

Terence Lambert: I just find it. Absolutely. I’m 74, and I still get excited every time I see something fresh every time. Even those common things that occur.

Ramsey Russell: Such as?

Terence Lambert: Well, I mean, I live in mid-Wales. We’re in. We’re 600 foot above sea level here. We’re on the edge of the Snowdonia National range of mountains. And certain birds are common here. Red kites, buzzards, hawks. But every time I see one I have to stop. I can’t overlook it. I’ve got to see that bird again. And I’m 74, man. You know, I’ve been there a long time. I have to spend time. It’s not just the bird itself. It’s a language that they use as well. I mean, I can walk in my environment here. I can hear hawks make. I can hear the passerines, the robins, the smaller birds make a particular noise. And I know there’s a hawk present, and I look for that hawk. I’m understanding that language. That’s how deep I’ve got into just loving the whole subject.

Ramsey Russell: How in the world did you get into something like this?

Terence Lambert: As a kid I cared for nothing other than the natural world. I’d wander all the time, any chance to just be out in the wild. I mean, even now, cities, I break out in boils in cities. And I’m not being sycophantic, the only city I’ve ever really, really enjoyed being in, New York. And by chance I happened to be there a few weeks after 9/11. By chance I happened to be there, and there was something about the whole atmosphere, the character, the place, the individuals you met. It was a rarefied time, of course, wasn’t it? You know, people were perhaps not behaving like they would do ordinarily.

Ramsey Russell: No, no.

Terence Lambert: In that huge city, there was a community that it mattered to them, and I just happened to be there. But so the one city that I could tolerate returning to, I think, would be New York.

Ramsey Russell: Where did you grow up? Here?

Terence Lambert: No, not. No. Mid-Wales is about 200 miles from my, my natal home, which is down in Hampshire, not very far from London. 30 miles.

Ramsey Russell: Be like a suburb of London.

Terence Lambert: A rural suburb. Yeah, but I mean, that was many years ago, and that’s all changed now. Development, of course, London spread to Greater London and now to areas like Hampshire and Surrey. So, yeah, we moved here 50 years ago to Wales.

Ramsey Russell: I’ve only been to the UK hunting for less than 48 hours. We’ve covered a lot of ground. Oh boy, I’m getting my, getting a tour. And I know that since we’ve left London Heathrow Airport, that the further we’ve gotten away. For a country that’s got so many millions of people living in it, relative to my home state of Mississippi, like even right here, it feels very rural. Once you get away from London, some of these cities, it all of a sudden becomes very rural. It’s like, I know you’ve got some neighbours nearby, but it doesn’t feel like it.

Terence Lambert: Well, we can see a house in the valley here in front of us, can’t we?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Terence Lambert: Otherwise we look for eight miles, and there’s just two properties in view. It’s a lowly low population here in Wales. About 4 million. That’s all. There are 8 million sheep.

Ramsey Russell: Talk about growing up. You know, you talked about getting your foundations for the outside. Were you a hunter? Did you hunt? Did you fish? Were you just a little boy climbing around the countryside?

Terence Lambert: No, I fished. I just loved fishing. Obsessed by it. It kind of interfered with education. I bunk off school occasionally just to fish. My father actually, that first cane rod with a bent pin on the end, and I think you’d call them bass, but here it’s a perch, that first fish. And even now I still absolutely adore it. I love it. And now in a kind of semi-retired state, I mean I paint, I still paint, I still work, but whenever I get the chance, I fish or we garden. You look around you now, Ramsey, it’s the big garden. We open it to the public occasionally.

Ramsey Russell: Oh really?

Terence Lambert: Oh yeah.

Ramsey Russell: I can see that.

Terence Lambert: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Well, I walked in this morning, speaking of fishing. I walked in this morning, and you all were gathered around the hearth drinking coffee, and you were telling a story about fishing and catching a barbel. Is that what you call it? Does that like a sucker fish?

Terence Lambert: Look like similar, yeah. It’s got those sort of catch you.

Ramsey Russell: You call him flying fish. You call them with a fly rod.

Terence Lambert: Oh no, no, that bait fishing. For the rest of the time I’m fishing for trout, and within 15 minutes of the house here, we’ve got the most beautiful lakes with big rainbow trout.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Terence Lambert: And you had some smoked trout last night.

Ramsey Russell: Oh my gosh, that was good.

Terence Lambert: So we smoke our own fish. We try to live as much as possible from stuff we grow, stuff we catch. Early days when we were first married, that’s when I did my hunting. We a fair amount of game in, in Hampshire there when I, when we were first married. And pigeons, stuff like that, rabbits.

Ramsey Russell: Were you a starving artist needing to feed your family? Was that by necessity or was that by choice?

Terence Lambert: By choice. I mean, I recognise the primitive in all of us, really, that hunter-gatherer thing. Even now I fish on a regular basis. When I come in with that trout and lay them in the sink and call my wife over. Have you seen this? It’s the hunter-gatherer, isn’t it?

Ramsey Russell: Do you catch them and her clean them? Glenny’s coming over to see your fish and then clean them and cook them. Is that how that works?

Terence Lambert: Well, we work together because we smoke a lot of fish. I mean, the last time we had 16 fish, we prepared for the smoker. So she does all the, all the pin boning, I do all the filleting, and then we either freeze them and make pâté out of them or we smoke them.

Ramsey Russell: How long have you all been married?

Terence Lambert: 50 years.

Ramsey Russell: 50 years. And it’ll love affair that began, you said this morning at breakfast when you were 11.

Terence Lambert:  We met, well, yeah. She was wearing a grey jumper.

Ramsey Russell: You remember this?

Terence Lambert: I remember it. I remember the sweater.

Ramsey Russell: Were you an artist at the time?

Terence Lambert: I was, this kid who could just cartoon all the time and caricature.

Ramsey Russell: Talk about the love letters you’d write to. They weren’t written, they were cartoons.

Terence Lambert: It’s slightly embarrassing to talk about it, but in fact, the character that I used in the illustrations to send along in the classroom under the table, there’s a little guy called Barney, the bashful painter. And there’s a sweet little kid, this caricature meant to be me, right? And just with all little anecdotes and stuff and just to get her attention, you know, because we were 11 at the time.

Ramsey Russell: Well, it must have got her attention and kept it.

Terence Lambert: Yeah. We were very grown up, though, because we would stay together. Well, we started sort of dating as kids at the age of 15, 16. And at that point, she’s a very smart woman and wanted to teach. So she was going north out of the area to receive sort of education towards being a teacher. And I went to art school, and for some extraordinary grown-up reason, we decided that we’d make a break then. And after that time, it was tough, you know, we were desperately in love, and teenage love is painful, isn’t it? I hope you remember that. But we did that, and we were parted for three or four years. And when she came back from her university time and I left art school, I arrived on the doorstep.

Ramsey Russell: Really?

Terence Lambert: Yeah, the very day.

Ramsey Russell: Let’s go back to that childhood growing up. What besides art? Was it all art? Were you just this little boy that combed the English countryside and immersed yourself into tadpole ponds and fishing and countryside, and just did nothing but art, or did you have other interests option?

Terence Lambert: I was pretty sporty too. I was quick, I could run fast, and I could play football. And both those things came together, and I ended up playing for my county. And then there were scouts around at various football matches because we had a youth team around us in the. Well, not the village, in the area. And we got on so well in that youth team that we made it through the different leagues. And we were playing against seniors, against grown-up guys, and we were winning those as well. And scouts would come along and take a look at the.

Ramsey Russell: The pro scout?

Terence Lambert: Yeah, and I was chosen to sort of have, well, games with Reading and teams like that in the southeast. And on one occasion, I was injured on the pitch. I got a ball smashed in my face, broke my nose. And on my way off the pitch, a scout came to me and said, I like the look of you. He said, not the broken nose, but your performance. And he said, I hear you’re at art school. He said, drop the art, get yourself fitter. He said, and I think you could make pro football.

Ramsey Russell: So that was a very pivotal moment life. You had a choice.

Terence Lambert: I had a choice.

Ramsey Russell: I mean, I’m an artist, I love football, I’ve got a chance of going professional. The pro scout comes in and said, make a choice. Quit the art. Dedicate 100% of your time to this, and I think you’ll make it. And what’d you do?

Terence Lambert: It was simple for me, because although I was flattered by the whole idea, I knew in my head that I wouldn’t have made it. I was quick, I kind of played a good game, and I could play anywhere on the pitch, but I knew I wasn’t good enough. I could see those around me were equally as good. And I just thought, no, I just loved. It’s the one thing I could do. It’s the one thing I could excel at. I picked up a pencil, and I could draw. The painting developed after that. It took me 50 years. I boast now when people say to me, how long did it take you to do that painting? I say, 50 years, not 5 days, because that’s how long the skill took to develop, really.

Ramsey Russell: So when you were a little boy, drawing these. Making these drawings for your wife now, Glenny, or what else were you drawing as a little boy, as a child? What were you sitting in your room at night drawing birds?

Terence Lambert: Yeah, the birds were there. And my four years at art school, in order to help my parents to keep me there at art school, I did an industrial design course. Not fine art. I did fine art for the first year. After that, I did three years of industrial design. So I was designing fan heaters and televisions and the casings around all of those things. But I earned money from just doing drawings of birds and selling them through sort of minor galleries locally and to friends. I lost my track now, where was I?

Ramsey Russell: Well, you were. You’d gone to fine art, but then swapped into.

Terence Lambert: Oh, that’s right.

Ramsey Russell: More technical.

Terence Lambert: But that helped me develop the drawing side. So yeah, I was always drawing wildlife and drawing birds. Because the time when I wasn’t at art school, I was out there in the wilds, wandering, fishing a great deal. I mean, when I got into my sort of late teens, I was going away for weeks at a time. I was getting a bevy together and sleeping out under the stars and fishing through the night in various places. I had this idea that I wanted to catch every species of fish swimming in our British lakes and rivers. I’ve nearly made it. There’s a couple of species left.

Ramsey Russell: Really?

Terence Lambert: Yeah, just a couple.

Ramsey Russell: Who is it? Your dad? Was he the influence in life or your granddad or a family member that introduced you into the outdoor world, into fishing?

Terence Lambert: My dad was a countryman. He could put names to birds immediately. So as a kid, I grew up understand.

Ramsey Russell: Was he an artist also?

Terence Lambert: He was a welder. The one thing I also developed from my father was a work ethic.

Ramsey Russell: Okay.

Terence Lambert: He worked so hard. I mean, we weren’t wealthy. We lived in a council house. We didn’t own that house. We paid rent for it. My father, my mother. But he worked really hard. And that work ethic’s followed me right through life, whatever I do. I mean, the house we’re sitting in now, when we bought this 45, 50 years ago, it was a wreck. The roof was in, the windows were out. And in that time, we’ve earned and I’ve laboured. And every stone you see around in this huge garden, we’ve got an acre and a half here. All the walls you see, I built those walls. There was a barn in front of the house here, which you can’t see now. I took that barn down stone by stone, moved it into the garden, and used every stone to build everything you see around you.

Ramsey Russell: Your dad must have been very proud when the scouts were looking at his boy. He must have been extremely proud.

Terence Lambert: Yeah. That’s tough, isn’t it?

Ramsey Russell: What did he think about your art?

Terence Lambert: I think as a father in that period back in the 1960s, early 1970s, I don’t think you’d see a way of I could earn a living from it.

Ramsey Russell: Right.

Terence Lambert: And that was genuine. I mean, I can understand why. And it isn’t easy. It’s fickle. The art world is fickle.

Ramsey Russell: I mean, he was a simple countryman. He took care of his family, he learned a trade, he welded, he provided for his family, took his kids fishing. And now you want to be an artist. That’s kind of outside of that. That’s scope of understanding.

Terence Lambert: It is.

Ramsey Russell: So, okay, so my kid draws, but that’s okay. He’s also a hell of an athlete.

Terence Lambert: Exactly. Yeah. So early days were difficult, and it was difficult to make a decent living. My wife was teaching. That helped enormously. I mean, she’s a really clever girl. So what we did, our first house that we rented, a cottage way out in the sticks, and I worked as a gardener for 14 hours a week. The rest of the time I spent in a studio that we established in this cottage. And I painted, and I painted for local galleries still, again, fairly minor galleries. And by chance in that time, I made a phone call to a local guy that was an arborologist, and he was, at the time, writing a book for Collins on trees of Britain and Europe. I phoned the guy because he wrote in a local newspaper, nature notes and that sort of stuff. And he said, well, it just so happens I’m going to be with the publisher tomorrow, Collins, they were the publisher in London at the time. He said, join me. I met him on the station. We went into town, and William Collins, then the owner, happened to be in the office when I walked in with a folio of work. He looked at the drawings and seemed to be very impressed by them, or the paintings as well, and asked me would I like to do a book. And I thought, really. So without a contract, we had a discussion, and I left there thinking, I’ll put some work together. And I’m sure they left thinking, oh, we won’t see him again. And I turned up four or five months later with a collection of paintings. He got very excited and said, there’s a book here, go away, give us 50 images.

Ramsey Russell: This book, in a timeline, would have come way after the fork in the road. Choose sports or choose art. You were drawing at the time. You were showing me some sketches. You were doing a lot of your drawings in pencil. And then you went to art school. So I’m trying to make sense of my timeline. I’m a young man, and I’m drawing, but I’m also an athlete. And then I’m going to art school. What did art school teach you that you didn’t know? And then where did the painting come in? See, I’m trying to piece that together.

Terence Lambert: This is really good question. Because the art school gave me an opportunity. It gave me departments I could work in. So I wasn’t just painting, I wasn’t just sculpting. I was doing all those things in my own time there because I had access to those departments. You know, that was the wonderful thing about it. I had a foundation year to begin with, to see where I could, what area I could be working in. I chose the following three years to be in a department doing industrial design. But it gave me evenings where I could go into the ceramics department to play with clay. There was glass blowing. I got into that. I joined forces with another guy, and we started exploring sculpture. So we started to learn how to work with different materials to sculpt. So all those opportunities were there. It was like a chocolate box. I could dip into each area and really enjoy it. The ceramic department had lots of lovely-looking girls there. So that was an encouragement.

Ramsey Russell: Exactly.

Terence Lambert: But yeah, so that was the early, well, late teens. So I left there. I was 20 when I left art school and was looking for work. A good friend who was a wood carver happened to have a studio. I was struggling to find work at the time. It was only a few months had gone by, but because of the work ethic, I needed to work. So this lovely guy, George Jemson, gave me a studio for a pound a week. So I had a proper place to go to work. A studio, well-lit, fully appointed. And that’s when I started to learn to paint. Surprisingly, I could paint, but not at a level that would be published.

Ramsey Russell: They started to learn. I mean, you just went and bought brushes and started experimenting with textures and colors and blending.

Terence Lambert: But it was slightly more than that. The one ability I’ve had, and I still have, apart from one or two artists that I really care for, I can understand and look at the way they paint by the marks they make. And I learned that very early on. So I was leaping from one technique to another until I found my own way of working. And then that developed into this high precision, very sharp, very detailed work. And I did that very quickly. I don’t know quite where that came from, I have no idea. But then, by the age of, when I eventually went to Collins, gosh, what was I? 23. Incredibly young. And that was a massive advantage at the time because Collins then took those illustrations to the Frankfurt Book Fair. They had this 23, 24-year-old guy who could paint in this high precision, who wasn’t just painting birds in profile. They were looking in all directions and different attitudes. They looked real for once. They weren’t just profiles. At the time, there were very few illustrators of that quality of Belle. There was certainly a good number in the USA, some really good painters there, but in Britain, we only had a few, a handful. So they took those paintings to Frankfurt Book Fair, and with a very basic synopsis of what the book was going to look like. And they sold it in eight languages.

Ramsey Russell: Wow.

Terence Lambert: In eight languages, immediately. So within less than a year, I was published.

Ramsey Russell: Which book was that? The one you showed in the morning.

Terence Lambert: That was Birds of Garden and Woodland. The very first one.

Ramsey Russell: Right. With the colour plates and descriptions of the species, birds of garden and woodlands.

Terence Lambert: That’s the fellow, yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Wow.

Terence Lambert: Yeah. And of course, being so young, the press picked it up. At the time, I’m not sure that it runs now, but there was a Sunday newspaper called The Observer, and they had a magazine, a Sunday magazine, and they gave me the center three pages of that magazine with all my work in it because I was so young, and this book was being published, and it had been such a success at this game, at this book fair. And people like the McCartneys, Linda McCartney saw it and immediately got in contact. Sir Clive Sinclair, people like that. And this naive young man who happened to be producing all this work, suddenly contacted by people that were famous.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Terence Lambert: You know, extraordinary. In fact, the McCartneys bought 18 illustrations from the first book. What a CV that is.

Ramsey Russell: Unbelievable.

Terence Lambert: Exactly. And that first book then also bought me a house in Wales.

Ramsey Russell: Which came first? Your being a birder or your being an artist?

Terence Lambert: I think the two kind of thinking about it.

Ramsey Russell: I mean, you’re that little boy out there with your daddy, learning things and seeing the world. You said something this morning at breakfast about wanting to possess it. Just being a little boy and picking up a feather and turning over a stone and somehow wanting to possess that experience in nature.

Terence Lambert: I’ve thought about that conversation we had, and it seems to me that it’s akin to those cave paintings. You think about it, their prey, what they’re hunting, the antelope, the moose, or whatever, they made marks on stonework with crude charcoal or whatever to try and somehow possess that or relate to that. What they’re seeing in a two-dimensional way, drawing on a wall. Perhaps it’s a similar thing.

Ramsey Russell: I mean, that’s crazy how primitive man would, I guess, take burnt sticks or some kind of rudimentary dye and paint the cave walls of hunting or wildlife or people.

Terence Lambert: But how vital it was to them that that existed. They had to hunt, they wouldn’t have survived. And for me, I mean, without exaggeration, and even now, I wouldn’t be the man I am without knowing that that green is out there and I can walk on it. And those birds are calling, and I can hear them. And that brings us on to conservation and the fact that we’ve lived in this house with this amazing view and this wonderful landscape for nigh on 50 years now. And in that short time, I’ve seen it change. You know, birds that aren’t here anymore. This year, our insect population, it’s noticeable. It just hasn’t been here. And it’s tragic. And I think we had the conversation earlier too, about nothing’s wild out there. There isn’t a wilderness. Every bit of that is man-made.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. I had that conversation yesterday with Mike, and it’s just massive in the United Kingdom. But at the world at large, the natural world is largely made from man now. It’s so altered and so changed. It’s not wild.

Terence Lambert: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Like some people want to consider it.

Terence Lambert: Yeah. I don’t like it. Rewilding. Okay. It’s convenient. It’s handy.

Ramsey Russell: It’s noble. It’s idealistic. Sounds good.

Terence Lambert: It’s just got to be another way of managing it to bring some of that wildlife back.

Ramsey Russell: What are some of your fondest memories, growing up with your daddy, fishing and doing things like, you know, like, for example, I’ve got this memory. It’s a very fond memory. Sometimes it’ll just hit me, boom. I’m driving down the road, I can remember with my grandfather walking to the end of the Greenville Marina and catching my first fish. He had to stop and do something. He took a fishing pole and we dropped down, boom. And I caught that first fish. And in that instant, boom. That bluegill coming up on that cane pole, in that instance, made me connect me to a natural world that ended here. It took me to right here. But do you have any fond memories of just like, just those little memories of just, boom. You know, we all remember what we did when we were young. Oh, we did this and we did that. But is there like a single moment that you just remember with your dad or outside as a little boy?

Terence Lambert: Sadly, I wish I had.

Ramsey Russell: The first time you put your hand on a bird, the first time you put your hand on wildlife. That one aha moment that just connected you.

Terence Lambert: Yeah. I feel guilty that I don’t have it. That’s sad. That is disappointing. I think perhaps because life was tough for them. I remember when he had his first $2 rise in his wages. You know, it was based around that. And it was hard work because he had two sons that. My brother, we played football together. But there was always sibling rivalry.

Ramsey Russell: Always is.

Terence Lambert: Always is. And as a father, he promoted that too. My father was an interesting man. During the war, three or four weeks after Hiroshima, he walked onto the site of Hiroshima.

Ramsey Russell: Really?

Terence Lambert: And you’d think an epic event like that in anyone’s life, a monumental moment. And he never, never spoke of it.

Ramsey Russell: He never told you anything about that?

Terence Lambert: Hardly ever. I do remember once when, as a kid, you asked him, you know, what did you do in the war, dad? And he talked a little bit about it. He talked about some fun stuff he did with the rest of the troops and stuff. But that one thing he just said, it was all one colour.

Ramsey Russell: It was all one colour.

Terence Lambert: I imagine that would be grey. I’m not sure, but that was significant. I know that’s not the question you asked about.

Ramsey Russell: No, it’s not. But that’s a heck of a story. I mean, you know, it’s interesting about that generation, your dad’s generation that went anywhere in World War II. They really didn’t come back and tell stories. They didn’t. They came back. They compartmentalized it.

Terence Lambert: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: And went on forward with their life and just put it in a place that it probably best left. Because the truth of the matter is, it may have somehow scarred you for him to describe what he actually saw at the Hiroshima site.

Terence Lambert: For my father, it didn’t end there. When he returned from war, he returned to his home where his, I don’t know what happened, but I think there was some money paid to each soldier while they were away.

Ramsey Russell: Stipend or something.

Terence Lambert: That’s right. And while he was away, his father drank that money away because he’d been lying in a trench in the First World War, dead. My grandfather in the Somme. But he wasn’t. They found him after a couple of days, still alive. They dragged him out of there. When they returned into Britain with a hole in his chest, he then took to the drink, and he wasn’t alive very long before he died, but he drank my father’s income, from the Second World War.

Ramsey Russell: Wow.

Terence Lambert: His party piece. My grandfather apparently never met him because I wasn’t born, but his party piece, walk into the bar, to the pub, and put shrapnel on the bar for a drink that he’d taken out of his chest.

Ramsey Russell: My goodness.

Terence Lambert: I mean, I’m not making this up.

Ramsey Russell: No.

Terence Lambert: I wish I was. Sorry. We just, we diverted from this beautiful world out there.

Ramsey Russell:     No, that went to a nice place. That was a story I wasn’t expecting there, Terrence. You know, I’ve got kids. You’ve got kids. I was once a son and we sometimes, in finding ourselves as young people, my kids being no exception, you know, dad has an idea of what the kids should do. My dad had an idea of how I should. He knew better from life experience how best to push me in the right direction. Being a normal young man, I bucked and I went my own direction. And you told a little bit of a story this morning about your dad was wondering, how in the world are you going to make a living? You had a job, you had a great job. You had a job making more money than your brother was at the time, tossing tires or something. And they came and they offered you a job and you said no and you left. Parted ways. Tell that story.

Terence Lambert: Yeah, well, one thing I did when I was an art student, I worked weekends and holidays. The gardened a bit for a big estate down in Hampshire. There’s another story there, but we won’t have time for that. But I mean, the other thing I did, I worked in a tire yard and it was just used tires and we’d just load them on the backs of trucks. They’d go off to the docks to be unloaded or to other companies that were retreading them at the time. I’m not sure that’s legal now, but whatever. Yeah. And I’d earn, we’d work through the night to load these trucks. So over two or three days, over a weekend, a long weekend, I’d earn as much as my brother. That created major problems with again, sibling rivalry. So when it came to the end of art school, I was still doing that work at weekends and holidays and stuff. And the manager from the company came to my father and said, look, your son’s coming out of college now, we’d like to offer him a job. And the wages were much higher than my brother’s at the time that he was offered. And I think the guy left thinking that, I was, I’ll be pleased to hear it. My father was very excited when I got home that day and said, this has been offered to you. I knew immediately I didn’t want to do it.

Ramsey Russell: But the future he presented, I mean, for a lot of people as a young man, you got offered this job and you could have spent the rest of your life working for that company and you had a job and you had wages and you could have taken care of your family and been hung on that peg for the rest of your life. And I mean, that’s a future, at that generation, like your dad, my dad generation that was, boom, there you go. It’s a blueprint. You got a living. That’s a great future for you. But it didn’t feel good.

Terence Lambert: It didn’t feel good. There’s something about working. I have a skill, and when people appreciate that skill, there are nice things said about it. I wasn’t trying to be anything more than just doing something well, and I didn’t know. It’s because it’s fickle. The whole art world is fickle. It’s very difficult to make a living, and many don’t manage it. I was very lucky, as we told you the story about going to Collins and being published. But at the time, though, I really thought I could do more with my art and be happier. That yard was tough. There were tough guys in that yard. You can imagine. And it was a laboring job. They wore out very quickly. I didn’t want to be part of that. It was great from the point of view of an income for a student at the time. And I appreciate my father was disappointed, but it got tough and I left home more there and then.

Ramsey Russell: And is that when you and Glennis moved from there to here?

Terence Lambert: No. But we weren’t married then.

Ramsey Russell: Okay. She was in school. You were in school.

Terence Lambert: Yeah. I mean, the times over all this is difficult to sort of appreciate, I think. But anyway, I went off and I had a cottage. I was then doing a bit of gardening as well, so I was doing a bit of gardening for a large estate. I stopped working at the tire yard, and then I started to paint, and then George Jemson gave me the chance of working in his studio, and all those things came together. Yeah, It’s very complex and very complicated. I haven’t outlined it correctly for you, I don’t think.

Ramsey Russell: When did your dad, disappointed though he may have been that you didn’t choose what he would have suggested you choose, this great opportunity offered to you to labour at the tire yard, when did he come around and go, oh, wow, did he ever pat you on the back, say, you did it, good choice, I’m proud of you?

Terence Lambert: That wasn’t the relationship. I’m making him sound like an ogre. He was just a dad.

Ramsey Russell: No, he’s a dad.

Terence Lambert: He was a dad. Absolutely.

Ramsey Russell: I’m a dad. My dad was a dad.

Terence Lambert: Yeah. When that first book was published, he was absolutely made up. He already was. Yeah. And that was great to see. It was lovely to see.

Ramsey Russell: That was it. And where have you gone since that first book? I mean, you’ve got a stack of books right here.

Terence Lambert: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: And you show me sketchbooks, and you teach classes. We have been to your studio up here.

Terence Lambert: Teaching, that’s basically for some time, I would visit a museum, and I was artist-in-residence for a week, and students would come in and work with me for a few days. Teaching the way I paint is not easy. It’s instinctive with me. Now, I might have mentioned to you early on that it’s akin to a good guitarist who doesn’t look at the frets, doesn’t look at the strings, but just plays. And when I pick up a pencil now, that’s how I feel. I’m not intimidated by the whole process because after 50 years, the skills are there. So I’m not intimidated at all by where I’m going. I just want to venture into areas that I didn’t think I could achieve. For instance, I’ve got drawings now that are 15 feet long.

Ramsey Russell: What’s always intrigued me about art lessons, let’s say, and I was asking you about art school. What did you learn in art school? You were doing this, you went to art school, now you’re doing this. And here’s where I’m getting at. Let’s take guitar lessons. So I pick up a guitar and I go learn to play. Jimi Hendrix gives me guitar lessons. And if I leave and if I can perfectly play like Jimi Hendrix, but that still doesn’t make me a musician. To me, it’s like when I break out and I’ve got. They say, oh, you play like Randy Russell. That’s when you’re a musician, you know. And if I take a drawing class or come and get inspired by Terence Lambert, and I leave and somebody goes, you draw just like Terence Lambert, I’m not an artist. I’m just an imitator. If I go to culinary art school and I can go through, pick a recipe book, and I follow it verbatim, that doesn’t make me a chef. A chef is when I can take that raw ingredient and go out here on that blank canvas and make my own, and it doesn’t matter. You see what I’m saying? That creativity as a student, it’s like all I’m really kind of learning is maybe a few techniques that I can fold into my own magic. I’m learning a technique of hitting a note. Oh, I can take it over here to my own inspiration. Is that right? That’s the difference of being an artist versus an emulator.

Terence Lambert: Yeah, I get that. Yeah. I don’t have an answer on that.

Ramsey Russell: Because you didn’t like, say, I’m gonna draw my scrub jay exactly like Audubon. No, you may have appreciated Audubon or this artist or that artist, but your expression of that bird is totally different.

Terence Lambert: Yes.

Ramsey Russell: You know, to speak more to my own work and knowledge, it’d be like a decoy carver. I can carve a decoy and it’ll look like a duck. Look enough like a duck on the water to bring it. But it doesn’t look like art. It doesn’t look like Elmer Cromwell or one of these other well-known artists. You know what I’m saying? But at some point in time, you know, it’s always, it’s never ceased to amaze me if you pick up a plastic store-bought mallard decoy or a hand-carved one, at a glance, anybody can look at it and go, that’s a mallard. Green head, the brown wing, the body, the blue stripe, blah, blah, blah. But boy, the subtleties, these are all expressed differently by the different artists.

Terence Lambert: Yes, they are.

Ramsey Russell: The one thing I remember from an art appreciation course, a class I hated my freshman year of junior college that I skipped but still passed with a firm C plus. But I never will forget to walk away all these decades later, I remember the man saying, I think, therefore I art. So we’ve all got to express our own vision of what something is. Am I right? I’m saying I’m not an artist. I’m asking.

Terence Lambert: I question the whole business of being an artist at times.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

“It doesn’t matter to me anymore. I’m busy. I’m happy.”

Terence Lambert: You know, I didn’t like using the term early years. I was an illustrator. I thought everyone was an illustrator. And I don’t know where that bridge, when you cross that bridge, I don’t know. Even now, you know, not now. Now I feel I’m creating more art than I have done in the past. In that I don’t have to think now or consider the client. So often in the past, I’ve had clients come to me and say, I love them. I love that particular image you did of whatever, the grouse, you know, can you do something similar? But this time, could you give us more of that beautiful heather? And they wanted to be part of that process. And that’s not possible for me. And I would say, I’m sorry, no, I can’t do that. If you don’t like it, we’ll find another client for it. And that’s happened in one or two people that haven’t wanted to work, but over 50 years, you can count it on one hand. But yeah, I do struggle, and especially now in our modern world. I mean, I’ve put on exhibitions, and the comments book’s there for people to write, you know, this is wonderful or didn’t like it at all or whatever. And the comments are there that, well, it’s far too photographic. I mean, why aren’t you painting in a looser style? Have you ever thought? And I’d rather see an abstract, you know, I don’t know. And actually, it doesn’t matter to me anymore. I don’t even consider it. I don’t care about status. I don’t care about where I am in the whole structure of the whole art world. I look out the window and see what I’ve been able to experience for 50 years. The freedom to enjoy that green world out there and everything in it. And express it on paper the way I do it. And certain people appreciate it. And then I, you know, I told you this lovely story about a little German guy, a little kid, 9 year-old Jakob Schmuck, who wrote to me on one occasion and sent me a wee card of a drawing he’d made by copying my copy, an illustration from one of my books, and asking a few questions, how I did that and what paint did I use, what size brushes and all that sort of, those sorts of natural questions he asked. And I gave him a fair amount of information, although I couldn’t, and help and support and send him some prints. I didn’t hear from him. I thought, oh well, fair enough. A few months went by and then a small postcard came through the post from Germany, and of a perfectly beautiful drawing, painting rather. And he said, Terence, thank you so much for the prints and for your advice. I think I’m achieving work equally as good as yours now you can retire. And that just gave me such a buzz. I mean, can you imagine? Lovely to have an effect on a little kid like that in another country. I mean, who gets that opportunity.

Ramsey Russell: Right. I mean, it sounds like right out of the gate, you start doing bird paintings and next thing you know, I mean, within a year, bam, you’ve got this book published in eight languages. Sir Paul McCartney and his wife buy a dozen copies and all these other luminaries, and you’re off. I mean, you know, so much for the starving artist phase. You know, there are people that have been starving for 20 years trying to express their art. But just right out the gate, you hit a lick.

Terence Lambert: Yes. And still today, I still get comments about that very first book. Its 50 years old.

Ramsey Russell: 50 years old. And is that book, is that what gave you the freedom to move up here, or you still weren’t married?

Terence Lambert: Yeah, we were married. We were just married. Yeah, we got married on the basis that Glennis was teaching, so there was an income there. And I’d just got a contract with a particular gallery. They commissioned a good number of works over a year. On that loose income stream, we married on that because, you know, when we’d known each other for such a long time and been in love since we were 11, you know, the natural thing was marriage, and it was naive, and we were so naive. We really were still young, you’re still young, aren’t you, in the early 20s.

Ramsey Russell: To me, that’s a delicious time of life, to be young and naive.

Terence Lambert: Yes.

Ramsey Russell: Even though I wasn’t a child when I started my venture that became getducks.com, I was young and dumb enough, I called it. People said, you can’t do this, you cannot succeed doing this model here. And I was young and naive enough to say, hold my beer and watch. And I threw myself into it. Now, 20-something years later, I sometimes wonder, what if I put all that time and energy into something else. You know, maybe it had been an equally good outcome.

Terence Lambert: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: But I like that, you got to be that young and naive faith. That’s what’s so great about it.

Terence Lambert: You have. But those moments in life, interesting, aren’t they?

Ramsey Russell: I think they are.

Terence Lambert: You could have just taken that other road. Where would we be?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. You always wonder. You’ll never know.

Terence Lambert: Never know.

Ramsey Russell: You know, when you come to a fork in a road, take it. That’s what I say. There really, truly. Is there a wrong answer? Did I happen here on purpose, or am I just here? That’s one of my favourite sayings. Old friend of mine used to say, when you come to a fork in the road, take it. You know, just follow your heart. You come to that fork in the road, and it’ll take you somewhere. Tell me a little bit about this house, you and Glennis were telling me about this beautiful cottage you all live in here. Like we’re here in a, what do you call this? Observatory, an annex?

Terence Lambert: Yeah. We call it the garden room because the garden almost comes in.

Ramsey Russell: Very beautiful. And the entire wall and all sides are windows. And I can see for miles on the beautiful English countryside and then go through this door into the house proper. What was this house like when you all bought it?

Terence Lambert: I’d say the roof.

Ramsey Russell: I’m assuming you were in that young and naive stage.

Terence Lambert: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Okay. That’s the way she explained it this morning.

Terence Lambert: Well, when we first moved to ours, we didn’t move directly here.

Ramsey Russell: Okay.

Terence Lambert: We had a house on a hill about 30 miles from here. And In fact, when we decided to buy that house, I hadn’t seen it, but we’d parked up above it. It was on the side of a hill, on a hillside. And the curlews were calling in the valley. And it was idyllic, beautiful, small place. And that’s when we had started having children at that first house. And we soon outgrew it because it was just sort of one down, two up. It was very small. It was on a well system. And it was in those food-for-free days when we did a lot of foraging. I was hunting then, fishing a lot. Stuff was important, even though the book was published. We had three vegetable plots, which we rotated over the three years we were there. We had fruit trees and everything else. We kept ducks, we kept hens. In order to pump water up, I had to walk down the bottom of the hill and turn over a pump down there to push water to the well above the house. Yeah. And I’d pick up roadkill. I remember bringing back a roe deer on one occasion. We’d only been there a few weeks. And I hung the deer on the back of the shed in the back garden there. And I was stripping the skin off it when the local farmer walked past. And he saw this carcass hanging on the back of the door, which looked very much like the carcass of a sheep. It just happened to be a roe deer. So, yeah. And we lived. We made our own butter. Our neighbors down in the valley, they had a Dexter cow. And so we’d go down and take the milk off the cow, bring it back, make butter. We’d make cheese, you know, cottage cheese and stuff.

Ramsey Russell: Sounds like a paradise.

Terence Lambert: Oh, we loved it. We absolutely loved it. But we outgrew it because we started having children. So the rectory came up for sale, which was seven bedrooms, an old rectory with an acre of land. And it was an absolute mess. No one wanted to buy it. In fact, it was going for auction. I found out who owned it, phoned the guy up.

Ramsey Russell: When was the rectory originally built, and how long had it been vacant when you all took possession?
Terence Lambert: Well, the rectory is alongside the church, and the church is 14th century.
Ramsey Russell: 14th century.
Terence Lambert: 14th century.
Ramsey Russell: So built back in the 1300s, 1500s, yeah. Wow.
Terence Lambert: So there would have been something here, yeah, probably a Welsh longhouse, which is possibly our kitchen area. Possibly, that’s difficult to tell. But over the years, the church has grown, the building’s changed. So from one very small Welsh longhouse, over the years, in 1862, the church built a transept, which is another section of the church, to extend the church. And at the same time, they developed the rectory, so they made it a lot bigger. But where we’re sitting now, in the garden room, our feet are on a pathway which led into the field because there’s a cellar behind us under the floor. And we had no idea it was there, but when we were building this particular building, we came across a doorway, went under the floor of the house, and there was beamwork with old hand-forged nails with hessian rope hanging in it, where they used to hang the hay to feed the stock.
Ramsey Russell: Wow.
Terence Lambert: So we’re sitting on top of the old walkway. And there was a door under the floor here, out into the field.
Ramsey Russell: My goodness.
Terence Lambert: So goodness knows when that was here. Extraordinary. So, yeah, we took on the mess, and just over the years, and it’s taken a good part of all that 50 years to restore every single room in the house.
Ramsey Russell: You know something I’ve always wondered. I walked in last night, and here in this room off the hall, you’ve got some drawings. You’ve got, looks like one on an easel, maybe drying. I know your art shop, art studio, is right up the hill here.
Terence Lambert: It’s just behind, yeah.
Ramsey Russell: We’ll go take a look at it here in a minute. But I’ve always wondered, throughout your career, you’ve got legions of books. How many drawings have you done in your career? Do you have any idea how many paintings?
Terence Lambert: Thousands.
Ramsey Russell: Thousands. But you don’t know.
Terence Lambert: I don’t know. And what’s more, I’m so professional, I’ve got very few records of them either.
Ramsey Russell: And you were showing me sketchbooks, drawing books this morning.
Terence Lambert: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: And that you, people began, well, I’d like that drawing, or I’d like this, or I’d like that. And you started breaking them apart.
Terence Lambert: Yeah. Sadly, I’m disappointed by myself on that one.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
Terence Lambert: But then it was probably a lean time when we needed more windows or something. I don’t know.
Ramsey Russell: But I’ve always wondered if successful professional artists such as yourself, did you wake up every morning and go, quote, up to the, up to your studio every morning at 8:00, yes, and start to paint something or do something every day?
Terence Lambert: Every day. Six days a week, and seven sometimes. And into the evenings at times. Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Did you have multiple projects going at one time? I’ve got three commissions going at one time, so I’ve got to do a little bit on this one, a little bit on this one, I mean, were you able to just kind of do it like that, or I feel like I’ve got the personality. I get tunnel vision, and I throw myself completely into something, and it consumes me. But then I may be a week or a month doing something else, you know?
Terence Lambert: Well, I mean, when I took on commissions for book work, I mean, I was working incredibly hard. I mean, there’s a part work there, Wildlife Fact File. I did that for 18 months, and I was turning out a painting a day for it. And they were complex. So the bird’s egg was there, a bird in its habitat and doing something, chasing a fish underwater, whatever it was. And they were birds of the world, so it wasn’t just British birds. So it’s lots of, and the fascinating thing then happened many, many years later during our COVID lockdown. I get emails all the time which are just spoof, they were just scams. Oh, I get them from Pamela Anderson. She wants a whole collection of work. It’s rubbish, you know. And this mail came in and said, would you do a painting a month for me? That was it. And I thought, really? So I emailed back and said, well, call me, let’s talk about it. So this chap phoned, and it was genuine. The guy was a keen birder, but he said he wanted rare birds because he travelled the world and seen lots of beautiful rare birds and would like them, but he wanted them a particular size, and it was 16 by 12 inches. Could I accommodate that, and could I do one a month for him? I thought, why not? So, and he said, well, we’ll start with 10. A commission for 10 of these works, please. Great. Okay. And the first works were fairly simple stuff. They were rare birds of Britain, things like Nightjar, one or two interesting warblers and things like that. And I completed those, and he was very happy, and that was gone. And then I learned over that year that the poor man had a major physical problem. He was bedridden and whatever. So his sister would help him by doing all his emails for him or whatever. So finished that work, and then within a fortnight, the email came back. I’m missing the work. Can we have some more? Well, that ended up, I produced 28 paintings for him over two years, and we ended up with the rarest things you’ve ever come across, Kousa Flowerpecker from the Philippines, there’s only 50 left in the world. Shelley’s Eagle Owl, only just discovered back in the Gabon, and it’s been extinct 120 years. This challenge to do these things all came from the earlier work in that illustrating that particular part work. And I absolutely adored it and loved it, and it stretched me so much. It was wonderful because there’s a lot of research, and of course, dear Google comes in to help there because I wouldn’t have had specimens for half of these things. Bay-breasted Cuckoo from the Caribbean, all these amazing creatures.
Ramsey Russell: How did he know about all the birds? Did he specifically request those?
Terence Lambert: Yeah, he did. But the last five or so got really extreme until I was sat fishing on the River Severn, which is the main river running through the middle of Wales and down to the Severn Estuary in England. And I was fishing this river, and the phone pinged. So I opened it up, and there was Terrence’s. Terrence Hayes is the guy’s name. Lovely man. And all he put in the email was Himalayan TT. That was the last bird to be done. And so I fired straight back, I said, Temminck’s Tragopan, and a smiley face came back. Temminck’s Tragopan is a very rare pheasant in the Himalayas. Back in 1984, I went to Everest twice, and I was in the Himalayas studying pheasants for the World Pheasant Association for a book, which never happened, in fact, but there, we were hunting down Temminck’s Tragopan. You couldn’t make it up, could you?
Ramsey Russell: No.
Terence Lambert: Of the thousands of bird species there are in the world, he chose that one. And if that wasn’t made in heaven, you know. Extraordinary. Absolutely amazing.
Ramsey Russell: What is your proudest moment as an artist? What is your proudest moment as a human being?
Terence Lambert: Learning respect for one thing, full stop. That’s in marriage and in everything in life, just respect for others. Proudest moment, you mean in my work?
Ramsey Russell: I mean, is there a drawing that stands out in your career that you’re just like, man, of all the ones I’ve done, this is my drawing?
Terence Lambert: I mean, I’m not going to be evasive, and I’m sorry if it sounds flippant, but I’ve always used the example of going to a party and smiling all night. But when you return home, you look in the mirror, and there’s spinach stuck in your front teeth. When I think about the work I’ve done, and I look even now in the hallway, well, in a moment I’ll show you. I’ve got a thing called Gavia Gavotte, which is loons from North America, and they’re displaying. And that was the centerpiece for a big exhibition. I had a retrospective exhibition put on by the Welsh Arts Council. They funded it back in 1999. A retrospective. And that was the centerpiece. And I thought I’d really arrived with something that I could really, really love and know that is the best I could do at the time. Now it’s in the hall, I pass it every day and think, oh, why didn’t I just soften that line? Why didn’t I just change that? It’s wrong to be satisfied with it. But now, sadly, at 74, I am losing a bit of edge and having to paint in a different way. The finesse and the precision is not quite the same as it was naturally. So I’m finding other ways. So I’m drawing bigger just to push the viewer back a bit.

Ramsey Russell: You know, you said last night at dinner, you said you quit hunting because you couldn’t hit the birds. You made a joke, “I quit hunting because I couldn’t hit the birds. I just fish now.” But you are a hunter, but you’re a birder. And I’m just curious, do birders and hunters, do they have the same or differing, because I do know birders that do not hunt and despise hunting, right? And do they have the same appreciation? Do you feel that birders know as intimately the birds in the quarry as hunters do? Or do you feel that hunters should step up a little bit and be more like birders and be a little more in tune with the totality of it all?

Terence Lambert: I’ve met an awful lot of hunters I really respect. I’ve met a lot that I don’t. But isn’t that true of everyone you meet?

Ramsey Russell: Right.

Terence Lambert: Yeah.

“But, you know, to me, falling into these conversations and getting to meet somebody like yourself, it really gives these hunting experiences a lot of context…”

Ramsey Russell: Right. I’m not trying to lump it and paint it with too broad a brush, but, you know, there is a little conflict sometimes between birders, antis and hunters, pro-hunting. And I just wondered if, because, I mean, some of the best hunters I know personally are also themselves birders, and they get the whole drama. I really appreciate your taking the time, Terrence. Thank you very much for welcoming me into your home and sharing your life and sharing your story. You know, I very much appreciate it. You know, as I travel around the world, I’m here to hunt. I’m here to hunt. James and I are going. We’re going to see and do a lot in a week, we already have. But, you know, to me, falling into these conversations and getting to meet somebody like yourself, it really gives these hunting experiences a lot of context, in the same way that the illustration of habitat in your drawings, the pine cones with this bird here, it really gives it a lot of context into my being here and experiencing the United Kingdom.

So thank you very much for your time.

Terence Lambert: Thank you. Thank you for your company.

Ramsey Russell: And the meals were great. I’ve enjoyed them.

Terence Lambert: Just say respect.

Ramsey Russell: Yes, sir. Thank you very much, folks. Thank you all for listening to this episode of Mojo Duck season somewhere from the country of Wales, Mid-Wales, we call it. You all have been listening to my friend, Mr. Terrence Lambert, renowned artist. Terrence, is there a way online that listeners can connect with you or your books or do you have a website or social media?

Terence Lambert: Yeah, there’s a website, but I’ve not looked at it for five or six years.

Ramsey Russell: Okay.

Terence Lambert: It doesn’t matter to me anymore. I’m busy. I’m happy.

Ramsey Russell: Thank you all, folks. See you next time.