Eric Ravilious: Artist and Designer

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TH: Can you tell us about the bombing of the Curwen Press during the Blitz, and how this affected the book and its future? James Russell, Ravilious: Submarine (edited by Tim Mainstone), Mainstone Press, Norwich (2013); ISBN 978-0955277795 It was also, says Powers, why Ravilious is not a memorialist of the interwar landscape but someone who allied traditional pastoral with modernism's sense of structure and surrealism's concentration on the dream. The pictures that display this best were the series of murals he painted in the late 1920s and early 1930s for Morley College in London, Oliver Hill's art deco masterpiece the Midland hotel in Morecambe, and the Colwyn Bay Pier. None have survived but the size of the walls meant he was forced out of his habitual pictorial intimacy into joyous jeux d'esprit and fantasy – Tudor actors playing roles in dolls houses or firework displays over De Chirico-like port buildings.

Eric William Ravilious (22 July 1903 – 2 September 1942) was a British painter, designer, book illustrator and wood-engraver. He grew up in Sussex, and is particularly known for his watercolours of the South Downs, Castle Hedingham and other English landscapes, which examine English landscape and vernacular art with an off-kilter, modernist sensibility and clarity. He served as a war artist, and was the first British war artist to die on active service in World War II when the aircraft he was in was lost off Iceland. [1] [2] [3] Life [ edit ] May, woodcut of the Long Man of Wilmington by Eric Ravilious, 1925. In late August 1942 Eric Ravilious – watercolourist, wood engraver, designer – had dinner in London with his friend and collaborator JM Richards. The evening was memorable because within days, Ravilious was dead. “I thought I discerned, behind his talk that night, a sense within him that he had come to the end of what he had to do,” Richards recalled, possibly with a memory informed by what was to happen. “It may have been no more than a sense of resignation: that he was now content to let events determine the next phase of his life.” What Powers is keen to stress is that Ravilious was part of a long tradition of English artist-printmakers that includes William Blake, Samuel Palmer and John Sell Cotman. These early 19th-century artists belonged to the generation that not only made watercolour a distinctively British medium of unexpected technical and emotional possibilities (Ravilious believed that oil paint "was like using toothpaste"), but approached their home landscapes with an unprecedented intensity of vision. Cotman in particular, with his clear outlines, unmodulated colour and sense of nature as a source of shape and pattern, was highly influential. Works by Ravilious are also held by the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, The Faringdon Collection at Buscot Park, The Ingram Collection of Modern British and Contemporary Art, The Priseman Seabrook Collection, the Wiltshire Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum. In 2019 the British Museum displayed one Ravilious painting, an uncharacteristic painting of a house, unlike his usual style. In 1940, when he was posted to HMS Highlander when it sailed for Norway, he wrote delightedly to Tirzah that in the ship “there are even flowers on the table and chintz curtains. It made me laugh to see a fine cottage chintz in the Wardroom of a destroyer.” He enjoyed the action too – “a lot, even the bombing which is wonderful fireworks”. And his pictures of HMS Ark Royal firing its huge guns show just this; they are an exercise in pattern-making where the spurting flames illuminating the Arctic dark are to him an extension of the bonfire-night celebrations he had painted in 1933.

Ravilious joined the Royal College of Art in 1922 when William Rothenstein was its principal. In the immediate postwar years Rothenstein was particularly interested in the application of art to design and was keen to steer the students away from "dreary imitations of Morris designs" towards making work that had a "more alert spirit". Ravilious expressed this spirit through a series of traits that he settled on early and which stayed with him for the next 20 years. He liked to put the old with the new and the manmade with the natural – a building in a landscape, for example, a piece of farm machinery standing in a field or an aeroplane or firework in the sky; he liked architecture, roads and fences that take the eye in and out of the image; he liked a quirky traditionalism and scenery that was unfussy rather than grand; he liked people to be offstage; he liked low-tone, dusty colours; and he liked patterns that have a certain rotational feel to them. It was a small-scale aesthetic that Ravilious never framed into a theory but that remained absolutely consistent. Here his instinct for the innate symbolic quality of objects and their strangeness has full play, as well as his fondness for snow and night skies. Ravilious became fascinated by submarines and spent time on board one of them to prepare lithographs for a projected book. Although relatively small numbers of these seem to have been printed, they are striking images, conveying the domesticity of life as well as the discomfort and danger. a b c d Alan Powers (14 July 2022). "The real and romantic: the life and work of Eric Ravilious". Art UK . Retrieved 25 February 2023. On returning from Norway, Ravilious was posted to Portsmouth from where he painted submarine interiors at Gosport and coastal defences at Newhaven. [37] After Ravilious's third child was born in April 1941, the family moved out of Bank House to Ironbridge Farm near Shalford, Essex. The rent on this property was paid partly in cash and partly in paintings, which are among the few private works Ravilious completed during the war. [16] In October 1941 Ravilious transferred to Scotland, having spent six months based at Dover. In Scotland, Ravilious first stayed with John Nash and his wife at their cottage on the Firth of Forth and painted convoy subjects from the signal station on the Isle of May. At the Royal Naval Air Station in Dundee, Ravilious drew, and sometimes flew in, the Supermarine Walrus seaplanes based there. [36]

Ravilious was extremely fond of Furlongs, and painted it on a number of occasions. He once said to Angus that "it was lovely to be in a place where you can spit on the floor". Of Tea at Furlongs, Russell writes: "the teapot and attendant mugs, bread and butter and bone-handled knives are themselves the focus of a painting that radiates light and pleasure. Only the dark grey umbrella, raised incongruously against the sun, reminds us that this scene is set in August 1939, on the eve of war." Ravilious only held three solo exhibitions during his life from which the majority of works were bought by private collectors. Other than the large number of war-time pictures held by the Imperial War Museum, significant numbers of works by Ravilious only began to be acquired by public museums and galleries in the 1970s when the collection held by Edward Bawden started to come on the art market. [19] The largest collection is held at the Towner Gallery in Eastbourne, while the Fry Art Gallery in Saffron Walden also has a major collection. [19] James Russell, Ravilious in Pictures: The War Paintings (edited by Tim Mainstone), Mainstone Press, Norwich (2010); ISBN 978-0955277740 I assume the only way that it could have been reproduced would be to photograph the illustrations from an original copy of the book and then use photolithography to transfer the imagery to new plates to print it again. Ravilious was himself the son of a shopkeeper. He grew up in Eastbourne, and in 1919 won a scholarship to the Eastbourne School of Art; three years later he began at the Royal College of Art, where his contemporaries included Edward Bawden, Edward Burra and Henry Moore. Paul Nash, who helped and influenced Ravilious in several ways, later said he was "fortunate in being there during an outbreak of talent". Good natured and "prepossessing in his appearance", Ravilious was known as "Rav" or "The Boy", and spent much time in the common room chatting up girls.Ravilious in Essex is at the Fry Art Gallery, Saffron Walden, until 14 August www.fryartgallery.org His paintings are often emotionally cool; the palette is restrained, the paint application light and dry, with plenty of white showing, and lots of hatching and stippling. There is a sense of detachment in them, as well as a hint of the mysterious or surreal: they are a strange combination of bleak, odd and enchanting. The watercolours are far from cosy, too, in their emptiness, and the absence of people in most of them, which can only partly be explained by Ravilious's confessed limitation when it came to drawing human figures. When people do appear, their faces are blanked out; they look like dolls or figurines. James Russell, Ravilious: Wood Engravings (edited by Tim Mainstone), Mainstone Press, Norwich (2019); ISBN 978-0957666559 His watercolours, though, remained attached to the real even though he added a concentrated personal dimension to the topography. The countryside of Sussex and the Essex profonde villages of Great Bardfield and Castle Hedingham were his main subjects. Because he disliked both bright sunlight and the colour green he preferred to paint under grey or cloudy skies, and in winter. He would work outdoors on pictures of half-empty village streets or bleak escarpments until his paper was soaked through with snow or the paint froze on his brush. a b c Dearden, Chris (12 March 2018). "Bid to save pier murals amid demolition". BBC News . Retrieved 19 March 2018.

TH: What was the process of selecting and sketching the shops, and where did the project go from there? James Russell, Ravilious in Pictures: A Travelling Artist (edited by Tim Mainstone), Mainstone Press, Norwich (2012); ISBN 978-0955277788 Imperial War Museum. "War artists archive:Eric Ravilious". Imperial War Museum . Retrieved 1 January 2014.

Russell, James (2021). Eric Ravilious: Downland man. Eric William Ravilious, David Dawson, Wiltshire Museum. Devizes. ISBN 978-0-947723-17-0. OCLC 1281898495. {{ cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher ( link) Richard Dorment (30 March 2015). "Ravilious, Dulwich Picture Gallery, review, A joy from start to finish". The Telegraph . Retrieved 31 August 2015. The Whitstable mine (from the 'Submarines' series)". Royal Museums Greenwich. National Maritime Museum . Retrieved 11 November 2020. Last drawing in book, twelve

TH: We know our high streets have faced significant challenges in recent decades. It’s interesting, though, that J.M. Richards was already mourning the British high street in his introduction to the book from 1938. You mention in your afterword the impression that this was ‘an obituary for an endangered species – the independent shopkeeper’. Can you tell us about this atmosphere of the time, and how it influenced the book? Her persistence has paid off. A circle of “friends” chipped in to help with the finance, and more than 70 cinemas have already signed up to screen a film, which is both a warts-and-all account of a passionate but unconventional marriage and a persuasive curatorial tour around a body of work whose quiet surfaces are never quite what they seem.The Chinese artist Ai Weiwei admits he knew nothing about Ravilious until Kinmonth approached him because of his installation History of Bombs at the Imperial War Museum. “I was curious to know how a war artist worked, so I accepted the invitation to participate in the project,” he says. He was astonished by what he discovered. “His expression is very calm, and he has such an innocent and almost naive painting style. I was deeply moved by the authenticity, attention to detail, and humanitarianism expressed in his artworks about war. He is able to observe and express in an extraordinary way. Although a lot of his works are watercolour paintings that seem like an understatement, they are profound, rigorous and meticulous. I think that Ravilious is one of the best artists in the UK.”