Roamer: Life’s work of sketches and drawings for all world to see

What about a dinosaur waggling its head from side to side for the kids, or your very own Giant’s Causeway in the garden?

These are just some of the wonderful works of art created by a man I met on Tuesday after seeing a pen and ink sketch on a website.

The website is called ‘Images and Memories of Old Northern Ireland Pre 2000’ - quite a mouthful!

The sketch is of the long-demolished gate lodge on the University Road entrance to Belfast’s Botanic Gardens.

Drawn in 1965 by Brian Willis, who’d recently arrived from London, the sketch is attracting considerable comment from folk here and around the world.

“I have hundreds of sketches and the idea is to pass them on before I am under the grass” he candidly admits on the website, “so I scan and print and keep the originals, but the pile is not getting any smaller.”

He posts a sketch on the website “every week or so” and hundreds by mail to “various people - friends, business, churches, who have asked for them.”

I emailed 86-year-old Brian, at home in Bushmills on the north coast, requesting a preview. Brian replied: “Come here and we can spend time amid the chaos of two rooms of archive material and art projects.”

This was a wild understatement! There aren’t just two rooms, but a whole house packed full of art works, diaries, sketchbooks and all sorts of artefacts - on the floor, on shelves, in cupboards, adorning walls, on tables and chairs - everywhere, including the attic.

And outside too, with 21ft-high painted sunflowers blossoming around the chimney and several convincingly life-like fibreglass seagulls perching on a local roundabout.

The sunflowers were a present for his dear wife Angela, who sadly died in 2018.

“You're always painting murals for other people,” she told him, “why can't I have something for myself for a change?”

The sunflowers may have faded with time, but Brian’s love for his late wife most definitely hasn’t.

His work is distinctively eclectic and multimedia - cartoons, animations, sculptures; indoor and outdoor murals; stage sets, backcloths and paintings and drawings and sketches in ink, watercolour, pencil, oil, pastel and acrylic.

His Corinthian and Roman sculptures are Glass Reinforced Plaster and his Giant’s Causeway (58ft long by 14ft high, painted on plywood) was commissioned for the opening ceremony of the 1999 International Youth Football Tournament at Coleraine.

His 24ft long dinosaur advertised a film (with Brian crouched inside, waggling its head!) and the Manhattan skyline was Trompe-l’œil, a highly realistic optical illusion of three dimensions on a two-dimensional surface. From whence his prolific creativity?

Originally from Wimborne, Dorset, Brian told me he’s the only son of Patrick “a mechanic who had all sorts of jobs but his most interesting one was helping to build the Vickers Viscount.”

Brian’s mum was shopkeeper Madge “whose mother was a circus tightrope walker from the Chipperfield dynasty” he said, adding “I have a cousin who trains elephants in South Africa!”

A proficient scenery painter at 13, Brian left school at 16 in 1952 and worked for a month in the Bournemouth Pavilion theatre. Next, a factory job, producing plays and making parade floats in his spare time.

“I was besotted with the theatre,” he admits.

On National Service with the RAF from 1954 to 1958 he worked with electronic navigational equipment, producing shows and concerts after hours. In 1958 he married Angela, a London nurse, and with his expertise in drama and electronics got a job as a Technical Operator in the BBC in London.

In a control room “with 900 circuits coming in and out” he worked with broadcasting icons like Wallace Greenslade, famous for the Goon Show, and Joy Worth, announcer, presenter and singer.

He moved to what is now the World Service and started sketching London buildings during lunch breaks, which he continued when he moved to Belfast in 1962.

More about this extraordinary ‘man of many arts’ on next Saturday’s page when he adds hospital radio and film sound recording to his busy schedule. Meanwhile you can view some of Brian’s sketches on Images and Memories of Old NI Facebook.