ARTIST CONTACTS

After publishing the highly regarded work of aviation artist Martin Bleasby in the last issue, the author of ‘Creating Your Masteriece’ (pages 84-87) Noel Harvey realised that his article did not contain contact details for any readers who were interested in talking to Martin about purchasing prints or original artworks.

Noel says: Martin does not have a website but tends to market his aviation art on Facebook using the following link: https://www.facebook.com/ MartinBleasbyAviationArtist/ Or you can find him on Facebook: @ MartinBleasbyAviationArtist doing an aerobatic display. As Ian was doing the commentary on all this, I ended up flying one of my glider designs, a 10-foot span model called a ‘Curved Air’, named after the band and because it had curved dihedral. The towplane was a three times size ‘Purple Haze’ with a hefty glow plug engine and a servo in the tail to release the tow line in case things went wrong. Obviously my ‘Curved Air’ had one in the nose to drop the tow line as well and this idea worked rather well, but only during the test flights of course!

We did our very first public display flight at a park in Matlock in Derbyshire and the 1:1 scale displays were flown from a nearby airfield as there wasn’t anywhere for them to fly from in the park. But we could fly our models from the cricket pitch there. It all went well until the time came to land the models; the tow plane was stooging around waiting for me to land but as I turned the glider onto the approach a whole lot of younger members of the viewing public decided that this nice piece of grass would be just the place to have an impromptu game of football! Despite Ian warning them of the approaching model over the PA, and the entreaties of their parents, they were far more interested in kicking the ball around. I had to do something fast and made a sharpish turn over the fence of a nearby tennis court, popped out the spoilers and brought the model into a landing inside the court. It stopped with the nose poking through one of the holes in the opposite fence! Ian naturally made out that this was all part of the planned display…

Modelling life was never dull around Ian and I’ll miss him and all his crazy ideas very much.

Kit Spackman