Ravilious
To Dulwich – a place that always seems to me like a leafy bit of Cheshire attached to the South Circular. I sometimes think – unnecessarily gloomily, seeing as she finished her days in the rented glories of Eaton Square – of Mrs Thatcher’s mid-premiership (that’s No. 10 rather than Alex Ferguson et al.) purchase of a house in Dulwich for her retirement, those basilisk eyes behind flickering net curtains looking out at a close swarming with security guards. I meet, as it happens, a Manchester United supporter in the queue for tickets at the Dulwich Picture Gallery (I’m here for the Ravilious Exhibition, surprisingly popular) – he was glancing over at the Van Gaal headline in the newspaper I’m reading. Free with information, he turns out to be a Manchester born Canadian and we talk of the Aston Villa and Man U. Cup final of 1957, and my saying to my dad that I wanted Man U. to win (this is just after the Munich Air Crash), then going out to play, and, later, being startled to hear that they had lost. It seemed inconceivable to a ten year old. It took me, indeed, a long time to get used to favourites losing – I cried when the mighty, previously undefeated Nijinski was beaten a head in the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe, and then – as has been the way of things with me – wrote a play about it. We talk of George Best, whom we both saw – me closer up than is allowable these days, standing near the touchline at Hillsborough, the Sheffield Wednesday ground. You could have reached out and pulled him off the field. Thousands wanted to. ‘He’s so beautiful I’d fuck him,’ the unknown bloke standing next to me (memorably) said that day, in a very unusual outbreak of homosexual affection on the terraces. This would be 1969? I’m reminded of one of George’s fellow players coming across George in bed with a Miss World: ‘George, what went wrong?’
Ravilious. Eric. Twenty years ago was almost unknown. I remember coming across him for the first time in 2003, Aberdeen Art Gallery which features probably his most famous water colour- of the interior of a railway carriage with a white horse seen through its windows. I was on my way to the Shetlands, had arrived in Aberdeen in plenty of time for the evening sailing from the ferry port (which you had to find). I suppose the key thing was that this – a water colour, not an oil – was the stand out painting in a gallery given over to post impressionists, mainly European. One of the great things about being a writer (and having a decent education) is you follow your nose with your enthusiasms. And there he was, unknown to me, ready to be discovered. Born the same year as my dad, 1903, as it turned out; a childhood in an antique shop in blameless Eastbourne; a water colourist (he thought painting with oils was like using toothpaste); died in 1942, as a War Artist, somewhere over Iceland. I have most of the books on him and he reproduces so well there are now no great surprises in any exhibition (the main venue for his work is the Towner in Eastbourne). You like him or you don’t: some recent Radio 4 critics found him pallid. What’s incontrovertible is that he reminds us of an old England (and sometimes Wales) - country lanes, downland, coastline. There are cars, but only the few owned by the bank managers, solicitors, doctors. Warm beer and cold linoleum. That Thirties world is focused by an oddness - a strange geometry which sharpens many of his compositions. He seldom gives us just an overview. Centre stage are often bits of machinery: a waterwheel, or huge ship’s screw, a bus rotting in countryside, a fever wagon. He takes the edge off bleakness: a Postman Pat van cheers up a picture of a Wiltshire landscape. He liked (or saw the earnings potential) in a series of paintings of ancient chalk ‘features’ – the Westbury Horse, the Wilmington Giant. One of his pictures, ‘Tea at Furlongs,’ dated August 1939 is an icon of an England just before the War that would kill him – and it’s that War we feel (did he?) approaching in his pictures. He was appointed a War Artist, upped his already prodigious work rate (he scrapped many paintings) and was killed while on a reconnaissance mission over Iceland in those Northern latitudes whose light he loved. He was married, had three children, was unfaithful to his wife (she to him apparently) but they survived their differences. He seems otherwise untroubled, and I envy his lifestyle, mainly travelling in the South of England, staying a few days here, a few days there, with his painter’s equipment. Sketches were made on the spot, but generally completed indoors. Sometimes you can almost sniff the rain or snow on his sheets: he was brilliantly adept at suggesting with little strokes and scrapings the various climactic conditions. Occasionally he approaches Seurat or Signy, but I realise I prefer him to his European counterparts and wonder, sometimes, at our uncritical reverence of Picasso and Braque, his more famous contemporaries. It’s taken him seventy years to achieve his current eminence: the gallery at Dulwich was as packed as if he were Rembrandt, which he isn’t. He’s a miniaturist, makes no claim to the large, bold statement. But there’s a vision there – is it slightly sentimental? It’s the only slight doubt I have about his (near) greatness.
It’s two of Ravilious’ prints – not cheap – I am buying from friend Biggs, who accompanies me. We interrupt our viewing with lunch in nearby (twee) Dulwich Village. We are indistinguishably part of that white skinned army of the grizzled who visit exhibitions like this day in and day out. ‘Are you a Friend of the Gallery?’ a helpfully polite employee of the gallery asks, coming down the queue to take the uncomplaining, unknowing and patient Friends to the top of the said queue, while eighty miles south east of us, anonymous, passport-less, dark skinned scrawny would-be migrants are ‘swarming’ en masse onto queues of lorries and cars in Calais. Later we buy our Ravilious fridge magnets and tea towels in the gift shop, eat carrot cake and drink afternoon tea. The evening we spend with the catalogue, with its glimpses of an England I think we mourn over. An England with scant central heating, of rickets and shiny toilet paper, I remind myself - if I am tempted to too much sentimentality.
22/8/2015
Ravilious. Eric. Twenty years ago was almost unknown. I remember coming across him for the first time in 2003, Aberdeen Art Gallery which features probably his most famous water colour- of the interior of a railway carriage with a white horse seen through its windows. I was on my way to the Shetlands, had arrived in Aberdeen in plenty of time for the evening sailing from the ferry port (which you had to find). I suppose the key thing was that this – a water colour, not an oil – was the stand out painting in a gallery given over to post impressionists, mainly European. One of the great things about being a writer (and having a decent education) is you follow your nose with your enthusiasms. And there he was, unknown to me, ready to be discovered. Born the same year as my dad, 1903, as it turned out; a childhood in an antique shop in blameless Eastbourne; a water colourist (he thought painting with oils was like using toothpaste); died in 1942, as a War Artist, somewhere over Iceland. I have most of the books on him and he reproduces so well there are now no great surprises in any exhibition (the main venue for his work is the Towner in Eastbourne). You like him or you don’t: some recent Radio 4 critics found him pallid. What’s incontrovertible is that he reminds us of an old England (and sometimes Wales) - country lanes, downland, coastline. There are cars, but only the few owned by the bank managers, solicitors, doctors. Warm beer and cold linoleum. That Thirties world is focused by an oddness - a strange geometry which sharpens many of his compositions. He seldom gives us just an overview. Centre stage are often bits of machinery: a waterwheel, or huge ship’s screw, a bus rotting in countryside, a fever wagon. He takes the edge off bleakness: a Postman Pat van cheers up a picture of a Wiltshire landscape. He liked (or saw the earnings potential) in a series of paintings of ancient chalk ‘features’ – the Westbury Horse, the Wilmington Giant. One of his pictures, ‘Tea at Furlongs,’ dated August 1939 is an icon of an England just before the War that would kill him – and it’s that War we feel (did he?) approaching in his pictures. He was appointed a War Artist, upped his already prodigious work rate (he scrapped many paintings) and was killed while on a reconnaissance mission over Iceland in those Northern latitudes whose light he loved. He was married, had three children, was unfaithful to his wife (she to him apparently) but they survived their differences. He seems otherwise untroubled, and I envy his lifestyle, mainly travelling in the South of England, staying a few days here, a few days there, with his painter’s equipment. Sketches were made on the spot, but generally completed indoors. Sometimes you can almost sniff the rain or snow on his sheets: he was brilliantly adept at suggesting with little strokes and scrapings the various climactic conditions. Occasionally he approaches Seurat or Signy, but I realise I prefer him to his European counterparts and wonder, sometimes, at our uncritical reverence of Picasso and Braque, his more famous contemporaries. It’s taken him seventy years to achieve his current eminence: the gallery at Dulwich was as packed as if he were Rembrandt, which he isn’t. He’s a miniaturist, makes no claim to the large, bold statement. But there’s a vision there – is it slightly sentimental? It’s the only slight doubt I have about his (near) greatness.
It’s two of Ravilious’ prints – not cheap – I am buying from friend Biggs, who accompanies me. We interrupt our viewing with lunch in nearby (twee) Dulwich Village. We are indistinguishably part of that white skinned army of the grizzled who visit exhibitions like this day in and day out. ‘Are you a Friend of the Gallery?’ a helpfully polite employee of the gallery asks, coming down the queue to take the uncomplaining, unknowing and patient Friends to the top of the said queue, while eighty miles south east of us, anonymous, passport-less, dark skinned scrawny would-be migrants are ‘swarming’ en masse onto queues of lorries and cars in Calais. Later we buy our Ravilious fridge magnets and tea towels in the gift shop, eat carrot cake and drink afternoon tea. The evening we spend with the catalogue, with its glimpses of an England I think we mourn over. An England with scant central heating, of rickets and shiny toilet paper, I remind myself - if I am tempted to too much sentimentality.
22/8/2015