James Russell

Ravilious Watercolours on Show in March!

2012-01-30T03:26:00.000-08:00

We'll be launching the new book at the RWA, Bristol, on Saturday 10 March!

Exciting news for art lovers in the West Country! On 10 March an exhibition of watercolours, wood engravings and lithographs by Eric Ravilious (1903-42) will open at the Royal West of England Academy here in Bristol.

After the phenomenal success of Ravilious shows in Eastbourne (Towner, 2010) and Saffron Walden (Fry Art Gallery, 2011), it will be wonderful to see a substantial body of work on display in the West of England. I haven't seen a full list of pictures yet, but there will definitely be some favourites on show, alongside paintings that people may not have seen before.

from Ladies Who Travel

At the Towner exhibition, 'Familiar Visions', we saw the artist's paintings of Sussex alongside his son James Ravilious's photographs of Devon. The Fry also took a regional angle, concentrating on 'Ravilious in Essex'. This time around the organisers are taking a slightly more academic approach, using the title 'Going Modern/Being British' as a starting point. It was Paul Nash, the painter's teacher, who asked in the early 1930s whether it was possible to be a modern artist while retaining qualities he considered to be traditionally British. In paintings like 'Event on the Downs' he tackled this question head on, but he'd already addressed it in more subtle ways earlier in his life.

He was particularly influential in the 1920s as a champion of wood engraving and watercolour. These were in no sense new media, but they had been so neglected in the 19th century that they must have seemed fresh and exciting to young artists in the aftermath of the Great War. Nash's 1924 exhibition of landscapes in watercolour was a dazzling success, but with most of the pictures in private hands it is difficult for us to appreciate just how good - and how innovative - this work was.

We are much luckier with Ravilious, who was studying with Nash at the time and went on to master both of his teacher's favourite media. As a wood engraver he was rarely surpassed - a fact that was acknowledged during his lifetime - but as a watercolourist the very good reputation he had built up before his death is only now recovering from a long period of neglect. It's wonderful that so many of his paintings have survived, in excellent condition, and that so many are either in public collections or owned by people who are more than willing to lend them for exhibitions.

Eric Ravilious, Interior at Furlongs, 1939 (DACS)

Ravilious is often described as 'quintessentially English' rather than British, a distinction which I think makes him seem a slightly parochial figure - as does his lack of interest in artistic movements and theories. In fact he numbered Henry Moore and other modernist luminaries among his friends, and travelled as widely as circumstances allowed; he painted ordinary things - an old car, a greenhouse, a barbed wire fence - in a way that made people see them in a new light, which suggests a modern mind at work.

David Hockney, Winter Timber

I'm glad this show will be on at the same time as David Hockney's exhibition at the Royal Academy. The two exhibitions will prove a wonderful study in contrast, with giant, boldly coloured pictures on the one hand, and small, delicately-nuanced paintings on the other - brass band vs solo violin. Yet the two artists also have so much in common, in particular a vital understanding that mystery and beauty reside in the most ordinary scenes.

Eric Ravilious: Going Modern/Being British is at the RWA, Bristol, from 10 March until 29 April
David Hockney: A Bigger Picture is at the RA, London, until 9 April

We will be launching 'Ravilious in Pictures: A Travelling Artist' at the RWA, Bristol, on 10 March, and on 24 March I will be giving an illustrated talk based on my researches for the new book, also at the RWA.

Illuminations on BBC4: Intelligent Telly!

2012-01-24T06:28:00.000-08:00

Dr Ramirez: look, no gloves!

Last night I belatedly started watching the BBC mini-series 'Illuminations: The Private Lives of Medieval Kings' and about half-way through the first episode I witnessed something extraordinary: two women standing in front of a cathedral, discussing the Anglo-Saxon King Edgar as if this was the most natural thing in the world. There was no rousing music. There were no special effects. Nobody was making outrageous claims about anything, or trying to shock - although we did hear a Chaucerian tale of nuns being pursued by the lusty monarch. It was like listening to the radio - only with pictures!

I'm sure I've seen art historian Dr Janina Ramirez on TV before - yes, I remember now. It was a few months ago, and she was talking about Icelandic sagas with an engaging earnestness that she also brings to the subject of illuminated manuscripts and the world in which they were created. Unashamedly academic and proud of her ability to recite poems with an authentic (we assume) Anglo-Saxon accent, she seemed genuinely thrilled to be let loose among the British Library's collection of Royal Manuscripts shortly before they went on show to the public last November.

The Alphonso Psalter (click name for details), British Library

This I can completely understand. For anyone who has a passion for any subject, there's nothing like handling a precious artefact, whether it's a book, a painting or a pair of Elvis's sneakers. And no gloves! When I saw her flicking through the first book with her ungloved fingers I thought Security would show up at any moment and carry her away, but then we were told that this is BL policy: bare fingertips are far more sensitive, apparently, and less likely to damage thousand year-old vellum.

The first episode was admirably simple. We saw books in the library. We saw the cathedrals, formerly monasteries, where they were made. We saw a few enthusiasts, also some cows (vellum on the hoof). The iPad, if that's what it was - other tablets are available - was put to good use, and on occasion text and pictures rose off the page and floated about in a pleasingly modern way. There was an assumption throughout that the viewer had a basic grasp of British history after the Fall of Rome - which may have been slightly over-generous - but in the main 'Illuminations' was as good as a Radio 4 documentary (something you can't say about many TV shows).

King Edgar, New Winchester Charter (click name for details) BL

But perhaps I'm biased. A long time ago now I studied illuminated manuscripts and once put on a slide show with images and pages from psalters and similar books. I've since seen different books at odd times and I love them. I love the ancient vellum and the glorious handwriting, and the personal quirks that Ramirez picked up on so well - the annotations and corrections and scribbles. Most of all, though, I love the bright, eccentric, personal illustration of these books, which you can see echoed in the work of more recent artists - from William Blake to Quentin Blake.

Some of the decoration I've seen so far has been breathtaking, preserved (as the presenter noted) for centuries by having been hidden away within the covers of a book. I'm looking forward to watching more, and visiting the exhibition of Royal Manuscripts at the British Library (ends March 12, I think).

Dungeness

2012-01-20T02:29:00.000-08:00

Miniature railway, lighthouses, shingle - Dungeness!

In the autumn I enjoyed a whistlestop tour around Rye and environs, a part of the world I knew well from the work of artists I love but hadn't visited in years. The place I had heard most about was undoubtedly Dungeness, that great parson's nose of shingle jutting out from the flat Kent coast a few miles south of the hilltop town.

Actually I read about it first, in Derek Jarman's wonderful, elegiac book 'Modern Nature'. This must have been twenty years ago, but both the tone of the book and the descriptions of the film-maker's strange, stony garden stayed with me. A dying man attempting to tease life out of salt-encrusted shingle, in the shadow of a nuclear power station? I didn't like his films, particularly, but this was a wonderful tale.

Prospect Cottage, Derek Jarman's former home (private - please respect)

Other stories about Dungeness reached me over the subsequent years. I remember the sound of feet scrunching over shingle in a Radio 4 documentary, a programme which left with me an image of stones lying in great undulating waves, so that when you stood in the midst of them you could see nothing else.

Then I came across the painting by Eric Ravilious that features in 'Ravilious in Pictures: A Travelling Artist', which gives a completely different impression. His version is more like a scene from an old-fashioned Sci-fi movie, with improbable modern structures dotted around a desolate shore. Dungeness had been popular with artists since at least the mid-19th century, when dramatic scenes of ships in peril were so much in vogue. More recently, that intrepid travelling artist John Piper had made several lovely pictures of the lighthouse and attendant buildings, using his favoured media of pen and ink, gouache and collage. Ravilious may have seen these, which would partially explain his idiosyncratic choice of subject and angle.

Eric Ravilious, Dungeness, 1939, private collection/DACS

Anyway, one bright morning in September I set off from Rye. As I drove south the weather changed, the clouds not so much moving in as forming around me, and by the time I reached the deserted holiday camps and hotels of Camber Sands it was drizzling. The country beyond reminded me of Lincolnshire or the Baltic coast, but that was probably just the weather. To the right the land was fenced off, miles of it, and looking at the map afterwards I realised it was an army range. I drove through Lydd, read a report in a local paper that trumpeted the expansion of the local airport as the only hope for the local economy and lambasted the bird lovers of Dungeness for their opposition to the plans, and carried on.

Approaching my destination on a narrow lane it was clear that this was one of the world's stranger and more wonderful places. To the right the industrial bulk of not one, but two nuclear power stations. To the left, an evenly-spaced row of houses, each slightly different to its neighbour, which stretched away along the coast towards Dymchurch, as far as I could see. And all around, the most extraordinary landscape - a kind of miniature Lake District with hills ten feet high and no plant taller than a gorse bush.

As I got closer to the coast the vegetation grew sparser, the shingle more obvious, until I was driving along an even more makeshift road with the odd wooden chalet on one side and on the other a wave of stones that formed a crest above the shoreline. On this crest, outlined against the grey sky, brightly painted boats were perched ready for launching, while closer at hand lay the skeletons of older, abandoned boats with bleached and broken timbers. Among these were other relics - huts and bits of winding machinery, and long, snaking sections of narrow gauge railway track. Up ahead were the lighthouses and on my right, as I went slowly along, Prospect Cottage with its matt black walls and bright yellow trim, and the bizarre ornamental garden created by Derek Jarman in the last years of his life.

The Low Light, built C19, converted to foghorn station C20

Few places I've visited have such a powerful and unique identity as Dungeness and I could see instantly why Ravilious had felt at home. The lighthouses and miniature railway and power stations and eccentric little houses were part of it, but what appealed to me most was the evidence of passing time.

While the cliffs of Beachy Head, just along the coast, are constantly being worn away, the shingle bank is continually growing, and as the sea retreats so the fishermen and other inhabitants of this peculiar settlement follow it, leaving behind on the stones whatever they no longer need. Everywhere was evidence of past endeavours, although I found no trace of the lighthouse on which Ravilious focused his attention, the so-called Low Light installed in the 19th century to supplement the main lighthouse.

Prospect Cottage

What a place to create a garden in the face of death. What a place for a painter of everyday marvels. I can't wait to go back.

'Ravilious in Pictures: A Travelling Artist' is published by The Mainstone Press at the end of February.

Eric Ravilious: The Case of the White Horse Dummy

2012-01-04T01:28:00.000-08:00

Eric Ravilious, The Westbury Horse, 1939

When I was researching 'Ravilious in Pictures: Sussex and the Downs', several years ago now, I kept hearing about a lost relic - the mock-up or dummy of a book that the artist was planning. The story ended up in the essay accompanying 'The Westbury Horse':

After making a successful start with the Wilmington Giant he had decided to paint more figures in September 1939, but war intervened. Joining the Observer Corps, Ravilious stayed in Essex until early December, when he abruptly swapped shifts with a fellow Observer and rushed off. He had been promised a job drawing chalk figures for a book, he told Diana Tuely, and in a tremendous burst of energy drew the white horses of Uffington and Westbury, the Cerne Abbas Giant and George III on horseback outside Weymouth.

On his return, he was invited to be a war artist... The book of horses and giants was not forgotten, however, and in January 1941 he sent a dummy to Noel Carrington, who was then editing the Picture Puffin series of children’s books for Penguin. Carrington responded enthusiastically, suggesting that the book might include drawings not only of chalk figures, earthworks and castles, but also of implements excavated from prehistoric sites. ‘Downland Man’ or ‘Whitehorse Hill’ might be the title, with accompanying text by H.J. Massingham; artist and author had collaborated not long before, when Ravilious illustrated Massingham’s new edition of The Natural History of Selborne by Gilbert White.

With Tirzah about to have a third child, Anne, Ravilious decided not to proceed, but he continued to work on the book and, according to Carrington, took the dummy with him on his posting to Iceland in August 1942, intending to finish it. He may have taken it with him when he volunteered to join the hunt for a missing plane, because it disappeared thereafter, and has never, despite the efforts of researchers, been found.

Eric Ravilious, White Horse dummy, 1941, cover

As I understand it, one or two of the more diehard Rav fans visited Iceland and endeavoured to track down the missing dummy, and their failure to find it encouraged this legend that he had, for some reason, taken it with him on that last flight. A more likely explanation was that the flimsy paper book had simply got lost, but the its creator's disappearance has a powerful hold on the imagination. His obsession with the North (a region associated with death in Mediterranean mythologies) and with flight suggest an artist driven by his own aesthetic desires to his doom. Whatever we may think of this, Rav's mysterious disappearance fascinates people of a romantic disposition.

Within the context of this story, the missing dummy had a grail-like status, so it was rather astonishing when the little book turned up last year, not in an ancient army-issue satchel but in a box uncovered in London during an office clean-up - one that must have been long overdue. Now the legendary dummy is up for auction, with a guide price of £2000 - £3000. I have no idea whether this represents value for money, but I suspect that this lot will fetch a decent price.

True, the dummy is sketchy in the extreme, with a few black and white photos of the chalk figures accompanied by rudimentary page layouts and a few pencilled notes, but the cover, based on 'Train Landscape', is nicely done. Besides, the buyer will probably not be interested in these details. Work by Ravilious is scarce, and this dummy, whatever its merits, is unique. It's the Last Book, a true relic.

'Ravilious in Pictures: A Travelling Artist' is in production and will be published in late February by The Mainstone Press.

'Great Expectations' & 'Ravilious in Pictures: A Travelling Artist'

2011-12-29T06:48:00.000-08:00

The Greatest 'Great Expectations'? David Lean's 1946 film

Watching 'Great Expectations' the other night I was reminded how important a sense of place can be. Pip and Magwitch are both creatures of the marsh, the lowest of the low. No wonder Pip's sister goes on in typically Dickensian fashion about being 'raised up' - out of the swamp and into society.

It's easy to take the places chosen by artists, writers and film makers for granted. We think of them as settings - a backdrop to the action - yet a place is often integral to the story. Charles Dickens understood perfectly that a place - whether a marshy seashore or a tenement building - can hold tremendous power. Victorian London was a thriving modern city, yet we remember the corners Dickens made into fiction, drawing out the emotion attached to old, picturesque or terrifying streets. Much of his London was composed of relics of the previous century, the city that was rapidly disappearing as the one we know grew up.

David Hockney, Looking at Woldgate Woods, 2006

Some writers and artists focus on places they know intimately. Thomas Hardy reimagined his native Dorset, Stanley Spencer the country around Cookham. Can we envisage the work of either separate from the location? And what about the Brontes? Or John Constable? Having abandoned dowdy Britain for the bright colours of California, David Hockney has returned home, West Coast palette in hand, and found new inspiration in familiar scenes.

Dickens was rather different. He went in search of places and scenes that came with emotional resonance or topicality built in, and in books like 'Hard Times' he borrowed heavily from the dramatic newspaper reports of the day. It's interesting to compare his lifelong quest for captivating places to that of JMW Turner, an artist who travelled widely to find subject matter that captured the violent changes wrought by the steam age.

JMW Turner, Snow Storm - Steam-boat off a Harbour Mouth, 1842, Tate

Curiously, the painters who followed him didn't seem so keen on the subject of place; think of the Pre-Raphaelites with their studied figures. While the work begun by Constable and Turner was taken on by painters across the Channel, it took a new century and the upheaval of the Great War to drive British artists out of their studios on a mass exploration of coast and landscape. After the mechanized brutality of the Western Front there was an understandable desire to 'get back to nature', and at the same time the production of cars and buses by factories that had previously made armaments enabled people to visit ancient sites, historic villages and beauty spots.

Paul Nash, Sudden Storm, 1918 (print from watercolour)

Painters turned their attention to places with an enthusiasm not seen since the early 19th century. Paul Nash set the tone, putting watercolour to use as a medium of modernity and teaching his students at the Royal College of Art to do the same. Among these were Edward Bawden and Eric Ravilious, both of whom took to the medium of John Sell Cotman and Francis Towne with great success - Ravilious never got on with oil paint, which he likened to toothpaste.

In his watercolours, Ravilious focused almost exclusively on place, with figures appearing sometimes as part of the scene, and his career progressed he went further and further in search of inspiration. This quest for new subject matter took him around Britain and into northern France, and it forms the basis of 'Ravilious in Pictures: A Travelling Artist', the fourth volume in the series published by the Mainstone Press. There are some glorious paintings in the book, from pictures of Rye Harbour and Newhaven to watercolours of Capel-y-Ffin and the Welsh hills, and some wonderful stories.

Eric Ravilious, Rye Harbour, 1938 - note Dickensian mudbank

An enthusiastic and accomplished letter writer, Ravilious left brilliant and often hilarious descriptions of the places he visited and people he met, without revealing exactly what he was looking for when he went out to paint, or analysing his work. This fourth book has been particularly fun to research and write, and as it goes into production I'll post the odd excerpt and some more descriptions of my own travels, following this genial ghost around the countryside...

'Ravilious in Pictures: A Travelling Artist' will be published by the Mainstone Press in late Feb 2012.

St Jude's Random Spectacular

2011-12-16T02:32:00.000-08:00

St Jude's Random Spectacular, Issue 1

The brand new journal from St Jude's is spectacular but far from random. Yes, it is eclectic, but with illustration by Mark Hearld, Emily Sutton, Angie Lewin, Jonny Hannah and other artists from the St Jude's stable it is a rather wonderful exposition of the Lewin house style. Open at random and you're transported to the world of energetic natural forms, retro typefaces and exquisite patterns that have made St Jude's so successful.

The cover could have been conjured up by Bawden or Ravilious for a 1930s book jacket. Seeing it made me wonder why it's taken so long for this rediscovery of all things mid-20th century to happen. It's a necessary and long overdue riposte to self-congratulatory conceptual art, computer-generated illustration and the kind of mind-numbing mass production that makes a Habitat mug look like a work of art.

Elisabeth Frink, Wolf & Crane 1968

You can see the influence of lots of artists at work. Last summer I walked into a room of lithographs by Elizabeth Frink and my immediate thought was 'how contemporary!'. In fact these characterful studies of birds and mammals were made in the 1960s, but the style - that sense of nature living and in motion - has echoes in the work of artists like Mark Hearld.

When I look at Emily Sutton's paintings of shop fronts I can't help but be reminded of 'High Street': the cafe shown in 'Random Spectacular' has the strange luminosity, stripped-down colours and exquisite lines of a Ravilious shop, but in the picture of a hat emporium on the opposite page Sutton has come up with a composition that is both tightly controlled and loose enough to let in some human warmth.

Angie Lewin, The 1953 Coronation Mug

Ravilious haunts Angie Lewin's work too - as she admits freely in her lovely book, 'Plants and Places'. By chance I was looking through it yesterday, and there's something fascinating about the way she works Rav's coronation mugs into some of her compositions. Her interpretation of his designs, with the lettering spilling off the mug into the 'world' of her print, suggests how influence works: you start with images made by another artist you love, build on them, and take off on your own...

The journal itself suggests old publications like 'The Saturday Book' - there are some nice examples here - with articles and photos relating to nature and the countryside. I love the way these cycles go: Ravilious and his generation adored Edward Thomas, Richard Jefferies and - above all - Gilbert White, whose 'Natural History of Selborne' was reissued numerous times during the 1930s. Ravilious was cock-a-hoop to be asked to illustrate one of these editions; perhaps the artists gathered together so thoughtfully by St Jude's could collaborate on a new edition. Now that would be a spectacle.

Gilbert White of Selborne, Nonesuch ed (from Bow Windows Bookshop)

By the way, there are only 750 copies of 'Random Spectacular', issue one. It isn't very expensive, and proceeds go to charity. Get yours here.

The Art of America - O'Keeffe & New Mexico

2011-12-12T12:37:00.000-08:00

Georgia O'Keeffe, Black Cross NM, 1929

Inscrutable behind mirror shades, the art critic drives north along the wide valley of the Rio Grande, following the highway between dry mountain ranges. Signs invite him to play at a casino or buy cheap Indian gas, but he drives on towards distant olive-green mountains, named the Sangre de Cristos for the blood-red colour of the New Mexican sunset.

If it's summer the mountains, as he approaches, will be topped by a towering thunderhead - or an anvil of smoke from a mile-square forest fire. Winter snow usually covers the mountains from Christmas onwards, and on occasions the high plains are white too. Mostly, though, reddish-brown and ochre are the dominant colours, along with the muted greens of pinon, chamisa and sage - and dazzling blue sky.

Northern New Mexico (heading south from Colorado)

The highway approaches the foothills and into view comes La Villa Real de la Santa Fé de San Francisco de Asís ('The Royal Town of the Holy Faith of St. Francis of Assisi'), or Santa Fe as it has been known for most of its 400 years. Today the city sprawls outward from the hills across the plain, with vast subdivisions spreading miles in every direction. A British city of a similar population (67,000) would be far smaller, but that's the West for you; like the horizons, the houses, yards and vehicles are wide.

Taos Pueblo

Our critic has a choice here: he can carry on up the Rio Grande, through Espanola, to visit Georgia O'Keeffe's old place above Abiquiu or head up into the mountains to Taos. Alternatively he can stop in Santa Fe itself. Whichever he chooses, he will find himself in an America different from either the sophisticated liberal-minded coastal cities or the republican-minded, God-fearing walmart country that stretches from sea to shining sea. Though a religious land, this is not the Bible Belt; Northern New Mexico is Catholic not Baptist. It is also one of the few places in the country where Native Americans, the descendants of 17th century Spanish Conquistadors and more recent arrivals from the east coast manage to live side by side - not always without animosity, it has to be said, but without destroying each other.

Ernest L Blumenschein, Haystack, Taos Valley, 1927

If we were on TV we might see as a historical introduction the cave-dwellings of the Anasazi, ancestors of today's Pueblo Indian tribes, followed by drawings of Conquistadors trudging north from Mexico in search of El Dorado (seeking gold, they found subsistence farmers growing beans and corn), and then some pictures of wagon trains heading west on the Old Santa Fe Trail. Billy the Kid might feature, and Chisum, and Geronimo. And the railroad... This is the West, a place of mingled cultures and ancient grudges and a region where people can leave their past selves behind and begin anew.

John Sloan, Road to Santa Fe, 1924

Take the road from Santa Fe to Abiquiu and see how many dirt roads head off into the hills. People live out there, off-grid, with a pick-up truck, a generator, a well and a gun. There are communes and cult centres, and artists living in trailers that they have extended, reroofed, rendered...

Artists came first to Taos, attracted by the extraordinary architecture of Taos Pueblo and the colourful culture of its inhabitants, as well as by the radiant light of Northern New Mexico. According to legend the painters Ernest Blumenschein and Bert Phillips were travelling from Denver to Mexico in the summer of 1898, when a wheel broke on their carriage. As luck would have it they were only a few miles from Taos, and that's where they went for help. They went no further.

Storm brewing over Northern NM

By the time New Mexico became a state in 1912, it already had a reputation as an enchanted region, a reputation exploited by advertisers of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad. The journey from Chicago or New York was hard but not impossible, and in the years after World War I artists came in ever-increasing numbers to Santa Fe. Some came to recover from tuberculosis in the dry climate; some came for the light; some came to paint (and give political support to) the Indians; some found in the strange geology and landscape ideal material for Modernist techniques.

John Sloan and Randall Davey were among the first to set up summer homes in the town, and you can still visit Davey's house (which is owned by the Audubon Society) and its beautiful mountain orchard. The paintings they exhibited (successfully) in New York encouraged others to visit New Mexico: Marsden Hartley and Arthur Dove, John Marin and Andrew Dasburg. Some stayed in Santa Fe permanently, enduring the cold, hard winters when there were no tourists to buy pictures and virtually no other way to earn a living.

Georgia O'Keeffe, Pedernal from the Ranch, 1956

Of these the best-known were the Cinco Pintores, a loosely-affiliated group who established a colony on Camino del Monte Sol, just below the TB hospital. Known as 'the five little nuts in the five adobe huts', Jozef Bakos, Fremont Ellis, Walter Mruk, Willard Nash and Will Shuster made the colony self-sustaining and permanent, with the glorious Museum of Fine Arts giving them a place to show (and sell) work.

Pedernal, nr Abiquiu NM - O'Keeffe Country

Moving to Taos in 1919, the socialite Mabel Dodge Luhan did her bit to encourage artists and writers to visit New Mexico. Willa Cather and photographer Ansel Adams were among her celebrity guests, but her most enduring literary friendship was with DH Lawrence, who set up home at a ranch nearby (also open to the public).

In May 1929 Georgia O'Keeffe visited New Mexico for the first time, and was immediately taken in hand by Mabel Dodge, who lent her a studio and a base from which to explore the surrounding country. O'Keeffe was already famous, both for her flower paintings and as a doyenne of the New York art scene; her husband Alfred Stieglitz was a mover and a shaker who helped her become one of the most prominent and highly-paid artists of her time.

Georgia O'Keeffe, Rancho de Taos Church, 1934

But O'Keeffe needed new inspiration and in New Mexico she found it, immediately focusing on the church architecture, skulls and crosses that were to provide her with subject matter for decades. Moving permanently to Ghost Ranch, just above Abiquiu, in 1940, she spent forty years evolving into the tough, self-contained old woman who still haunts the region as a kind of desert seer. She lived so long (dying in 1986 at the age of 98) that she seemed as permanent as the mountains and desert she loved, and in Santa Fe everyone over a certain age has a story that begins, 'Did I ever tell you about the time I met Georgia... ?'

Acequia Madre, Santa Fe, NM

I also remember people telling me that the artist didn't like Santa Fe, a not uncommon feeling among people who come to New Mexico for the isolation of the desert rather than the restaurants and galleries of the capital. Nevertheless, the city has adopted her as its own, with the O'Keeffe Museum adding to the already numerous tourist attractions it has to offer. Chief among these is (to my mind) the fact that old Santa Fe is a beautiful town of adobe houses set in quiet tree-lined streets; you can walk from the Plaza to the mountains (providing you're fairly fit), and enjoy the huge clear skies of the state that calls itself (without a shred of irony, and ignoring the shocking divide between rich and poor) the Land of Enchantment.

BBC4: The Art of America - parts 2 & 3

2011-12-08T02:26:00.000-08:00

Jeff Koons, Puppy, 1992 (at Bilbao) - isn't he cute?!

More great telly from Andrew Graham-Dixon, who must have had a blast barreling along the Nevada and California highways in his convertible. Having managed to keep a straight face for most of the first two parts, he finally broke down in the third, when he was shown standing on the hilltop above the Hollywood sign, chuckling at the hilarity of it all. Here he was, an art critic known for his subtle, serious, passionate analysis of paintings, in Tinseltown!

There was an irony here, one of several that added a fascinating undercurrent to the show. If there is an Art of America it probably isn't the painted canvas but the motion picture, yet Hollywood was presented as one of the more amusing components of the incomprehensible, unserious sprawl of Los Angeles - a city in which (as AGD rightly pointed out) the buildings themselves are works of art. They are also, he might have added, covered in art, as LA's vast expanses of cement have attracted mural painters for decades.

Edward Hopper, Night Hawks, 1942

But what was the man supposed to do? Given three hours and whatever budget the cash-strapped BBC has for this sort of programming, he set himself the task of weaving the story of American art into the broader history of a huge, diverse country.

In general he proved adept at combining the broad sweep - The Depression, The Sixties - with detailed examination of particular artworks. I was absolutely gripped by his discussion of 'White Flag', Jasper Johns' painting of 1955, which was nicely set in the context of the McCarthy Era. Similarly, his detailed examination of Edward Hopper's legendary 'Night Hawks' allowed us to contemplate the picture as we might in a gallery, with an intelligent guide. We were introduced to Norman Rockwell, one of the most genuinely popular American painters of the last century, and given new insight into the political pressures that influenced the way he painted African-Americans.

Jasper Johns, White Flag, 1955

Most of the greats had their moment in the spotlight: Rothko & Pollock, Johns & Warhol. Factory acolyte Billy Name had an entertaining walk-on part, sporting a marvellous ZZ Top beard. Curious that in AGD's anxiety-ridden, urban America, most of his interviewees lived in leafy suburbia!

Inevitably, given the scale of the operation, there were artists who perhaps should have been included but weren't. Having spent a lot of time in New Mexico, I was hoping for a glimpse of Georgia O'Keeffe, who was both brilliantly original AND popular. The lack of any detailed examination of her work was part of a wider problem: although the series talked a lot about the diversity of American culture, the artists featured were not especially diverse. With the odd exception (eg Nan Goldin), most were white men. Was the Harlem Renaissance discussed (I would double-check but Part 2 no longer available)? Were we introduced to Jackson Pollock's wife, the talented Lee Krasner? Did we see work by Dorothea Lange or Diane Arbus?

Andy Warhol - anyone for soup?

I was reminded of the brilliantly eccentric BBC4 series 'British Masters', which featured (if I remember correctly) no women artists at all. I'm not waving the flag of political correctness, just noting an anomaly.

Anyway, we at least had the treat of Mr Graham-Dixon interviewing one of my favourite artistic mavericks, Jeff Koons. I was a big fan of the King of Kitsch back when his giant floral Westie seemed a wonderful riposte to the solemnity of the Josef Beuys school. Like Ed Burra, Koons is a very dangerous artist to take seriously and AGD was wonderfully circumspect, allowing Koons to chirp cheerfully about the knick-knacks and mass-produced pictures of his childhood while a gang of workers put the finishing touches to a series of massive paintings.

Georgia on my mind...

Ever articulate, Koons talked winningly about 'acceptance': it's OK, he said, to love the ornaments of your childhood; it's OK to adore Michael & Bubbles; making love with Ilona Staller is OK too - though he must look at those pictures of his younger self enjoying intercourse with the legendary Italian porn star & MP (who was his wife at the time), and wonder what on earth he'd been thinking...

A curious journey then, from the first drawings of Native Americans to billboard-sized paintings of inflatable dolphins. Great fun to watch, and extremely informative, although I would add a proviso: this was (for the most part) liberal, secular, urban America - intellectual, doubting & ironic. Much of the country is, by contrast, conservative and devout; while the sculptor at the end was busy making a clever piece depicting man's evolution, untold numbers of schoolchildren are being taught Creationism - not as religious doctrine but as science.

BBC4: The Art of America

2011-12-05T04:39:00.000-08:00

Flying fish illustrated by John White, 1580s (British Museum)

Having successfully missed the whole of the recent BBC4 series 'Art of America', I've been catching up on the iplayer (without which I'd probably never see anything). As I write this you have about nine hours in which to watch the first episode, and I would strongly recommend dropping everything and putting it on right now...

Critics have already made the point, but Andrew Graham Dixon is that great rarity: an art historian who makes wonderful TV programmes in which he displays both passion and balance. He is articulate and neither glib nor condescending. Yes, he can be a bit serious (as he was when talking about the delightfully flippant and unserious Edward Burra) but he demonstrates clearly and with a minimum of posturing that Art Matters.

So far I've managed to watch the first two parts of 'Art of America', and the opening programme is a gem. In fact the opening of the opening programme is fantastic in its own right, as AGD introduces artist and map-maker John White, who travelled with a pioneering expedition to (what is now) North Carolina in 1585 and later became governor of the ill-fated colony of Roanoke Island; on the first expedition he painted watercolours of the Native American people they met, and these survive today as a unique record of a long-vanished society.

John White, A Cheife Herowan's Wyfe, 1580s (BM)

If there are two broad views of American history - the March of Progress vs the Devastation of a Continent - then it is clear which side this presenter takes. Believers in Manifest Destiny may prefer to watch with the sound off, but you can't really argue with the fact that North America changed dramatically in the centuries after Columbus, and not to the benefit of all. Those who know American history will not be surprised by much, although the archive film and photography is as excellent as it always seems to be in these BBC4 shows.

Audubon's Wild Turkey from 'Birds of America', 1827-38

At some points the art seems slightly unworthy of the colossal historical drama unfolding across the continent. The Americans had no Delacroix. But there are one or two moments of breathtaking beauty and of these surely the most memorable was when AGD helped a wonderful grey-haired archivist to lift the cover of John James Audubon's 'Birds of America'. I'm not sure how well people know this extraordinary book of bird paintings here in Britain, but in the USA you can find it all over the place, in numerous editions and on legions of prints and posters.

Audubon's Carolina Parakeet, now extinct

None of them, though, comes anywhere near this mighty 19th century edition - the double elephant folio. As a book it is almost preposterous, a volume so enormous that two people struggle to lift the cover... but those pictures: from the wild turkey on the first page (the original bird of America remembered every year at Thanksgiving) Audubon's birds live in a way that no stuffed bird in a box ever can. We learned that the third bird we saw - a parakeet - was driven to extinction by the farmer and the gun, prompting a discussion of 'the murderous white man' and his malign impact on natural America.

Fascinating stuff. I wonder what American viewers will make of this show if it appears on the other side of the Atlantic...

Eric Ravilious & Paul Nash in Bristol

2011-12-03T04:40:00.000-08:00

Eric Ravilious, Bristol Quay, 1938

Bristol has been a popular destination for the wandering artist since at least the 18th century, when the Avon Gorge began attracting painters who were looking for something Sublime (cliffs, ruins, etc), but didn't want to go dragging all over Wales looking for it. Since then the port city and its scenic surroundings have proved a fertile hunting ground for generations of artists, and today Bristol must boast one of the highest per capita population of creative types in the country.

JMW Turner, The Avon Gorge & Bristol Hotwell, 1792 (Bristol Museums & Art Gallery)

This was brought home forcibly to me when I went to the launch of Francis Greenacre's lovely book 'From Bristol to the Sea' (Redcliffe) - it must be more than five years ago now - at the Merchant's Hall in Clifton. The great and the good of the city were out in force, I remember, and quite rightly, as the book is a gem - a nicely-produced, readable survey that includes some lively watercolours by a 16 year old JMW Turner; he spent a family holiday perched on the cliffs with his sketchbook, pursuing his vision with typical dedication.

Francis Danby, St Vincents Rocks & The Avon Gorge, 1815 (private collection)

Bristol at the time was becoming something of a fashionable watering hole, on account of the allegedly health-giving waters of the Hotwells, so there was a market for scenes of the city and environs. John Sell Cotman painted an unusual, atmospheric watercolour of St Mary Redcliffe Church, while Thomas Girtin, Francis Danby and Samuel Jackson were among the many popular painters who worked here.

John Sell Cotman, St Mary Redcliffe, Bristol; Dawn, etching after 1802 w/c

Later in the 19th century the attention of artists turned from scenic views to shipping and industry. With its unique layout, the port of Bristol - the City Docks, rather than the port at Avonmouth - offered unusual perspectives that combined features of city life (church spires, shops, crowds) with ships and the activity surrounding them. This remained an attraction for artists into the 20th century. Edward Wadsworth was sent to Bristol during World War One to supervise the painting of ships with dazzle camouflage, and he then recommended the place to a younger artist friend, John Nash.

Nash visited in the 1920s and then returned in November 1938, bringing with him Eric Ravilious. Nash had been trying to get Rav to Bristol for a while, but what really persuaded his friend was the prospect of the paddlesteamers laid up in their winter berths. These lovely old boats, run by P&A Campbell around the Bristol Channel during the summer months, were exactly the kind of subject Ravilious enjoyed, and the pair spent days and, more often, nights sketching them. The resulting pictures give a fascinating insight into the way each artist worked, and I also like to imagine them sitting side by side on the docks with their easels, each intent on his version, perhaps pausing to share a nip of something against the cold.

John Nash, Britannia, 1938 (pic borrowed from Dru Marland)

There was a certain rivalry between the Nash brothers which may partly explain, I think, Paul's comparative lack of enthusiasm for Bristol. Or perhaps it was simply that he drew his inspiration less from cities and man-made things than from nature. Anyway, he did visit the city in March 1939, where he made one of his hastier sketches of the Clifton Suspension Bridge. This was included in 'The Giant's Stride' an article he wrote for the Architectural Review about Brunel's bridge and the legends surrounding the Avon Gorge.

Paul Nash, To the Memory of Brunel, 1939 (British Council)

'It had an unhappy air,' he wrote of the bridge, 'Like the dream of an ambitious mind, never quite realised. What dream was walled up in this impressive travesty? ... Strange forces had been at work in the Avon Gorge, I felt convinced, not those alone of honest engineering.'

More on all of this, and on the fascinating relationship between Ravilious and the Nash brothers, in my talk at Foyles on Tuesday 6th December - yes, that's THIS TUESDAY, 6.15pm!

Your Bookshop: Use It or Lose It

2011-11-25T04:20:00.000-08:00

Thanks to everyone who came to Blackwells in Oxford last night for my talk on Paul Nash. I thoroughly enjoyed myself - great to see some old friends and meet new ones. It was also wonderful to be surrounded by so many books. We were in the Norrington Room, which is a Tardis-like underground space, vast and absolutely packed with books. Apparently it held the Guinness world record for longest bookshelf until some even larger shop opened somewhere in... was it South America? Perhaps someone can help narrow it down!

All those books gave the room a wonderful acoustic and even though the space is vast it felt intimate. But then a good, well-stocked bookshop does tend to feel intimate, however large it may be. Insulated by books, the browser can forget the outside world for a while and relax. Well, that's what I've always done.

Books too are intimate. On the way home to Bristol last night I sat opposite a man rather older than me, who had his nose in an old, battered copy of 'The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner' by Alan Sillitoe. He was completely absorbed, not even taking his eye off the page as he nibbled at his flapjack. I once read a similarly battered copy of the same book, as have countless other people, but what really struck me about the man on the train was his absolute immersion in the world of the book - a world that opens when you first lift the cover, and to which you can return whenever you like, for the rest of your life. This chap might have read the book for the first time when he was young, perhaps when it was originally published, and was now rereading it for the tenth or fiftieth time; Sillitoe (who died last year) might have been a lifelong companion...

Blackwells at sale time...

I visit quite a number of bookshops to give talks, launch new books, etc, and I've chatted with lots of bookshop owners and managers. Many are struggling in the new world order of online retail and deep discounts. Others seem to be prospering and these tend (in my limited experience) to be the shops that muster a decent audience for a talk. These are businesses that devote enormous amounts of time and effort into winning not just customers but supporters. They run their own literary festivals or have comprehensive programmes of lectures and readings; they double as art galleries; they host book groups.

The Norrington Room - cosier in real life... and less green

They work, I think, on an important assumption. If you make your bookshop a place that is integral to people's lives, then they will stand firm against the temptation to 'buy with 1 click' and support you. It's not as if books, even at full price, are particularly expensive - how does a paperback compare with a round of drinks? Or even a couple of lattes? We go the '1 click' route out of laziness and that perennial (and very British) desire to get things cheap, irrespective of the cost in other terms. We may think of a favourite writer almost as a friend but will still choose to buy his or her new book at a colossal discount. What happens when I buy a book listed at £9.99 for £4? The writer's modest royalty, which is based on the actual price paid for a book, shrinks away almost to nothing. The publisher takes a hit too and is forced to cut costs, perhaps moving production to China (another British printer out of business), reducing staff and turning down books that won't sell sufficient numbers.

Much Ado Books, Alfriston - read this

A bookshop manager described to me recently the common phenomenon of people coming in, examining books on the shelf and then popping out to order online on their phone. These non-customers were enjoying the facilities offered by the shop - freedom to browse, attractive displays, carefully-chosen stock - and then taking their business to a cut-price rival who offered none of these things. The manager was planning to start accosting people and explaining to them that if they didn't buy books in the shop, the shop would soon be gone.

I once worked for an artist and gallery owner who would pursue customers down the street, refusing to leave them alone until they agreed to buy something. She knew that her survival depended on making sales, that no one was going to help her if she didn't, and that a certain proportion of people would give in and buy something. It's probably a good thing that bookshop people are less aggressive, but in fact the same principles apply; they either sell books or go under.

Toppings, Bath - the perfect bookshop?

Booksellers have found an array of solutions: selling rare books online; specialising in a particular subject; transforming their shop into an arts centre. Writers (and artists) can do their bit too, giving talks or encouraging people via social networks to support their local shop. But in the end what matters most is where and how we choose to buy books. We're consumers! We have freedom of choice! It may seem our God-given duty to buy everything for the lowest possible price, but it isn't.

By the way, I'm giving a talk at 6.15pm on Tues 6th December, at Foyles in Cabot Circus, Bristol. It's on Eric Ravilious and Paul Nash and you can expect lots of pictures to look at, the odd glimmer of humour and even a glass of wine. And it's FREE!

Wrecked Planes & Magnolia Trees: Paul Nash in Oxford

2011-11-21T03:48:00.000-08:00

Paul Nash, Pillar and Moon, 1940 - a view of Ascott Park, Stadhampton, nr Oxford - Tate

We tend to associate artists with places we know from their paintings: John Constable and Flatford Mill, Stanley Spencer and Cookham, Ravilious and the Downs... It's the same with people. We build a picture of a life from letters, diaries and so on, but this tends to be distorted because the sources we rely on are unreliable. One correspondent destroys their letters, while the family of another refuses to share them. In another instance, a person who mattered a great deal to the artist never wrote or received a letter. Paul Nash never wrote or talked about his mother Caroline, who died when he was twenty after a decade of mental illness, and she barely gets a mention in the biographies. Do you think her life and death influenced his work? Would it influence yours?

Paul Nash's last home at 106 Banbury Road - note blue plaque

But I'm supposed to be talking about places, and in particular about Oxford, which features in Nash's life rather like an important friend he never got round to writing to. His first real connection to the city was through his wife Margaret, an extraordinary woman who, as tends to be the case with the wives of famous artists and writers, is known only as his devoted helper. Born in Jerusalem and raised during her early childhood in Cairo, Margaret Odeh studied modern history at St Hilda's College, Oxford. She graduated in 1908 and, on moving to London, became involved in the Suffrage movement; as part of her work she helped women who were trapped in prostitution, and she retained an open-minded attitude to social and sexual mores.

Aircraft dump, Cowley

Paul and Margaret met in 1913 and married shortly before Nash joined the army in the first months of the war, and they remained together despite constant upheavals and crises caused by his infidelities, health problems and their inability to settle. Their move to Hampstead in 1936 was supposed to be the last, but three years later, on the eve of a new war, Margaret insisted they leave London and move to Oxford; a ground floor flat on Banbury Road was to be Nash's last home.

By this time Nash was severely weakened by asthma, and unable to walk or stand for long periods. After the artistic camaraderie of pre-war Hampstead he now wrote that 'I wander in the College gardens or thread my way through the Oxford streets, jostled by the late British Expeditionary Force from France and the more recent force of female expeditionaries from Piccadilly and Leicester Square...'

Paul Nash, Totes Meer, 1941 - Tate - can you spot the owl?

It is fair to say that he wasn't desperately happy in the suburbs of Oxford, but I think that being restricted in his movements focused his mind, and in the last few years of his life he produced some memorable paintings. 'Battle of Britain' was painted in Oxford, as were series of pictures devoted to crashed aircraft (German) and flying aircraft (British). A short drive took him to Cowley, where damaged planes from around the country were brought for salvage - a scene which looked to him suddenly 'like a great inundating Sea'. This fantasy he worked into 'Totes Meer', a painting I happened to see last week at Tate Britain, hanging in the museum's Romantics exhibition.

Paul Nash - a natty dresser

Nash tended to downplay his extensive borrowing from other artists, but he was undoubtedly something of a magpie, and in this painting combined the English pastoral of Samuel Palmer, the Romantic vision of 19th century German painter Casper David Friedrich, and his own studies of the Dymchurch coast to create one of the Second World War's more memorable images.

But the war did not preoccupy him directly for long. In 1942 he was released from government employment and left to his own devices. Knowing that he hadn't long to live, his mood swung between black despair and a kind of elation. His 'ivory basement', as he called his flat, had a garden surrounded by a red brick wall, and here he grew the sunflowers which feature so strongly in his final paintings. Here too I imagine grew the magnolia tree, that suburban staple, which provided the blossom for 'Flight of the Magnolia'.

Not that he was entirely trapped in his 'subub'. He travelled to Gloucestershire now and again, took a tour around Dorset with his old friend Lance Sieveking, and discovered at Boars Hill, just outside Oxford, the view that was to preoccupy him more than any since Dymchurch twenty years before...

Paul Nash, Flight of the Magnolia, 1944 - Tate

To be continued.

Paul Nash in London, Oxford, London again &... Bristol!

2011-11-17T01:31:00.000-08:00

Thank you to those who came to Sotheran's on Tuesday evening for the launch of 'Paul Nash in Pictures: Landscape and Dream'. A few people mentioned that they had read this blog from time to time, and it was fun to meet them - you, I should say. Well, the whole evening was fun. How could it not be, in such fantastic surroundings? If you have bookaholic tendencies I would be very wary of 2-5 Sackville Street, Piccadilly, unless you're a bookaholic and proud! I was surprised by the range of books, which varied from the terrifyingly expensive to the surprisingly affordable. Marvellous.

One thing people rarely tell writers when they start out is that the hardest part of the job is not coming up with the idea, or pitching it, or negotiating with publishers, or researching the book, or writing it or even - though this can seem like torture - editing it. The hardest bit is catching the attention of people who might like the book, so they can think about buying it.

The oldest antiquarian bookshop in the world...

Where, after all, do you hear about books? Each week there are a few pages of newspaper reviews and a couple of radio programmes, and these tend of course to be dominated by one or two Books of the Moment or, at any rate, by the products of big publishing companies.

I think the situation is probably hardest for writers who are snapped up by big companies then neglected, their books published but not marketed. Anyone who is published by a small press knows the score: if you want anyone to know about your books you have to jump up and down crying 'Look at my book what I wrote!' like the worst kind of B-list celebrity. In this respect Amazon, not always an institution that writers call Friend, is quite helpful: your book might occupy the slenderest of niches, but if its ISBN is registered it will most likely have some kind of presence on Amazon. You can get helpful friends to review your book and give it five stars and, should anyone buy it, it will appear on 'People who bought that, bought these' type of lists. Of course someone might also review it and give it no stars, but hey ho.

Otherwise you're reliant on word of mouth, the odd plug here and there, and shameless self-promotion. Which reminds me... Next Thursday evening (24 Nov) I will be at Blackwells bookshop in Oxford, giving an illustrated talk on Paul Nash that will include his paintings from the local area - 'Totes Meer', 'Pillar and Moon', 'Landscape of the Vernal Equinox'... - and other favourites. I'll be leaving the art-speak locked up at home and trying to match the enthusiasm levels of your hero and mine, Dr Fox (no not that Dr Fox, this one). So, if you fancy spending an evening getting to know a fascinating artist and his work, tickets are on sale at the remarkably reasonable price of £2.

Then the following Thursday (1 Dec) I'm back in London again, taking part in the Paul Nash evening being held as a fundraiser at the St Bride Library (see above). This should be a real treat, with Alan Powers and Brian Webb speaking as well as David Heathcote, and it will probably sell out. The St Bride Library has a devoted group of friends and they will no doubt turn out in large numbers as they did for a Ravilious Evening a couple of years ago.

Not the oldest antiquarian bookshop...

And then it's home to Bristol on 6th Dec, and the new Foyles bookshop in Cabot Circus. I'll be giving a free - yes, not even £2! - talk on Nash and Ravilious, which I hope will appeal to Bristol's large artistic community. Quite how I'm going to tell them all about it I haven't worked out yet, but I'm hoping a few hours walking around Clifton with a sandwich board and a loudhailer will do the trick.

Three New Titles from Little Toller Books

2011-11-13T09:20:00.000-08:00

Illustration by Stephen Bone from 'The Military Orchid'

I love old books, and always have - there's nothing I can do about it now. As a writer I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand it's rather sobering to scan the spines of hundreds of books, all once deemed worthy of publication and now entirely forgotten. An author may have written twenty, fifty or a hundred titles only a few decades ago and now be unknown to all but the lover of old books; we are like the people who explore graveyards, spinning stories from the inscriptions on the stones (OK, we're the same people). The graveyard reminds us of our mortality and the shelf of old books tells us that our success - whatever it may be - is fleeting.

On the other hand you never know when you might find a kindred spirit among a shelf of old books. I have more in common with Edward Thomas than with 90% of my contemporaries . I love his poetry but have a greater affection for some of his prose. 'In Pursuit of Spring' is a wonderful book, as is 'The South Country' - the story of the clerk who spends every summer working on the land expresses perfectly the rootlessness of modern (sub)urban life. Thomas befriended, championed and looked after the poet WH Davies, whose 'Autobiography of a Super-Tramp' I picked up the other day and read mostly in one sitting. Published in 1908 and written in simple, unsentimental prose, it is a frank account of a youth most people would consider misspent. The particular edition I found was from Jonathan Cape's Traveller's Library of the 1930s, and it looks, feels and smells as if a tramp had been carrying it around for a while.

The Saxon font at Little Toller

Not so my copy of 'The South Country', which is a new, sweet-smelling paperback published by Little Toller Books. Yes, there is a publisher that loves old books enough to rescue them from the charity shop and reissue them, and does so with style and economy. Inspired in part by Common Ground and their wonderful 'England in Particular', Little Toller has gone deep into the back catalogue, like Edward Thomas exploring the hidden lanes of Sussex and Hampshire, and pulled out a series of wonders. It is fitting that the press has as its emblem a figure from the Saxon font in the church at Little Toller in Dorset, one of artist and antiquarian John Piper's favourite objects.

Until this month there were twelve titles in Little Toller's Nature Classics Library. Alongside 'The South Country' there's Adrian Bell's 'Men and the Fields', which offers a fascinating picture of rural England shortly before World War Two, and books by Richard Jefferies and WH Hudson. Oh, and Richard Mabey's 'Unofficial Countryside' is in there too, which, since Mabey is still very much with us, rather brilliantly connects past and present. The books are nicely-weighted, reasonably-priced paperbacks with beautiful covers and illustrations by artists who are also in some cases long-forgotten.

Page from 'Sweet Thames Run Softly'

Recently three more titles have appeared, with the same distinctive covers, each colour-coded and bearing on the front a beautifully-reproduced painting. The most obvious choice, perhaps, is 'In the Country', Kenneth Allsop's account of life in Dorset which was first published in 1972. A famous TV presenter of the day (a kind of celebrity that fades even faster than literary renown), Allsop was also an energetic conservationist; this book charts a year at the old mill he and his family moved to from London, combining history, environmental debate and witty observations of nature:

Outside my window a dove is working itself up into a lather. Nervous collapse is imminent. It struts like a Grenadier drill sergeant. Its neck is curved as a drawn bow. Its chest bulges with simmering aggressiveness. It pounds the balcony tiles with pink feet. From its throat comes a furious rumbling. It is spluttering with foiled rage... How, I wonder once more, did the dove become the emblem of peace?

The name Robert Gibbings seemed familiar when I saw the second book, 'Sweet Thames Run Softly', but it took a moment to remember that he ran the Golden Cockerel Press in the late 1920s and early 1930s, commissioning Eric Ravilious and other wood engravers to illustrate his books. Gibbings was himself a talented wood engraver and in this book combined the roles of writer and illustrator to beautiful effect. Like 'Men and the Fields', this book takes us on a tour of England just before the war, only in this case the journey was down the Thames in a home-made glass-bottomed punt.

Cover image: David Inshaw, 'Oak Tree, Bonfire and Fireworks', 2004

This kind of particularity defines the Little Toller list as much as the interest in natural history. Each of the authors plucked from the past has an individual vision and an unusual way of going about things, although few are as odd as Jocelyn Brooke. I had no idea who this was, although I did recognise the painting on the cover of 'The Military Orchid' as the work of David Inshaw, and not being particularly interested in orchids I dipped into the book only to find that the flowers are only part of the story. Brooke was by all accounts an odd chap, an observer of flora and people who tried his hand at various aspects of 'real life' and in the end preferred to live in the country with his childhood nanny and write a stream of books.

From an Edwardian childhood to service in a mobile VD clinic during World War Two his memoir is funny, acerbic and full of life, surely one of the most interesting books to be published this autumn. I particularly enjoyed his frankness as a botanist, his admission that he preferred the experts who supported his identification of a particular plant and confession that many plants bored him silly. Here's the opening:

Mr Bundock's function, so far as my family was concerned, was to empty the earth-closet twice a week at the cottage where we used to spend the summer. This duty he performed unobtrusively and usually late at night: looming up suddenly in the summer dusk, earth-smelling and hairy like some menial satyr... He became of sudden interest to me one June evening by asserting, quite calmly, that he had found the lizard orchid.

I wonder what they'll dig up next...

Artists at War: Paul Nash & Rex Whistler

2011-11-07T04:47:00.000-08:00

Rex Whistler, Girl with Red Rose, 1935

The course of a life may be affected by many things, from external accidents to the internal workings of an individual character. Take Paul Nash (1889-1946) and Rex Whistler (1905-1944), two artists who went to war - with very different results.

We remember Nash not just as a war artist but as the quintessential painter of the world wars. The art collection of the Imperial War Museum is practically built around his vast canvases from the Great War, while 'Battle of Britain' is revered as one of the most striking paintings of the 1939-45 conflict. Nash's feeling for place and love of symbolism suited him for the job, but when he joined the Artists' Rifles in late 1914 there was no indication of what he would become.

Indeed, he spent more than two years in the south of England, training as an infantry officer - and meeting Edward Thomas in the process - before embarking for France with his regiment. Life in the trenches has come to dominate our collective memory of World War One, but the front lines were the equivalent of the coal face in a mine; a colossal effort went into manufacturing weapons and ammunition, training men and transporting everything and everyone to the right place at the right time.

The war, Nash wrote to his wife Margaret in March 1917, 'has become a habit so confirmed, so inevitable, it has its grip on the world just as surely as spring or summer.'

The battlefield seemed to Nash, when he finally arrived, a place of strange beauty:

Paul Nash, 1918

'Here in the back garden of the trenches it is amazingly beautiful - the mud is dried to a pinky colour and upon the parapet, and through sandbags even, the green grass pushes up and waves in the breeze... Nearly all the better trees have come out, and the birds sing all day in spite of shells and shrapnel...'

This opinion was to change dramatically when he returned to Flanders as a war artist in the autumn, and witnessed the aftermath of the Battle of Passchendaele. That he had not fought in the battle was down to a mixture of luck and strength of will. In May, shortly before a Big Push, he had the good fortune to fall into a trench in the dark, injuring himself sufficiently to be invalided home. He had been sending sketches of the front lines home and now he seized the opportunity to persuade the authorities that he should be appointed Official War Artist and sent back to France in that capacity.

Nash had on his side a formidable weapon: the persuasive and determined Margaret. John Buchan, author of 'The Thirty-Nine Steps' and now Minister for Information, acquiesced, and within a few months Nash had risen from the ranks of minor British artists to become a household name. He also, incidentally, secured the release of his brother John from service on the front lines, and the two of them spent much of 1918 painting scenes of devastation in the green hills of the Chilterns, with the British and Canadian governments footing the bill.

Paul Nash, We are Making a New World, 1918

Two decades later he was once again appointed as an Official War Artist, and channeled his passionate hatred of Nazism into a series of memorable paintings. This time around, the selection and appointment of artists was organised by a War Artists Advisory Committee led by Kenneth Clark, the charismatic Director of the National Gallery. He believed that fine artists were an asset to the nation and should be kept from harm, and also that the work of such individualistic painters like Nash could serve as valuable propaganda.

Rex Whistler, dining room at Plas Newydd, 1936-7

However the appointment system was not perfect, and some of the omissions are mystifying. Why, for example, was Rex Whistler not chosen? According to his brother Laurence's biography, Clark approached artists whose work he knew and admired, and invited others to apply. Thomas Hennell was one painter who applied repeatedly, until he was eventually accepted. Whistler was not approached, and could not - out of pride, perhaps - apply.

Laurence wrote of his elder brother that he was 'not of this age', and indeed he does seem a strange, old-fashioned figure, painting murals for aristocratic clients as if he were living in the 18th century rather than the 20th. In 1936 he was commissioned by the Marquess of Anglesey to paint his dining room at Plas Newydd, and duly produced a glorious set of murals that mirror and transform the view of Snowdonia from the opposite windows.

Rex Whistler, Self Portrait, 1940

Yet this was hardly the time to be courting the aristocracy; by the mid-1930s many of the great houses of the land were falling into decay or being taken over by the National Trust (as Plas Newydd would be), as their owners struggled to pay death duties or meet soaring maintenance costs.

It is worth comparing Whistler's career with that of Eric Ravilious. Both became fascinated by mural painting as students, the former at the Slade and the latter at the Royal College of Art, and both launched their careers with murals. This was thanks in good measure to the legendary Henry Tonks (Paul Nash's former teacher), who chose Whistler to decorate the underground dining room at what is now Tate Britain. The success of these murals, which were finished in 1928 and can still be seen today, was the catalyst for the commissioning of the Morley College murals a year later; the success of these made the reputations of Ravilious and Edward Bawden.

The careers of the three artists had certain parallels; Whistler and Bawden both did work for Shell, while Ravilious and Whistler made designs for Wedgwood and all three were prodigious book illustrators. Socially, however, they moved in very different circles, and while Ravilious and Bawden chose to live simply in Essex, Whistler lived the high life, painting portraits of Cecil Beaton and the Sitwells and murals for stately homes.

When the war came, Bawden and Ravilious were among the first wave of artists chosen to record the conflict. By mid-1940 over 200 names had been considered, including Whistler's, which was apparently marked on the official list with a 'No'. His first inclination had been to volunteer for the army and, without a persuasive alternative, he now joined the Welsh Guards and began training as a tank commander.

Lieutenant Whistler (centre) & Cromwell tank crew 1944

Not that he gave up painting - far from it - and while stationed on Salisbury Plain he had the village blacksmith in Codford make him a unique piece of equipment, a metal box wrapped in a groundsheet, in which he kept paints, brushes and small canvases. This was fixed just behind the turret of his Cromwell tank when he rode in it from a landing craft onto the Normandy beach during the D-Day landings.

An artist at war, Whistler painted and sketched many of his fellow soldiers but only saw action once. With his platoon he was driving through the outskirts of Caen when his tank became caught up in wire, then came under machine gun fire. He jumped down and ran to the nearest tank to explain the situation and give orders, but as he started back to his own tank a mortar exploded, killing him instantly. If Kenneth Clark's ambition had been to protect artists from harm then he had, in this instance, failed.

'Paul Nash in Pictures: Landscape and Dream' is available now from the Mainstone Press and all good bookshops.

'Paul Nash in Pictures': Wood on the Downs

2011-10-25T03:13:00.000-07:00

Paul Nash, Wood on the Downs, 1930 (Aberdeen Art Gallery)

A clump of beeches rises in a sculpted wave over hills that roll and tumble like the sea. Nash loved the ancient uplands, and his paintings of Iron Age hillforts, trackways and sacred sites span a region from the Dorset coast to the northern tip of the Chilterns. It was during a 1924 visit to Ivinghoe Beacon, that great hump of chalk overlooking the Vale of Aylesbury, that he first discovered this wood, describing it as ‘an enchanted place in the hills girdled by wild beech woods, dense and lonely places where you might meet anything from a polecat to a dryad.’
     Today the Ridgeway and Icknield Way paths meet nearby, making this a landmark for long distance ramblers and a destination for daytrippers, but even in the 1920s people were visiting the hills and woods in increasing numbers. A national preoccupation with prehistory had been growing since the Victorian era and, in the aftermath of the Great War, books like H. J. Massingham’s Downland Man (1926) encouraged readers to explore the landscape of the ancient past. As aerial photography offered a new perspective on earthworks and monuments, the rise of motor transport turned sites like Ivinghoe Beacon into tourist attractions.
     ‘Millions of motorists must have passed the place,’ Nash noted wryly when he described this painting, adding ‘It is on the main road on the top of the hill. I have wanted to do something about it for years.’
     The opportunity came in the last month of his annus horribilis [1929], when Jack offered (or was persuaded) to drive him.
     ‘It was a lovely day for the drive,’ Nash remarked, ‘But devilish cold for drawing when we got to the hills…. The woods in the hollow below were crowded with wild pigeons which alternately sailed in the clouds over the tops of the trees or settled in the branches where they sat so thick the woods looked like monstrous orchards bursting into bloom.’
     He sketched directly onto canvas, noting the colours on a separate drawing, then painted the oil in his studio to his own design. One critic found the pleasure to be found in the picture ‘austere’, adding ‘It is a sort of higher mathematics of painting that Mr Nash pursues.’
     We can imagine the artist chuckling over this remark. As a boy he had been set for a career in the Royal Navy, but failed to pass the necessary entrance exams. There were plans to make him an architect, or set him to work in a bank, but the same weakness held him back:
     ‘Although I appeared to possess a good average intelligence,’ he acknowledged. ‘I was extremely deficient in mathematical calculation… Actually I was capable of quite complicated methods of computation to prove my sums. But the answers were fantastically wrong… I have seen mathematical teachers reduced to a sort of awe by my imbecility.’
     Awe of a very different kind is inspired by this painting. Simultaneously abstract, architectural and descriptive, it gives perfect expression to Nash's extraordinary sense of place.

This is an excerpt from 'Paul Nash in Pictures: Landscape and Dream', which will be available in early November from the Mainstone Press. Join us for the official launch at Henry Sotheran's bookshop in Piccadilly, on November 15th (more details here).

'Paul Nash in Pictures' - Launch & Events

2011-10-19T05:19:00.000-07:00

Exciting news! Henry Sotheran's, the wonderful fine art and antiquarian bookshop in Piccadilly, is hosting the launch of 'Paul Nash in Pictures: Landscape and Dream' on Tuesday 15 November. I'm not sure of the time yet but I imagine it will be early evening - everyone is welcome to come along and I will post full details as they emerge. (It's 6-8pm)

Other events we'll be doing to celebrate the launch of the book:

Blackwells Bookshop in Oxford has invited me to give an illustrated talk on November 24th, which will probably feature Nash and Ravilious. I'll add a link to the publicity info as it becomes available.

On 1st December I'm taking part in a Paul Nash Evening in aid of the St Bride Library off Fleet Street. Alan Powers and Brian Webb are giving talks and so is David Heathcote, author of 'A Shell Eye on Britain'. It may well sell out.

And on 6th December I'm at Foyles in Cabot Circus, Bristol, for a combined Nash/Ravilious extravaganza.

The book itself should be printed, bound and ready to go in the first week of November. Apologies if you've been looking out for it on Amazon - production has taken just a little longer than anticipated. Judging from the proofs, though, it should be gorgeous.

Edward Burra: Pallant House Retrospective

2011-10-19T00:08:00.000-07:00

Edward Burra, Country Scene 2, 1970

Why do we neglect British artists so badly? When you think of the effort made by Kenneth Clark to employ painters during World War II, both as war artists and on projects like Recording Britain, you have to wonder what has gone wrong since. Look at Edward Burra, one of the most original and extraordinary painters of the century.

Edward Burra, Silver Dollar Bar, 1948

He worked from the 1920s to the 1970s, travelling widely and painting subjects as diverse as 1930s Harlem, the cafes and hotels of French ports and bizarre skulls and skeletons. Prolific and inventive, he brought to the world an eye that was neither Modernist nor traditional; in fact his vision doesn't fit any of the maps of 20th century painting. For that reason he ought to be celebrated as a true original but instead art historians (the map-makers) have skirted around him.

Burra doesn't even sound British, and his work certainly doesn't look British - where are we supposed to put him? What were his influences and who, in turn, did he influence? Where does he belong in the evolution of art?

Visiting the recent Watercolour show at Tate Britain I was knocked sideways by a gigantic painting of a church interior. Surely it couldn't be watercolour?! It was too big, too bold. It stuck out among the gentle washes and topographical details like the sorest of thumbs. I didn't know then that the artist who made that picture was crippled, often barely able to use his hands. I didn't know that he painted in the strangest way, starting in one corner and working his way like a spider across the paper. I didn't know that he was born and raised in suburban luxury, just outside Rye, and lived his whole life either at his parents' house (which he hated) or in the town itself (which he didn't like either).

I did happen to know that he was a friend of Paul Nash and studied at the RCA during the 'outbreak of talent' that included Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth and Rex Whistler (Fine Art) and Ravilious and Bawden (Design). Burra appears in 'Paul Nash in Pictures: Landscape and Dream', accompanying the Nashes and their friend Ruth Clark on a disastrous 1930 trip to the Cote D'Azur...

Edward Burra, Valley and River, Northumberland, 1972

These few bits of information make Ed Burra seem all the more extraordinary, so well done to the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester for putting on the first major retrospective of his work in a quarter-century. Hooray! It starts at the weekend and runs until February, and personally I can't wait to get there. I'm particularly keen to see the late landscapes - there was one fabulous example in the Tate's Watercolour exhibition - with their lovely greens and idiosyncratic design.

A new monograph is being launched at the show, but I would also recommend Jane Stevenson's book and Burra's letters - his writing is as peculiar as his painting. You can also see the artist's work in 'The Strawberry Thief', Jeremy Deller's show at the Fine Art Society - which also features Deller's model of a Ravilious plant house.

For a slightly different take on the subject, look here.

Paul Nash: Rye, Dymchurch, Iden

2011-10-06T03:25:00.000-07:00

Paul Nash, Landscape at Iden 1929 (Tate)

Since I was eight or nine I've pictured the Battle of Hastings on a beach, like the Normandy landings of World War Two in reverse, so it was rather unsettling to drive through leafy hill country to the landlocked town of Battle. I was endeavouring to get from Eastbourne to Rye by as straightforward a route as possible, which turned out to be not very straightforward at all.

Paul Nash, Winchelsea Beach

The plan was to find a campsite near Rye, but at 6 o'clock on a Sunday evening, as I trundled around the backroads north of the town, this was beginning to look rather unlikely. Eventually I stopped south of Appledore at the Ferry Inn, an old pub with a landlord from Chaucer, and they kindly helped me find a site near Winchelsea Beach.

Driving around in the evening sunlight I found myself in Iden, a village I knew from association with Paul Nash and his haunting 'Landscape at Iden'. Perhaps it is because of the painting that the name of the village is so evocative; the name, which for some reason I associate in my mind with the poet Robert Frost, suggests beauty and antiquity and peace on the one hand and, on the other, death. Well, I suppose that is Nash's fault.

Orchard at Iden

The place itself is charming in a straggly sort of way and must have once - without the speeding lorries and vans - been an ideal artist's retreat. Bordered to the west by a huge orchard and to the north by the valley of the Rother, the village feels a bit like an island. The Nashes lived in the mid- to late-1920s in Oxenbridge - a sort of extension to the Iden - in a cottage Nash described as little more than a summer house, and the surrounding country is haunted by his work.

Paul Nash, Landscape, Stone Cliff

It is a varied landscape, with thickly wooded hills, wide valleys and, only a mile or two away, the great expanse of Romney Marsh, which is bounded here and there by steeply sloping hills, and it evidently inspired Nash more than Rye itself. He and Margaret moved to the ancient hilltop town in 1930, after her mother died and her father needed to live with them, and there's a blue plaque on their house at the top of East Street - a rather eccentric house reminiscent of Nash's grave in Langley.

Rye at the time had a small but boisterous colony of artists and writers, notably the authors EF Benson and Radclyffe Hall. Nash became friends with the latter and with her partner Una, Lady Troubridge, whose appalling taste in art he forgave for some reason, and with Edward Burra and the American poet Conrad Aiken.

Rye: an unlikely outpost of Modernism

Aiken once described Nash's 'love of beauty that was oddly both animal and mineral, and could be as soft as a cobweb... or the flesh of a woman, or as hard as one of the flints in his "Nest of Wild Stones"'.

Chez Nash 1930-33

The early 1930s were a tricky time for Nash, however, with a less-than-successful foray into abstraction and considerable soul-searching about his work. Visiting Rye, with its narrow streets isolated from the natural world (Burra, who lived there most of his life, called it Tinkerbell Town) one can understand how his mind became tight and tangled there.

He had got on much better along the coast at Dymchurch where, in the early 1920s, he painted at least two dozen pictures, both in oil and in watercolour.

Paul Nash, The Shore 1923 (Leeds Art Gallery)

What I hadn't realised until I clambered up onto the sea wall to have a look is that he could have painted them all without moving more than a hundred yards or so. Rarely have I visited a place and found it so haunted by a painter.

He himself alluded to a certain therapeutic quality in his Dymchurch work, and one can see how the sheer bulk and wonderful geometry of the sea wall might have helped him to overcome the nervous strain of war.

Paul Nash, The Shore, Dymchurch

An odd little place, Dymchurch must have been, with its handful of grand villas, its humble, pantile-roofed cottages, the marshes stretching away to the north and, looming over everything, the great mass of the wall. Subsequent history has layered amusement arcades and gift shops over the old buildings, but the wall, though recently improved, is still a thing of elegance and grace - modern, functional and as good a symbol of security as you could wish for in unstable times.

Look out for 'Paul Nash in Pictures: Landscape and Dream' - published this month by The Mainstone Press.

To be continued.

PM Praises 'Things of No Use'

2011-10-05T02:58:00.000-07:00

Speaking at Morley College, an adult education centre near Westminster Bridge, London, the Prime Minister alluded to a remark made by the chairman that nobody came there to learn anything useful.

'I thank God there is such a place left,' the PM said. 'It is the things that are of no use that really make up one's life. You may remember that at Cambridge there was a toast that used to be given, "God bless the higher mathematics, and may they never be of any use to anybody." There was in that toast the quintessence of a profound common sense, which distinguished my old University, and I have always taken it to heart. And on the lowest ground how good it it is for us to have some outlet - indeed, something that opens a window in one's soul completely remote and alien from one's daily work.'

'Such knowledge and such beauty as you teach in this college is the knowledge and beauty that open "the magic casements" for us, and every life wants its magic casements. I may be old-fashioned and prejudiced, but I always feel that there are no real magic casements except to those who at some time in their lives have grounded themselves on the humanities. In those people, admirable though they be, bursting with statistics and training in the syllogisms, in whom that groundwork on the humanities is absent, there is always to me - I come from a fruit country, so I use this simile - there is always a certain unripeness, a certain tartness and certain acidity, and the only mellow fruit is that which has been ripened in the wisdom of the ages, in the beauty and romance of art, poetry and music.'

Edward Bawden & Eric Ravilious at Morley College, 1929/30

As you might have guessed, these words were spoken not by David Cameron but by Stanley Baldwin, who in February 1930 unveiled a set of murals at Morley College for Working Men and Women. These murals had been painted by Edward Bawden and Eric Ravilious in the refectory, where students came to relax, and were designed to offer things 'interesting to look at and intriguing to unravel for people sitting scattered about the room'.

The college, which had been founded in the previous century, had close links with the the Old Vic Theatre, so the murals had for the most part a theatrical theme. Bawden painted scenes from 'King Lear', 'The Tempest', 'As You Like It' and 'Romeo and Juliet', while Ravilious contributed scenes from Marlowe's 'Tragedy of Dr Faustus', with the Seven Sins floating down from the beams. There were pictures from Miracle Plays and obscure Elizabethan drama, interspersed with figures and symbols: a quartet of winds, a group of Harlequin figures and so on.

Stanley Baldwin was evidently impressed, observing that 'the one thing he felt was that the works were conceived in happiness and in joy, and the execution gave real pleasure to the artists. It was only in that spirit that any creative work could be done that was going to give pleasure to other people.'

Morley College is still going strong more than 80 years later, but the murals were destroyed when the refectory was hit by a bomb during the Blitz. Whether or not such work will ever be commissioned again, it seems unlikely that a Prime Minister, speaking in public during a period of grave economic hardship, would praise an educational institution that taught literature, music and art with no thought of skills or outcomes, simply because life with a knowledge of these subjects is richer than life without.

Ravilious, Nash, Piper: Newhaven, Eastbourne, Rye

2011-10-02T14:27:00.000-07:00

Eric Ravilious, Newhaven Harbour, 1936

Last Sunday I managed to see the John Piper show at Towner, just a couple of hours before it closed. An interesting experience: as anticipated there was some fabulous work from the 1930s, especially those collaged visions of Newhaven and other places on the south coast. Some of the later work was less fun, but all in all a lovely exhibition that confirmed my view that you often have to travel out of London to see the best work by British artists. Can we have Paul Nash in Kent and Sussex next?

I was in the happy position of having a couple of days to charge around the region, taking pictures for forthcoming talks about Paul Nash and Eric Ravilious. It's possible to get a bit obsessed about finding the settings for particular paintings, but it is interesting to see how an artist redesigns reality for a particular composition. Perhaps more important, though, is seeing what it is about a place that attracts artists - feeling the atmosphere and getting a sense of the light.

Closed for the duration... West Pier, Newhaven

Take Newhaven, a port that might seem rather humdrum in comparison to Lewes and Eastbourne. Ravilious, Edward Bawden and Piper all loved the place, but why? I went there first, having left Bristol early in the morning, and parked on the West Quay. I set off walking towards the sea, past wooden piers piled with fishing stuff, through a new marina development and on, and on - I'd mistakenly parked miles from the sea. Here was Newhaven Fort on the right, finally, and some boats perched in a yard, and then the sea came into view, between a lowly breakwater to the east and the magnificent curving arm of the West Pier or, as Tirzah Ravilious called it, 'the mole'.

Giorgio de Chirico, Ariadne, 1913

The sense of space was breathtaking and the light pearly - I could imagine that at dawn, with the sun rising over the sea and the cliffs of Beachy Head, Rav for one would have been in his element. The breakwater with its arches borrowed from a de Chirico painting has evidently been closed for some time, so one can't walk to the lighthouse at the end as Ravilious did in a storm in September 1935 (the night an old man was swept off the same pier to his death).

However the Hope Inn, where he and Bawden stayed several times, is going strong. I was wondering when it was transformed from traditional old pub into its groovy modern form, and a letter from EB to ER seems to pinpoint the date to 1936/7. With his usual waspish humour Bawden points out that the improvements are both to the layout of the pub, with a balcony now running in front of the bedrooms, and to the food: ‘Meals and service have brightened; gone are those soft, stale oyster-eyed eggs and there is is less water and more gravy with the meat’.

Eric Ravilious, Beachy Head, 1939

From Newhaven, I drove through Seaford and on towards Beachy Head, only belatedly realising that the road crossed the top of Cuckmere Haven - a glimpse of water in fat sunlit coils almost sent me into the hedge then it was gone, as sights always vanish when you're in a car, and it was on to the next place. I'd been wanting to visit Belle Tout Lighthouse since I'd found out about it being a hotel, and overcame what I think is a perfectly sensible horror of cliffs to have a look at the place.

Beachy Head... not for the faint-hearted

It reminded me that, years ago, I visited Beachy Head with a friend who stood with his feet STICKING OUT over the edge of the cliff, while I cowered on all fours. There's something particularly daunting about those chalk cliffs, but what is it? The curving green hills that are cut off so abruptly? The stark white of the chalk? The sheer drop? Those white cliffs are scarier than the black granite of Pembrokeshire.

Belle Tout... the moving lighthouse, now a hotel

On then to Eastbourne and the Piper show, before heading for Rye. Quite what was going to happen in Rye I wasn't sure, but the idea was to camp... somewhere. And see the landscape and coast that inspired all three of these artists along with countless others...

To be continued

Gerhard Richter: Painting from Photos

2011-10-01T14:19:00.000-07:00

Gerhard Richter, Gymnastics, 1967

I don't think I'm alone in associating Richard Hamilton, who died recently, almost exclusively with his brilliant 1956 collage, 'Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?', a Pop Art classic that you'll find in every book on 20th century/modern art. I remember coming across the picture in 'The Shock of the New' and being mildly astonished that its creator was British.

Unlike Rauschenberg and Johns, Warhol and Lichtenstein, Hamilton didn't spend years creating similar works that could be distributed among the modern art galleries of the world and assure his reputation. Instead he addressed subjects that interested or infuriated him (Bobby Sands, Tony Blair) in whatever he felt the best medium to be. The Tate website has some unlikely-seeming early work - diagrammatic line drawings of simple machines that might have been done by Hamilton's hero Marcel Duchamp.

Richard Hamilton, Swingeing London, 1967

According to the excellent obituary in The Guardian (which was written, slightly bizarrely, by Norbert Lynton, an art historian who died four years ago), Hamilton was essentially a painter, though not in the Lucian Freud mode. No long nights staring at a model for him. Instead, his wonderful, epoch-defining picture 'Swingeing London' was based on a grainy black and white newspaper photograph; both subject and composition came to him readymade, and his task was to translate the energy and immediacy of the Paparazzi snap into paint.

Caravaggio, Supper at Emmaus, 1606

The result is different from any picture he could have invented or made from his own sketch. It is a painting both of an exciting moment (Mick Jagger's arrest) and of a new phenomenon (the intrusive photographer), and the dramatic light and shadow remind me of Caravaggio.

When Hamilton painted 'Swingeing London' (he made at least one collage of the subject too, as well as prints), Gerhard Richter had been making his distinctive, blurry photo paintings for several years, and he was to continue doing so on and off until the late 1980s, when he brought the decades-long project to a close with a haunting series portraying the last days of the Baader-Meinhof gang (or Red Army Faction as they were officially known). You can see numerous examples on his website, and no doubt a few will make it to Tate Modern for the imminent retrospective.

Gerhard Richter, Aunt Marianne, 1965

In notes and interviews Richter tends to play down the personal in his work. He chose to paint from photos, he told an interviewer in the 1960s, because, 'When I paint from a photograph, conscious thinking is eliminated. I don't know what I am doing.' He chose banal, everyday subjects to avoid anything that might mean something already, or be part of some debate. Yet one of his earliest pictures, catalogued under 'Death' on his website, has an extremely significant subject: Adolf Hitler, under whose rule the artist grew up. While some of his family supported the Nazis, Richter's Aunt Marianne, a schizophrenic, was killed by them at a euthanasia camp; in his 1965 portrait she is holding the young Gerhard in her arms.

Mundane or historically charged, Richter's photo paintings are almost always filled with a sense of loss and longing, as if the image were of a dead loved-one, dimly remembered. This is as true of the 'October 18, 1977' (Baader-Meinhof) series as it is of the portraits and figures he painted in the 1960s. The pictures of Gudrun Ensslin are particularly poignant, showing us not a captured terrorist but a complex woman who seems by turns fragile, defiant, idealistic and lost. 'There is sorrow,' Richter said of these paintings, 'But I hope one can see that it is sorrow for the people who died so young and so crazy, for nothing.'

I've been trying to imagine what it could have been like to grow up in Nazi Germany, surrounded by Hitler's followers, to experience the outbreak of war (at aged 7) and the almost complete destruction of one's home city (Dresden 1945, aged 13), then to discover the horrors of Belsen and Auschwitz. Then there was the 1961 flight from Communist East Germany to the West, and a new beginning. He brought with him his wife and one suitcase, and memories.

Gerhard Richter, Confrontation 2 (Gudrun Ensslin), 1988

When I look at Richter's grey paintings, made in the late 1960s, I can't help thinking of Max Ferber, the Jewish-German painter in WG Sebald's 1993 book 'The Emigrants', whose art is as much about erasure as creation:

He felt closer to dust, he said, than to air, light or water. There was nothing he found so unbearable as a well-dusted house, and he never felt more at home than in places where things remained undisturbed, muted under the grey, velvety sinter left when matter dissolved, little by little, into nothingness. And indeed, when I watched Ferber working on one of his portrait studies over a number of weeks, I often though that his prime concern was to increase the dust. He drew with vigorous abandon, frequently going through half a dozen of his willow-wood charcoal sticks in the shortest time; and that process of drawing and shading on the thick, leathery paper, as well as the concomitant business of constantly erasing what he had drawn with a woollen rag already heavy with charcoal, really amounted to nothing but a steady production of dust...

Ferber achieves success, late in life and almost in spite of himself, when his work is discovered by the London art scene. Richter, by contrast, has enjoyed a long, prolific and continually successful career; his output of abstract paintings since 2005 alone is quite astonishing. There have been a few photo paintings since the Baader-Meinhof series, but these represent a tiny proportion of his catalogue. Perhaps they were part of a process, and no longer needed.

John Piper, Newhaven and the Towner Appeal

2011-09-19T03:00:00.000-07:00

The Towner Gallery in Eastbourne has appealed for help in buying two interesting pieces by John Piper, both showing the harbour at Newhaven. Both pictures are currently on show at the gallery, as part of its summer blockbuster, 'John Piper in Kent and Sussex', and they're among the best on display.

Piper is an intriguing figure, not least because his work is so varied and, it has to be said, uneven. Looking through 'Piper's Places', the book he put together with Richard Ingrams towards the end of his (Piper's) life, I was struck by this. You'd go from a beautifully detailed, atmospheric drawing of a country church to a scribbled sketch of some piece of coastline that had evidently caught his fancy at a particular moment, in a particular light perhaps, or with clouds looming.

Eric Ravilious, Newhaven Harbour (litho), 1937

Of course he went everywhere (in England and Wales, at least), setting the trend for his generation by leaping in his car, at a time when owning one was still a luxury, and buzzing about the countryside, photographing and sketching everything that caught his interest - churches and ancient monuments, elegant streets, hills, ruins, harbours...

Edward Bawden, Newhaven, 1935

I think his work reflects this restless, sometimes hectic, motion. At its best it can capture the spirit of a place perfectly, and bring something new to the artistic process too, and this is especially true of the collages he made in the 1930s. His collage of the Castle pub and the harbour is in striking contrast to the paintings Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden made at the port around the same time.

The Towner has secured £75,000 from The Art Fund and other sources towards the purchase price of Piper's 'The Castle' and 'Newhaven' - a wonderfully energetic pen and ink drawing, but still needs another £10,000 to complete the sale. Perhaps some generous sponsor has already stepped forward, or perhaps the money will come from thousands of people, each giving a little. They're well worth the investment, I'd say. Thank heavens Piper had the sense not to become a solicitor...

Later: the extra money was found and Towner now owns both pictures - once again the Art Fund has helped a museum buy work which is both popular and important.

'Paul Nash in Pictures: Landscape and Dream': Sneak Preview

2011-09-10T09:02:00.000-07:00

'Paul Nash in Pictures: Landscape and Dream' is published next month by the Mainstone Press.

The Slow Death of Banksy's Reaper

2011-09-09T09:15:00.000-07:00

Banksy's Reaper: rowing nowhere slowly

I was sitting recently outside The Ostrich, one of those Bristol dockside pubs that has seen its fair share of comings and goings over the centuries, nursing a half of cider and looking across the water at a picture I see several times a week. In fact, other than paintings we have at home, I probably see it more often than any other artwork. This picture is rudimentary in the extreme, a hasty sketch in white paint on the hull of a boat, just above the waterline.

My daughter tried to persuade me the other day that the picture is of a monkey, but I'm fairly sure it's supposed to be the Grim Reaper, rowing a boat as hundreds of people do in the Harbour every week. Not that this Reaper would actually be going anywhere, were he really rowing: he looks more like a gruesome old signalman yanking at his levers to change the points (and, no doubt, send two trains hurtling towards each other).

on Stokes Croft

This rowing reaper was painted by the Bristol street artist known to the world as Banksy, a man renowned for his ability to create quite substantial paintings in public without anyone noticing. He hasn't often taken to water, and this note in his book 'Cut It Out' suggests why:

One night I painted the side of Bristol's new harbour bridge [Pero's Bridge] with a message about the slave trade, which got painted over within six hours of daybreak. Afterwards, I made the slowest getaway in criminal history, splashing through the darkness in a tiny rowing boat before stopping off to paint my name on the side of the Thekla.

This tag was removed, against the wishes of the boat's owners (Thekla houses a music venue and nightclub), by Bristol City Council, whose long campaign against Banksy has distinctly Pink Panther-ish overtones, so the maverick dauber came back with the Reaper. It has survived the Thekla's 2006 refit and paint job, so that today Death occupies a square of dark grey on the otherwise green hull. Various patches of paint in greenish-greyish hues show where other tags have been deleted.

Blue paint cleaned off by BCC

I'm not suggesting that the Rowing Reaper has any great significance, but it interests me a lot more than some of the officially sanctioned art on display nearby. What I love about Banksy's Bristol pictures is that they are expressions of an inventive and wily character at work; they tend to be tucked round corners, just off major thoroughfares like Stokes Croft and Park Street, in the sort of places you could stick up a scaffold or a ladder without anyone noticing; the rats and monkeys and so on just pop up as you're walking along. They make you smile, or not, depending on mood. To the kids they're unremarkable, part of the fabric of the city like the statue of Cabot outside Arnolfini.

While Banksy's fame grows around the world his Bristol pictures are deteriorating quietly. The guy hanging out of the window off Park Street has been pelted with blue paint, while a gorilla was recently painted over by a property owner who obviously doesn't keep abreast of the news. No effort has been made to protect any of these paintings, which would presumably be extremely valuable if they weren't fixed forever to a wall in Bristol. Perhaps there will, in due course, be a preservation campaign which will see the best of them sealed behind perspex; perhaps not.

Fun while it lasted: Banksy vs the Bristol Museum (2009)

When the Reaper fades into the rusty hull of the Thekla I can't see many people waving their arms about in horror and consternation. More likely there'll be a shake of the head and a wry smile. It was fun while it lasted.

Eric Ravilious at the Belle Tout Lighthouse

2011-09-02T01:18:00.000-07:00

Eric Ravilious, Beachy Head, 1939

Listeners to this Saturday's 'Excess Baggage' are in for a treat as presenter Sandi Toksvig takes a bus from Brighton to Eastbourne, pausing near the end of her journey at the Belle Tout Lighthouse. In 1999 the retired lighthouse made the news when its owners had it moved 17 metres inland, away from the edge of the crumbling chalk cliffs of Beachy Head, but this isn't why Radio 4's travel show is visiting. Last year the 1832 building, which was decommissioned in 1902 and spent much of the 20th century as a private house, opened as a hotel, offering the unusual experience of a 360 degree view from the lantern room.

Belle Tout circa 1900

It is always good to hear that an interesting old building has been given a public role, but for Ravilious fans the news brings an added frisson of excitement. In 1939, as he prepared for his last major show as a civilian, Ravilious explored the region around Eastbourne (his childhood home, where his parents still lived) with renewed curiosity. His watercolours of Cuckmere Haven and the Wilmington Giant are what springs to mind whenever I hear the phrase 'romantic modern', since they take old provincial subjects - the kind of scenes an 18th century antiquary might have drawn - and make them new.

During this busy period the artist spent several days on Beachy Head, unknowingly rehearsing his wartime role as a painter of coastal defences. In 'Ravilious in Pictures: Sussex and the Downs' we featured one of the pictures he made from his vantage point on the cliffs, and I imagine that the view at night from the lantern room of the new hotel is similar.

Belle Tout Hotel, lantern room (Rob Wassell

But he didn't only work outside on the clifftop. Although known as a landscape painter, Ravilious produced a good proportion of his work indoors, and he had an eye for an interesting interior that few artists have rivalled. He worked in several greenhouses and in a butcher's shop, in an RNAS sickbay and a farmhouse bedroom. In his quiet, good-humoured way he easily persuaded the owners or occupiers of building to let him set up his easel, and so it was that he escaped the fierce breezes of Beachy Head for the calm of the Belle Tout lantern room.

'Just now I am busy on the hills painting,' he wrote to his friend Diana Tuely, 'in the greatest comfort with my jacket off, and seated in a magnificent Chinese chair. That is to say I am perched in the top of the Belle Tout lighthouse (I wish you could see this) in the lantern drawing the immense expanse below with a gale blowing outside'.

I am very much hoping that the painting he made from this vantage point will be included in the fourth volume of our Ravilious series. 'Ravilious in Pictures: A Travelling Artist' is due to be published by the Mainstone Press in November, featuring watercolours painted by the artist on his travels around Britain and northern France. There are some gorgeous pictures in this new volume, from fabulous interiors to harbour scenes and Welsh landscapes, and some wonderful stories to be told...

Full details of the book will be released soon, and I will post a picture of 'Belle Tout' once all arrangements are in place.

TS Eliot & East Coker; Edward Thomas & Dymock

2011-08-27T02:40:00.000-07:00

I've been following with interest the debate over a proposed housing development between the Somerset town of Yeovil and nearby East Coker, waiting for someone to point out that change is central to TS Eliot's vision in the poem he named after the village. He didn't live there, but his ancestors had done, which made the village the perfect setting for a meditation on time and timelessness. An Anglo-Catholic who would have made a marvellous Zen Buddhist, Eliot was much preoccupied with the subject of time, which he talked about in terms of motion and stillness, squeezing whole histories into a few lines. This is how East Coker begins:

In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.

And a little further on:

Houses live and die: there is a time for building
And a time for living and for generation
And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane
And to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots
And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.

Eliot was less interested in the place itself than in the changes wrought by the passage of time on that place. The village itself he knew towards the end of its 'wind breaking the loosened pane' period. After a century of more or less continuous agricultural depression and urban growth had left villages empty and decaying, the motor car brought new people - artists, writers, commuters, Imperial retirees - to renovate houses, campaign for bypasses and object to new development.

This process continues today, with a flow of people to the semi-rural south and a consequent demand for good quality housing. You're not likely to come across many rustics dancing around midnight bonfires... I can't say whether people should be allowed to fulfill their dream of a life in bucolic Somerset or not, but I don't see that TS Eliot has much to do with the argument.

A more genuinely poetic piece of country, and one that doesn't seem to be threatened by anybody, lies around the Gloucestershire village of Dymock. I first explored the area while researching orchards and cidermaking, discovering in the process that Edward Thomas and Robert Frost had lived and worked there shortly - by which I mean weeks - before the outbreak of World War One. Frost was already gaining a reputation by this point, in good measure thanks to Thomas's reviews of his work, while his friend was still writing and researching the generally tedious but occasionally brilliant books of prose that he finally stopped writing when he joined the army.

Frost inspired Thomas, but the war allowed him to stop writing prose, freeing his mind for his brief, prolific career as a poet. In August 1914, the future was not looking especially rosy for Thomas - it rarely did - but he enjoyed his time with Frost, which the pair spent endlessly roaming around the valleys and wooded hills. Thomas's tendency to agonise over the smallest decision led Frost to write his most famous poem, 'The Road Not Taken', which began life as a personal joke but then took off on its own:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveller, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth

Anyway, you can still wander miles around Dymock, visiting the straggling villages where the poets lived. There is a Poets Walk, which I took last year, although I'm not sure the local farmers had been told of its significance. From what I remember the first part involved navigating through a field of sweetcorn that grew more than head high. Then there were barbed wire fences to negotiate and finally a bull. I think I turned round at that point.

Wonderful to see the new biography of Thomas getting a lot of attention, as he has been badly neglected. At his best, he can give you the shivers...

As the team's head-brass flashed out on the turn
The lovers disappeared into the wood.
I sat among the boughs of the fallen elm
That strewed the angle of the fallow, and
Watched the plough narrowing a yellow square
Of charlock. Every time the horses turned
Instead of treading me down, the ploughman leaned
Upon the handles to say or ask a word,
About the weather, next about the war.
Scraping the share he faced towards the wood,
And screwed along the furrow till the brass flashed
Once more.

The blizzard felled the elm whose crest
I sat in, by a woodpecker's round hole,
The ploughman said. 'When will they take it away? '
'When the war's over.' So the talk began –
One minute and an interval of ten,
A minute more and the same interval.
'Have you been out? ' 'No.' 'And don't want to, perhaps? '
'If I could only come back again, I should.
I could spare an arm, I shouldn't want to lose
A leg. If I should lose my head, why, so,
I should want nothing more...Have many gone
From here? ' 'Yes.' 'Many lost? ' 'Yes, a good few.
Only two teams work on the farm this year.
One of my mates is dead. The second day
In France they killed him. It was back in March,
The very night of the blizzard, too. Now if
He had stayed here we should have moved the tree.'
'And I should not have sat here. Everything
Would have been different. For it would have been
Another world.' 'Ay, and a better, though
If we could see all all might seem good.' Then
The lovers came out of the wood again:
The horses started and for the last time
I watched the clods crumble and topple over
After the ploughshare and the stumbling team.

'As the Team's Head Brass', 1916

Richard Beard: 'Lazarus is Dead'

2011-08-26T06:17:00.000-07:00

Brothers Limbourg, The Raising of Lazarus, 1416

Richard Beard is an unusual kind of writer, and an extremely unusual kind of British writer. In fact he ought to have been French, or Eastern European. He handles words with a poet's care and, though his outlook is essentially comic, he is rigorous in his approach to subject and structure.

For his 1996 debut 'X20', he bent the form of the novel to reflect the experience of its protagonist, Gregory Simpson, who quits smoking and decides to write something every time he craves a cigarette. In 'Damascus' (1998), the constraint is linguistic, with almost every noun in the book taken from The Times on the day the Maastricht Treaty came into effect (1 November 1993), making British people citizens of Europe.

This would mean very little if Beard's fascination with form wasn't mirrored by his desire to get to the bottom of things. He is less a teller of stories than a seeker after truth. How do we know a decision is the right one? What grounds do we have for certainty in any given situation? In 'Becoming Drusilla' (2008) he set out to learn the truth about his old friend Drusilla - formerly Drew - Marland, exploring the transsexual experience in a sensitive, personal, finely structured narrative that blended genres (biography, travel writing, history) with wit and verve.

So to his new book, 'Lazarus is Dead', which is I think his most interesting to date. The rigorous structure of the early novels is there, with chapters built around the number 7, but the writing has the easy flow of Beard's non-fiction books. Following the model of 'X20' the life story of the protagonist (Lazarus, the only person Jesus calls 'friend') is woven into a wider meditation on his role in Christian tradition, which sounds a bit dry but isn't - I finished the book at a sitting. What makes it so gripping is Beard's limitless curiosity. He wants to know what Lazarus died of, and what being fatally ill in 1st century Palestine was like. He wants to know what it's like when you childhood pal is hailed as the son of god. He wants to know what it means to die, and what it means to return from the grave.

Giotto, The Raising of Lazarus, 1304

The historical evidence for Lazarus's existence is, well, non-existent, the Biblical evidence scant. Yet Lazarus has been portrayed in words and pictures countless times, and it is this evidence - a kind of collective imagination - that Beard draws on, sharing the views and versions of writers, painters and film-makers across the centuries. A rather dull review in The Observer last week failed to get the point, trying to read 'Lazarus is Dead' as if it were a conventional novel rather than a thought-provoking, moving and literate exploration of a world-famous character who may, or may not have existed.

Rembrandt, The Raising of Lazarus, 1630

I've found some of the paintings Beard mentions in the text, and one or two others that he doesn't. An illustrated edition would be a treat. But what on earth, I find myself wondering, will he write about next?

William Blake, The Raising of Lazarus, 1795

The Cerne Abbas Giant in Pictures

2011-08-16T09:21:00.000-07:00

Frank Dobson, The Giant, Cerne Abbas, 1931

I came across this fabulous picture illustrating a review of Alexandra Harris's book 'Romantic Moderns' in The Art Newspaper. I particularly like the cloud preserving the giant's modesty and can imagine the conversations between the artist and Shell's advertising supremo Jack Beddington that led to its addition. Actually, it's the shadow cast by a cloud that conceals the celebrated phallus, which is surely a physical impossibility.

The point is, though, that Beddington thought this glorious chalk figure too good to leave out when he was commissioning the paintings of British landmarks that were supposed to encourage motorists to buy Shell products. Antiquaries and tourists had been visiting Cerne Abbas since the 18th century, if not earlier, although depictions of the figure were not necessarily true to life.

Samuel Hieronymous Grimm, The Giant, Cerne Abbas, 1790

On the southern declivity of a steep chalk hill, called Trendle Hill, to the north of the town, a gigantic figure has been traced, representing a man holding a knotted club in his right hand, and extending his left arm; it is one hundred and eighty feet high, and well executed; the outlines are two feet broad, and two feet deep; between the legs is an illegible inscription, and above, the date 748: it is by some antiquaries referred to the Saxon times, and supposed to represent one of their deities; by others it is thought to be a memorial of Cenric, son of Cuthred, King of the West Saxons, who was slain in battle; and according to vulgar tradition, it was cut to commemorate the destruction of a giant who ravaged that part of the country, and was killed by the peasants: the figure is occasionally repaired by the inhabitants of the town. (Samuel Lewis' 'A Topographical Dictionary of England', Vol. I, [1831])

Images of the giant were not hard to come by in the 1930s, when numerous picture postcards carried its photograph. The increasingly widespread use of aerial photography offered a new perspective, which artists may have exploited to give a clearer view of the figure... Paul Nash made watercolour sketches of the giant before the war, while he was researching 'The Shell Guide to Dorset', and during the conflict.

Paul Nash, The Cerne Abbas Giant, 1935

Eric Ravilious, meanwhile, gave the figure a martial air in his painting, made during a whirlwind visit in December 1939. His version, incidentally, shows a different kind of censorship. The people who covered over the white chalk outline of the giant at the start of World War II were not concerned with modesty; their aim was to prevent the pilots and navigators of the Luftwaffe using the distinctive figure as a landmark.

Eric Ravilious, The Cerne Abbas Giant, 1939

Post-war, the Cerne Giant has been restored to his full glory, and artists have returned to paint this strange personage. While his image is better known than ever before, the giant's history remains murky. It seems unlikely that he is, as past historians used to surmise, a Roman tribute to Hercules, or even a Saxon homage to some long-forgotten deity. Medieval writers were as keen on oddities as we are nowadays, and though the White Horse of Uffington was often described - as a wonder almost as great as Stonehenge - the giant is not mentioned until after the Civil War. Who first carved out this unforgettable shape, and why, we may never know.

David Inshaw, Cerne Giant

'Paul Nash in Pictures: Landscape and Dream'

2011-07-31T03:42:00.000-07:00

Paul Nash, Event on the Downs, 1934-5

Paul Nash in Pictures: Landscape and Dream celebrates the life and work of Paul Nash (1889-1946), an artist of energy and vision who created iconic paintings of both world wars and explored in inimitable style the ideas and issues of the interwar years. After a period of neglect following his death, Nash’s reputation is in the ascendant again, but though we appreciate the quality of his paintings, we have perhaps lost sight of their humanity.

Bringing a fresh eye to the artist’s legacy, Paul Nash in Pictures: Landscape and Dream goes behind the scenes of twenty-two paintings to explore Nash’s life, the places and people he knew, and the times in which he lived. The book draws on diverse sources, from published books to correspondence, to create an intimate portrait of a passionate, funny, supremely imaginative artist.

This approach will be familiar to readers of the Ravilious in Pictures series published by the Mainstone Press, and the book has been produced in a similar style and with the same attention to detail. In this, the first of two proposed books on Nash, we focus on the artist’s oil paintings – the work in which he explored most thoroughly the ideas that preoccupied him. Well-known paintings like ‘The Battle of Britain’ are included alongside pictures that are reproduced for the first time. A second volume will address the artist’s watercolours, so that the two books together form a unique biography of Paul Nash – a life in pictures.

Paul Nash in Pictures: Landscape and Dream will be published by The Mainstone Press in October 2011. James Russell is available for talks and book signings. Please contact the publisher for details.

What the critics say about Ravilious in Pictures:

‘Beautiful’ (Stella magazine, Sunday Telegraph, Dec 2009)

‘Ravilious’s watercolour landscapes of the South Downs … are beautifully reproduced here
alongside insightful essays…’ (London Review of Books, Jan 2010)

‘James Russell’s writing has the clarity and concision of the paintings, and is both properly informative and enjoyably readable... Glorious.’ (Andrew Lambirth, The Art Newspaper, Sept 2010)

‘A vivid portrait of the artist’ (Country Life magazine, Dec 2010)

‘Fantastic’ (Emily Rhodes, The Spectator Arts Blog, Dec 2010)

‘Alluring… convivial…’(Paul Laity, The Guardian, May 2011)

James Fox & 'British Masters': the Finale?

2011-07-26T09:57:00.000-07:00

Lucian Freud, Girl with a Kitten, 1947

Whatever the excesses of the previous episodes in this BBC survey of 20th century British art, the final part was - generally speaking - sober, thoughtful and lacking in those awkward Alfred Munnings moments. It wasn't a desperately jolly programme, but then neither Francis Bacon nor Lucian Freud, two of the evening's stars, were known for their levity. Nor was Graham Sutherland, for that matter. Dr Fox was spot-on when he described the impact of the Holocaust and the Bomb on post-war artists; it was a time to reflect seriously on the human condition, and these painters duly obliged.

Graham Sutherland, Thorn Trees, 1945

Fox and team must have had an anxious time re-editing the programme to take account of Lucian Freud's death last week. I wonder whether, if he hadn't died, they would have come back to him as they did or left us with that tantalising five minutes at the beginning of the show. On hearing the news they must have rushed off to find an easily accessible Freud, and recorded the refreshingly underwritten material on the glorification of cellulite.

Francis Bacon's studio

Some odd moments aside - did Dr Fox have to gaze for quite so long at a sunlit twig? - this was the pick of the three shows, giving us cool appraisals of several indisputably great artists and plenty of marvellous archive footage. I'm not sure what I enjoyed more, watching Francis Bacon showing off his French (and his studio, surely the finest, messiest, most authentic studio EVER), or listening to Graham Sutherland's marvellous voice. Of course we also had to have Dr F in a Soho street and Dr F on the set of Corrie, but we're used to that by now.

Keith Vaughan, Eldorado Banal, 1976

Chris Ofili, No Woman No Cry, 1998

Contrary to the concerns of some, there was nothing flippant in his treatment of Keith Vaughan's life and death, although Fox might have noted that it wasn't so much conceptual art that people preferred to Vaughan's figures as abstract painting. But then abstraction didn't get much of a look-in during the three hours of 'British Masters'. Nor did women (except, for the most part, in the role of 'friend' or 'student'), which made Fox's targeting of Tracey Emin as a peddler of inferior conceptual art slightly awkward.

The programme concluded, not surprisingly, that a great period of British painting ended with the death of Lucian Freud. Whether this is true or not remains to be seen, but one or two living artists might disagree...

Elizabeth Magill, Close to Swansea, 2002

Lucian Freud: Painting Matters

2011-07-22T14:03:00.000-07:00

Lucian Freud, Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, 1995

So we're talking about painting AGAIN, but why? I think it's because Lucian Freud made paintings that were - are - relevant, whatever other artists they may remind us of, or refer to, whatever movement or genre they belong to. Beautifully crafted, staged and lit, they are no more 'real' than a painting by Frank Auerbach (one of Freud's favourites), but they talk to us about our world and our time.

The painting of Sue Tilley, a Job Centre manager who is now in her fifties, could be seen as a Rubenesque modern incarnation of all those reclining Venuses but you don't need to know anything about art history to appreciate either the physical presence of the woman on the couch or her significance. People seems slightly amazed that a figurative artist should have been enjoying such success in the 21st century, but has there been a time when humans have been more obsessed with the body? An overweight middle-aged woman waits for the bus beneath a vast billboard showing a svelte young model in M&S underwear; Freud makes the unspoken connection real.

Damien Hirst, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, 1992

Freud painted Sue Tilley at a time when painting in general - and figurative painting in particular - seemed to be on its last legs. Damien Hirst stole the painterly tradition of the still-life-with-dead-things and went one better with a real shark in a tank. I saw it at the time and loved it. I still love it. Hirst's best work - you can see some in an Art Fund touring exhibition, currently in Leeds - is terrifying, fascinating and relevant in an age of close-up natural history and industrial farming.

Tracey Emin, Everyone I have ever slept with, 1995

Great artists - the same goes for writers, politicians, sportsmen - are great opportunists. Freud's famously piercing stare wasn't just for intimidating people. He was looking at us, figuring out what we wanted (or didn't want) to see, seeking out not the most beautiful but the most interesting models - looking for the one that was RIGHT. Sue Tilley was one. Kate Moss had to be another. Freud was competing for our attention with artists who could offer something new and exciting, like a tent full of real-life lovers. He chose his subjects carefully and well.

Benefits Supervisor Resting, 1994

But Freud must also have known, having lived and worked among some of the great 20th century artists, that good paintings - the right paintings - last. When Paul Nash painted 'We Are Making a New World' (1918) and 'The Battle of Britain' (1941) he was competing for public attention with photographers and film makers who were convinced (as many others were) that their media were the best - being the newest and most obviously realistic. Perhaps the photographs are more harrowing, and the films more dramatic, but those paintings have endured, as Freud's will.

James Fox, 'British Masters' & 'Paul Nash in Pictures'

2011-07-19T02:58:00.000-07:00

Stanley Spencer, The Resurrection, Cookham, 1926

After an eye-opening first instalment, art lovers around Britain were keen to see what James Fox would get up to in the second episode of 'British Masters', and he didn't disappointment. Lingering shots of a nude Stanley Spencer (did somebody say 'flaccid'?) were followed by a piece proclaiming the virtues of obnoxious Royal Academy president Sir Alfred Munnings. A deeply unfashionable artist, we were told, and it wasn't hard to see why; it was much more difficult to see why Dr Fox had picked him out for special praise.

Until, that is, we reached the finale of that piece, in which an inebriated Munnings launched a public tirade against modern art in general and Picasso in particular. Not for the only time in the programme, the excellent archive footage and recordings had more allure than the art. 'In Search of England' was the title of a book by bestselling interwar travel writer HV Morton (whose 'In Search of London' is still in print and one of the best books EVER on the city), and in the programme Dr Fox used the documentary-travelogue form to great effect.

Nash and Spencer aside, he mostly avoided the famous names of the period and instead chose artists whose work reflected the concerns and conflicts of the age: Munnings and the 'ordinary' William Coldstream stood on two sides of a divide represented in literature by Evelyn Waugh and George Orwell. If this made interesting viewing it didn't necessarily show British art at its best, and Dr Fox will no doubt be lambasted as a reactionary himself - have we had a female artist yet? I don't think so... However, the day was saved by the in-depth study of Spencer and a fascinating final section on John Piper, whose exquisite painting of Coventry Cathedral, still smouldering after the previous night's bombing, has a genuine, understated greatness.

The film of Piper discussing Gainsborough and Picasso was a curiosity - what a strange old bird he was - and the sequence on the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition was fun too. I loved the old footage of people travelling by bus to Avebury, although I don't remember reading anywhere that Nash discovered the ancient stones by chance, after suffering an asthma attack on a bus. Is this really what happened?

John Piper, Interior of Coventry Cathedral, 15 November 1940

It would be good to know as I've been delving into Nash's life and work this year in preparation for a new book, 'Paul Nash in Pictures: Landscape and Dream', which will be published by the Mainstone Press in the autumn. As with the 'Ravilious in Pictures' series, the new book focuses on a selection of twenty-two paintings, each accompanied by a concise essay; we've decided to dedicate the first volume to Nash's oil paintings, which he used to express the ideas that pre-occupied him most. A second volume will focus on his gorgeous watercolours, which were admired greatly during his lifetime but which are now rarely seen in public.

Paul Nash, The Wanderer, 1911

The more I learn about Nash the more fascinating a figure he becomes. Born in 1889 he had the kind of Victorian childhood where Mother was seen for an hour in the evening. He read Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, and from them gained a lifelong love of nonsense and wordplay, and though occasionally ill was robust enough to star in his school soccer team. Any sensible career path was cut off for him by his hopeless maths, yet critics later described his paintings as 'mathematical'. He seems to have been motivated by an intense inner vision, but took centre stage in the public debates of the time.

His struggle to reconcile modernity and Britishness was rather like Piper's. Nash tried abstraction, but quickly returned to the painting of natural forms - stones, leaves and trees. Although he greatly admired (and in some cases knew personally) Picasso, Max Ernst, de Chirico, Magritte and other modern artists, he continued to find inspiration in nature and constantly sought subjects in the British landscape that reflected his inner preoccupations; his discovery of Avebury in the summer of 1933 was part of this quest. His frequent journeys to France, including a hilarious jaunt around the Riviera with a young Edward Burra, were also part of the process.

Paul Nash, Equivalents for the Megaliths, 1935

So, another contentious and gripping programme from James Fox comes to an end, and we must wait a whole week for the next. What on earth will he say, I wonder, about post-war painting?

British Masters: Paul Nash

2011-07-18T14:03:00.000-07:00

Paul Nash's grave in Langley

Paul Nash suffered a great deal in life but died peacefully in his sleep after making a final sketch from the balcony of a hotel in Boscombe, Dorset. His family had deep roots in Langley, a village still during his lifetime but today a sprawling suburb of Slough. It's hard to imagine from the picture, but housing estates press against this rural churchyard from every side, and entering it is like stepping into another world - not back in time, so much, as into Nash's world of characterful old trees, dramatic walls and unlikely structures.

The pillared grave he shares with his wife Margaret is a monument both modern and classical beside the mellow red brick of the wall that surrounds his family's ancestral plot. He lies close to them, connected under the earth, but apart, and watched over by a bird that might be a falcon out of Ancient Egypt. Is this the peregrine of 'Landscape from a Dream', placed here to keep an eye on the artist? Nash liked to tell people that death resembled flowers drifting in the sky. He'd experienced a vision, when he was 21 and his mother had just died after a long and distressing mental illness, of a woman's face floating in the evening sky. Or that's what he said, at any rate, and that's what he painted.

Then he abandoned the human face and figure for woods and trees, often with a bird or a flock of birds flying around. He felt very strongly, throughout his life, the personality of trees, of things and of places. Certain places seized his imagination. At Dymchurch in Kent, in the early 1920s, he painted and sketched the sea wall and the sea over and over again. More often, though, he moved restlessly from place to place, looking, sketching, trying out ideas. He and Margaret were almost constantly on the move, sometimes together, sometimes apart, and often in the midst of crisis.

And, strange as it may seem, Nash was at his most productive when life was at its darkest - in the years following his mother's death, and following his father's, and at moments when his own life hung by a thread. Whatever the debates about modernity and Britishness, about abstraction, surrealism and the rest, Nash was motivated by an awareness of and terror of death. He spent his life coming to terms with mortality, in his strange paintings of tree stumps and ancient stones and heaps of felled wood, using the language of natural forms to explore the processes of which, like it or not, we are part.

Swan Song, 1928/9

Yet he had a wonderful sense of humour, which he retained through everything. You can see it in his private letters, which are full of wit and wordplay, and also I think in some of the paintings we talk about in such solemn terms. He disliked having his picture taken and almost invariably looks stiff and formal in photographs, whereas contemporaries noticed the smile on his lips and an eye that was constantly looking for wonders.

In an age of omnipresent images it's hard to accept that we cannot rely on visual evidence for Nash's character - or even appearance. Instead we have to dig out old books and read both his descriptions of the world and other people's descriptions of him. He loved Henry Purcell and American jazz, Botticelli and the cartoonists of the New Yorker; the American humourist James Thurber said of Nash, 'At the time there was no one in England, or anywhere else outside the US, who knew our comic art so well, or appreciated it so heartily.’

Event on the Downs, 1935

This isn't to say that Paul Nash wasn't a serious artist - he most certainly was. He produced some of his best paintings in the face of, or in response to death, and he served as a war artist in both World Wars, and between the wars he got embroiled in all the artistic debates of the age. Yet he was also charming and funny, a pretty good singer of old songs, a lover of life both cerebral and earthy.

Parkland near Nash's family home at Iver Heath

Vision and Place: Paul Nash & Iain Sinclair

2011-07-18T04:16:00.000-07:00

Iain Sinclair's new book 'Ghost Milk' is dedicated to 'the huts of the Manor Garden Allotments' which, you may remember, were brushed aside in 2007, during the more general bulldozing of the London 2012 development site in Stratford, East London. Of course you can't build an Olympic stadium and all the ancillary gubbins without altering the immediate environment quite substantially, but there was something particularly sad about the destruction of the four-and-a-half acre allotment site on the bank of the River Lea.

While 'Ghost Milk' finds Sinclair at his most incendiary, applying the blowtorch of his furious prose to the 2012 London Olympics, it is this dedication that really struck me. It reminded me that, behind the blistering prose, exhausting digressions and peculiar obsessions that make reading Sinclair a challenge, the self-styled 'Travelodge tramp' is a Romantic with an extraordinary sense of place.

This comes across most strongly in my favourite book of his, 'Lights Out for the Territory', in which ordinary London streets, parks and patches of wasteland are transformed into a strange, poetic realm. He has a sharp eye and a feel for the underappreciated, but what makes this book really come to life is the author's pursuit of private obsessions. He is on a quest, not to fulfil a publisher's commission (as seems to be the case in 'London Orbital') but to find patterns in the city that are intensely meaningful to him and, by proxy to us. I've read the book numerous times, still find it bewildering, and love it partly for that reason. At the same time I think there's a simple underlying premise, suggested by the title, which is from the end of 'Huckleberry Finn', when Huck (the narrator) tells us his book is finished:

Sinclair: the obsessive's obsessive

'But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can't stand it. I been there before.'

You get the feeling that Sinclair doesn't want to be civilised and he doesn't like civilisation to be forced on others, hence his furious opposition to the development surrounding the London Olympics. Like the raggedy Huck Finn, the author and his city are already civilised, in their own, homegrown way; Sinclair loves the city as it has evolved, and 'Lights Out for the Territory' is, as much as anything else, about this organic place with its myriad obscure connections.

Avebury in 1905, PA Hooper

When I read the dedication above I thought immediately of another place and time, and an artist with an acute sense of 'genius loci'. When Paul Nash discovered Avebury in the summer of 1933 he was at a low ebb, both artistically and personally. In fact he was recovering from the first major attack of the bronchial illness that would eventually kill him, and had travelled to the Wiltshire village of Marlborough with his old friend Ruth Clark to recuperate.

They took the bus to Avebury and, when they arrived, Nash was transfixed by what he saw. He had spent 20 years exploring his inner visions in the real landscape, finding inspiration in the woods of Buckinghamshire, on the battlefields of the Western Front and on the Dymchurch sea wall. Here was a place at once exciting and strange, where the ancient past lay undisturbed beneath accumulated layers of time.

Paul Nash, Landscape of the Megaliths, 1934

'The great stones were then in their wild state, so to speak,' he later noted. 'Some were half covered by the grass, others stood up in cornfields were entangled and overgrown in the copses, some were buried under the turf. But they were wonderful and disquieting, and, as I saw them then, I shall always remember them.'

Keiller's men raising a stone

By the late 1930s, when Nash wrote this, the landscape of Avebury had been transformed, thanks to the unstinting efforts of Alexander Keiller, the marmalade millionaire and archaeologist. Keiller's aim was both to preserve the architecture of the great stones for posterity and to return the site to something approximating its original state. Stones that had toppled over were set upright, those that were buried were dug up and reinstated, and missing stones were marked by concrete posts. What visitors see today is largely Keiller's work.

I understand that the allotment holders of Stratford will be returned to their site after the Olympics, but this isn't the point. The place, which evolved over time and held within it all manner of stories, memories and ghosts, has gone, as the old neglected Avebury disappeared when the first megalith was re-erected.

RIP Manor Garden Allotments

'But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can't stand it. I been there before.'

Small is Beautiful: Kettle's Yard and the Fry

2011-07-15T03:03:00.000-07:00

'Von Ribbentrop in St Ives' at Kettle's Yard

Thank you to everyone who came to my Ravilious talk in Saffron Walden on Wednesday, and to the organisers - Nigel and Iris Weaver and staff at the Fry Art Gallery. I was just reading a post by Jonathan Jones about cuts at Tate Liverpool and it made me appreciate all the more the virtues of small, quirky galleries. I feel the same about bookshops, but we'll come back to them another day...

I had to go to Cambridge en route to Essex and, while there, braved the bikes and crowds of French schoolkids muddling about in the road to visit Kettle's Yard. I hadn't been for years and had completely forgotten that the permanent collection lives not in the gallery but in the house itself, the former home of Tate curator and collector Jim Ede and his wife Helen.

Having worked at the Tate during the 1920s and 1930s, Jim amassed a diverse collection of British art from the period, and in 1966 he donated house and contents to Cambridge University. His vision was to create not 'an art gallery or museum, nor ... simply a collection of works of art reflecting my taste or the taste of a given period.'

HS 'Jim' Ede at Kettle's Yard

Christopher Wood, Jean Bourgoint, 1926

Instead he sought to preserve 'a continuing way of life from these last fifty years, in which stray objects, stones, glass, pictures, sculpture, in light and in space, have been used to make manifest the underlying stability.'

At a time when exhibitions tend to be dominated by great walls of explanatory text, it is a pleasure indeed to wander around this eccentric dwelling, looking at paintings in a domestic context and, quite naturally, unlabelled. With interest in 20th century British art on the rise, I can think of few better places to see work by Ben Nicholson, Alfred Wallis, Winifred Nicholson, David Jones, Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, Christopher Wood and others, alongside work by modern European artists. The selection is eclectic, reflecting not the depth of Ede's wallet but the warmth of his friendships. The paintings, sculptures and other objects BELONG in the house and are all the more enjoyable for that.

Kettle's Yard interior

The strangeness of the experience is heightened by the fact that you have to ring a doorbell for admission, much as if you were popping round to visit a friend; the staff are helpful but you can't get hold of a guidebook (which has a numbered plan of all the art) until you've been all the way round. When I was there a woman was trying to buy a guidebook but had given up her handbag, as requested, at the front door. You'll have to go and get it, she was told firmly - NOT the handbag, JUST the purse.

From there it's a half-hour drive to Saffron Walden and the Fry Art Gallery, where 'Ravilious in Essex' is entering its final month - 4000 visitors and counting. The Fry was also established by public-minded collectors, a succession of them in fact, going back more than a century - it takes its name from a scion of the Bristol family of chocolate makers who owned it in the 19th century. Nigel and Iris Weaver discovered the place in a ruinous condition when they moved to Saffron Walden in the 1980s, restored it and in 1987 opened the building to the public once again. Like Tate Britain in miniature, it is a gorgeous building with a fascinating permanent collection.

With a focus on the artists of Great Bardfield (John Aldridge, Edward Bawden, Tirzah Garwood/Ravilious, Kenneth Rowntree...), the Fry has become the principal port of call for admirers of Eric Ravilious, who lived in north-west Essex for the last eleven years of his life. Paintings, lithographs, Wedgwood china and wood engravings are beautifully presented, with a collection of the artist's wood blocks a particular treat.

David Oelman at the Fry... now those books look familiar!

Both Kettle's Yard and the Fry have mildly eccentric opening hours, so do check before you set out. I was just too early for the Kettle's Yard show 'Von Ribbentrop in St Ives', which opens on July 16th. 'Ravilious in Essex' runs until August 14.

British Masters: Pure Genius

2011-07-12T02:54:00.000-07:00

Walter Sickert, Mornington Crescent Nude, 1907

Does the decade 1910-1919 represent the best period of British art EVER? Was David Bomberg the greatest painter on the PLANET? Is James Fox trying to bring our artistic heritage to life with an audacity and verve that BEGGARS BELIEF?

David Bomberg, The Mud Bath, 1914

If we discount the misery of golfers who tuned in by mistake, last night's 'British Masters' on BBC4 was an hour of almost unalloyed joy. Raised to believe in the superiority of French, German, Italian, American, Spanish and Russian 20th century artists to our own, it was pleasure indeed to see the youthful professor fix the camera with a steely eye as he described Paul Nash's 'We Are Making a New World' as the greatest war painting EVER.

Fox

A complete disregard for the broader streams of art history, such as the experiments of Picasso and Braque, allowed us to revel in the inventiveness of Bomberg and the dastardly Wyndham Lewis. With Dr Fox as a sort of art historical Dr Who we explored a parallel universe in which British artists invented modern art. Walter Sickert was the first artist EVER to portray poverty and crime in paint. Mark Gertler predicted the entire history of the 20th century in a painting of a merry-go-round.

Berger

If art history students were left slightly bemused by this interpretation, it was great TV, by turns dramatic, funny and moving. I thoroughly enjoyed being lured into Sickert's painting of a murdered prostitute, and then blamed for the killing. Nevinson's story was nicely told, as was Nash's. My favourite moment, though, was when the blinds were raised to reveal the painted interior of the Sandham Memorial Chapel. Looking at Stanley Spencer's extraordinary visions of friendship, hope and redemption, I was on the presenter's side - the chapel's interior is a work of art to rival any.

Stanley Spencer, The Resurrection of the Soldiers, Sandham Memorial Chapel, 1920s

By coincidence, I was watching 'Ways of Seeing' on Youtube last week and couldn't help but notice the contrast between James Fox's approach and John Berger's. You could probably watch them side by side in different windows if your computer's fast enough. In the first episode of his fabulous series - which was made in response to Kenneth Clark's equally great but rather less confrontational series 'Civilisation' - Berger sought to expose the ways paintings are exploited by all and sundry for their own ends. The essential qualities of a painting, he told us, are stillness and silence. Anything added, such as music, or the movement of a camera to pick out details, is added, whether by advertiser or art historian, for a reason.

Dr Fox spent an hour last night using every trick in the TV presenter's book to catch our attention, to make us look and to share his passion for British art. Good for him.

Mary Fedden at the RWA

2011-07-08T03:06:00.000-07:00

Mary Fedden, Fruit Dish, 1992

These are strange times at the Royal West of England Academy, an institution which has traditionally served the region's artists with a genteel lack of concern for footfall or fashion. With the appointment of a new director, Trystan Hawkins, the old dowager has been given a thorough makeover, with a cafe installed where the New Gallery used to be and a summer exhibition designed to pull in the crowds and - judging by the merchandise on offer - part them from their cash.

There's a giant Damien Hirst sculpture of a 1960s Spastics Society collecting box on the balcony and an exhibition, combining behind-the-scenes photographs and paintings, of professional ballroom dancers. The paintings are by Jack Vettriano, who is 'arguably one of the country's most popular living artists', according to the exhibition flyer. The photos, by Jeanette Jones, capture the tension, excitement and fear of a tough competitive world; the paintings offer a less emotionally intense, more glamorous vision.

Mary Fedden, Window Still Life, 1994

The president of the RWA, Simon Quadrat, has recently resigned in protest at the populist programming, and you can see his point. The director's response is that people will come to see Hirst and Vettriano and, having paid their £5, will have a look at paintings by Lisa Milroy, sculpture and works on paper by Elisabeth Frink, and a mini-retrospective of Mary Fedden.

There are three gorgeous etchings made by Frink in the 1970s, but I really came to see Fedden, an RA and former president of the RWA who is now in her nineties and still painting. She was born in Bristol during World War One and, after studying at the Slade, returned to paint and teach here. The Second World War and marriage to Julian Trevelyan took her away from the city, and today she lives beside the Thames in London.

Mary Fedden, Red Tulips, 2010

The Portland Gallery in London held a major retrospective of her career a couple of years ago, but the RWA show is different. For one thing, it has the great virtue of being small. While a big show can be a lot of fun I think I prefer a one-room exhibit; rather than rush from picture to picture, trying to take them all in, you can relax, focus on one or two favourite paintings, and compare work easily. It's fascinating to see a still life painted in the early 1950s (and perhaps in need of a clean) beside one made in the 1990s.

There are some intimate details - a watercolour of an elephant painted for a friend - but most of the work is of a familiar kind: still lifes of fruit and flowers and jugs, with perhaps the view from a window beyond, also some landscapes. What one tends to lose when looking at reproductions, apart from the texture of the paint, are the subtle variations in colour that add so much to the feeling of a painting. There really is no substitute for seeing a painting live...

Perhaps the next stage in the 'Your Paintings' scheme should be for participating museums and galleries to put on a whole host of one-room shows - not massive, expensive affairs but small, manageable exhibitions. Look what 'Ravilious in Essex' has done for the Fry Art Gallery and tourism in Saffron Walden (3000 extra visitors in a couple of months). Many other artists have a dedicated hard core of fans who would willingly travel for a small, well-thought-out, show.

Mary Fedden, Lilies, Bird and Zebra, 1999

The pictures shown are from the database of Mary Fedden's work at the Portland Gallery, London, which represents her.

You can see photos of the work hanging at the RWA here (scroll down a bit)...

'Your Paintings': Celebrities vs Art Historians

2011-07-05T03:44:00.000-07:00

Stanley Spencer, The Scarecrow (1934)

Yesterday I made the mistake of visiting the BBC website devoted to the 'Your Paintings' project. An hour later I was still there, touring the online galleries with Rory Bremner. Or was it Mary Beard? It doesn't matter. In the end I had to watch all of them, to find out who did the job better, the celebrities or the art historians.

First up was James Fox, the debonair art historian who is fast becoming the BBC's go to man. He gave us a brief preview of the upcoming series 'British Masters', which sounds like a golf tournament but is in fact a wholesale reappraisal of 20th century British art. Stanley Spencer's 'Scarecrow' (1934) is a treat, although surely it is less a prediction of coming turmoil, as Fox suggests, than it is a reference back to the abiding influence of the Great War.

A good start for the experts, but here comes Frank Skinner, veteran comedian and footie fan. He is not, he tells us, an art historian, but he does like to visit galleries and that - he thinks - is enough. Is it? He takes for the theme of his tour a specific subject, The Annunciation, as depicted by sundry artists. Botticelli's version is stunning, and Skinner's commentary - 'Mary looks like she's opened the front door to put the milk out' - entertaining. He gets in a bit of a pickle later on with a discussion of Paul Delvaux but ends on a high note with an actual pickle, or gherkin, in Carlo Crivelli's painting of the subject.

Botticelli's Annunciation - Mary 'putting the milk out'

In all, a bright, entertaining survey from Skinner, so let's try another celebrity, Monty Don. It's clear from the outset that the gardener's gardener Knows What He Likes in a painting. He likes Cezanne so much that he spent a year in France experiencing the landscape, and he likes Ivon Hitchens and he likes Stanley Spencer. The latter's 'Wisteria at Englefield' (1954), Don tells us, was painted from a child's viewpoint, adding 'Spencer was a very small man, famously'.

Time for another art historian: Gus Casely-Hayford. Here's someone who knows what he's talking about, although his tour of artists on the edge plots a rather odd route from Richard Dadd and Blake to a discussion of slavery. Solid from the experts, though. I think they're winning.

For the celebrities, here's Rory Bremner, with a selection of paintings accompanied by impressions of the Royal Family and others. And some interesting info too, sneaked in among the laughs. Peter Blake made of the printer's mis-registration a new technique in 'The Beatles 1962' (1963-8).

Elizabeth Magill, Close to (Swansea), 2002

A delicate touch from Bremner, then, followed by solid performances by Matt Baker (a TV presenter with a fairly conservative taste in landscape painting) and historian Dan Snow. Yinka Shonibare presents a wonderfully eclectic selection including Elizabeth Magill's gorgeous 'Close to (Swansea)' (2002), then The Reduced Shakespeare Company ups the tempo with a whistlestop tour of bard-related painting. The art experts need something good here. Can critic Alastair Sooke deliver?

He has a good subject: money. A tour of the nation's free-to-view masterpieces gives us Monet, Van Gogh, Picasso, Titian and some big fat numbers to go with them. The National Gallery and the National Gallery of Scotland came up with £50 million to buy Titian's 'Diana and Actaeon' from the Duke of Sutherland. But it could be worth far more.

Titian's 'Diana and Actaeon' - a cool £50 million

It looks like the experts have it, but wait! Here's sex and relationship expert Tracey Cox - sorry, boys, she's definitely not an art historian - with a fascinating, sensitive tour of paintings depicting love in the widest sense. 'During orgasm, men's brains completely fire during the moment of pleasure, and the female brain, actually shuts down and lets go.' Could this be the clincher?

Only one to go, and it's Mary Beard, a Professor of Classics, but not an art historian. Is she a celebrity or an expert? Or a centaur-like combination of the two? Who cares. She's bold, erudite and straightforward and her tour is by turns illuminating - Classical artists showed Perseus nude and Andromeda clothed, whereas Renaissance artists did the opposite - and shocking. It ends with a picture of a young woman suckling her starving father - a popular Roman theme, we are told, although the painting shown of Cimon and Pero is by Abraham Bloemaert not Carlo Cignani.

When in Rome... Abraham Bloemaert, Cimon and Pero (early C17)

So who wins? I'm not sure, but old-fashioned art history (focusing on technique, influences and so on) seems to be the loser. And who should the BBC hire to front an hour-long version, if such a programme were to be made? It would have to be Professor Beard. How about a BBC4 special on Classical themes in painting?

David Inshaw, Alfred Wallis, Bloomsbury: 'Hidden Paintings' on the BBC

2011-06-27T13:29:00.000-07:00

Curtis Dowling: are these worth £60k or nothing?

Last night's 'Hidden Paintings' was an intriguing phenomenon - a series shown not in the same place at different times but at the same time but in different places. If that doesn't make sense, have a look here, and all will be clear...

Although each part was only broadcast in its particular region we now have, thanks to the BBC's iPlayer, seven days to watch the whole series. I've only managed a few so far, but have been treated to a behind-the-scenes tour of Charleston Farmhouse, a fascinating essay on fame with respect to David Inshaw and a Fake-or-Fortune quest featuring two paintings by Alfred Wallis - or should that be 'Alfred Wallis'? You'll have to watch to find out...

David Inshaw, Window, 1969

What the programmes have in common is less the 'hidden paintings' of the title than the impression - that I was left with at any rate - of artists and artworks bobbing about on the sea of fashion, either riding high on a wavetop or plunged into a trough. Fashion is cruel, inconstant and unpredictable. David Inshaw, for example, must have been thrilled to learn that he would be featured in the series - only to discover, as soon as filming began, that his painting 'Our days were a joy and our paths through flowers' had been taken off the wall at the City Museum and Art Gallery in Bristol after being on show more or less constantly for decades.

A curator at the museum pointed out that the painting had been taken down to make way for a newer acquisition. This is fair enough, and no doubt pleased both the artist concerned and his or her fans, but presumably there was choice involved. A decision was taken to remove this painting and leave that one, to hang this new artist but not this one. In the case of the City Museum and Art Gallery the phenomenal success of the 2009 Banksy takeover has perhaps influenced curatorial thinking, and it would be hard to think of two more different artists than Inshaw and Banksy.

When I was at school my experience of The Winter's Tale - a play with a preposterous plot and wooden characters - was enlivened by the Inshaw painting on the cover of the Arden paperback. His is a very particular vision - of strong, beautiful women and trees with dense foliage, of Silbury Hill and lightning and crows. I happen to think Inshaw is a very fine painter and a victim - presently - of the art world's continuing love affair with The New. In a few years' time he'll be rediscovered, as Piper, Nash and Ravilious are being rediscovered at the moment, and people will think it extraordinary that his paintings have languished in storage so long...

Charleston Farmhouse

On which subject, a highlight of the Hidden Paintings programme on the Bloomsbury group was the sight of volunteers preparing Charleston Farmhouse for the public after the winter closure. As people pulled bags off decorated jugs and whisked away curtains of plastic to reveal paintings, the bizarre decorated world of Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and co came gaudily to life. The presenter - rather admirably, I thought - revealed the equally colourful love life of the group in a similar series of unmaskings, and the shots of Bewick Church were fantastic.

It may be quite hard to recall actual paintings by Grant and Bell, but in applying paint to just about everything in their house they gave their reputations immunity from changing curatorial fashions. This rather reinforces the point I made in the last post - and which Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen also made in relation to Devizes Museum - that artists are best served by small institutions which adopt them. I used to visit Kettle's Yard in Cambridge years ago, to have a look at Alfred Wallis and others.

Charleston: garden deco

Wallis's story was also about changing fortunes, as we learned how popular an artist has to be to attract the attention of forgers... It was also about different kinds of expertise and different kinds of knowledge, giving us the fascinating scenario of two well respected experts each absolutely sure that the two pictures shown to them were, or were not, by Alfred Wallis. In the end scientific analysis had the last say, but why would someone bother spending a fortune on a study of paint? Because an original Wallis is a valuable commodity just now - though whether it will be in twenty, or fifty years' time is anyone's guess.

'The Badminton Game': David Inshaw's Hidden Masterpiece

2011-06-24T05:38:00.000-07:00

David Inshaw, The Badminton Game, 1972-3

Poor old Tate Britain. Barely weeks after one TV channel exposed the absence from its walls of paintings by LS Lowry, the BBC is about to broadcast a programme dedicated to another artist whose work is languishing in Tate Storage. In fact it focuses on one particular painting, David Inshaw's 'The Badminton Game'. Would it, I wonder, be all that hard for someone to rush off this afternoon to Tate Storage, retrieve the picture and hang it BEFORE the Beeb's presenter starts complaining about its concealment from the poor, overtaxed public?

I used to sell art at a gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and in my pomp I could rehang a room in minutes. Does it really take longer to pull a painting out of storage than it does to make a TV programme? Might it be sensible, in the age of instant media, to reserve one room for pop-up exhibitions, allowing TB to respond swiftly to public interest in a particular work or artist (and make TV pundits look silly to boot)?

David Inshaw, Our days were a joy and our paths through flowers, 1971/2

Often, the best place to see work by a favourite painter is in one of our many brilliant regional galleries and museums. The last time I went to Bristol's City Museum and Art Gallery they were showing another exquisite painting of Inshaw's, 'Our days were a joy and our paths through flowers', which had been painted in 1971/2 for an exhibition at the Arnolfini Gallery. The title, Inshaw has explained, "comes from Thomas Hardy's poem, 'After a Journey', about a dead lover whose spirit lives on in the sights and sounds of nature."

Unfortunately, 20th century British painters like David Inshaw are insufficiently represented at major London museums, which have far more art than space to show it. Happily, regional museums can and do support the legacy of particular artists - the Fry Art Gallery's devotion to Eric Ravilious and the Great Bardfield artists is a case in point - and now art lovers can travel around the country armed with Christopher Lloyd's comprehensive guide, 'In Search of a Masterpiece'.

Yet even regional museums lack the wall space to hang more than a small proportion of their holdings, and this situation can only worsen as time passes. At the same time, the costs of insurance and transport can make the sharing of art works between institutions prohibitive; from talking to gallery people one gets the impression that some think it safer and therefore more desirable to keep a picture in storage rather than share it with another institution. Of course there are many exceptions, but I think there is a genuine dilemma.

If people want to see publicly owned art, shouldn't every effort be made to help them do so? Taking digital pictures is one possibility, but it doesn't get to the root of the problem. The artworks themselves, as objects, are treated as valuable pieces of property, to be preserved in the best possible condition. This is as it should be, but only up to a point. After all, a painting is only really worth as much as the pleasure it gives, and a painting stuck in a basement for decades is giving pleasure to nobody.

PS The Bristol Evening Post have an interview with BBC presenter Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen here.

Olivia Laing's 'To The River': Woolf, Asham, Ravilious

2011-06-19T12:44:00.000-07:00

River Ouse, Mount Caburn in background

Have just finished reading Olivia Laing's account of a midsummer ramble from the source of the River Ouse to the sea, a book I would thoroughly recommend to all thoughtful or imaginative walkers. Everywhere we go in this densely populated old country many others have been before, and traces of their existence remain in often unexpected places.

History is not the preserve of academics and experts. History is all around us and inside us, and Laing demonstrates ably and entertainingly how the knowledge of history that she carries inside her enriches her life and experience. She doesn't seem quite so sure of the present, perhaps because its ugliness has not been filtered or refined by the passage of time, but as a conjuror of ghosts - from Gideon Mantell (discoverer of the iguanodon) and Simon de Montfort (13th century rebel) to Virginia and Leonard Woolf - she rivals WG Sebald, whose 'Rings of Saturn' (1999) displays a similar fascination for the dead.

Eric Ravilious, Cement Works No.2, 1934

I have spent time in and around Lewes, researching 'Ravilious in Pictures: Sussex and the Downs' and collecting material for subsequent talks, and had the strange, slightly voyeuristic pleasure of walking with the author (in my imagination) through Woolf country. I walked one midsummer day from Beddingham Hill across the river to Rodmell and back, and shared Laing's experience of being caught in the open by a torrential shower; I spent half an hour under a farm trailer that had been left, conveniently, out in the fields.

People sometimes ask me whether there was any connection between the Bloomsbury contingent based at Charleston Farmhouse and Rodmell and the artists - notably Eric Ravilious - and writers who gathered at Furlongs, the cottage where Peggy Angus lived and entertained. The answer seems to be 'no', but one can easily imagine Virginia Woolf, the inveterate walker of the Downs, and Ravilious, the seeker of interesting scenes and subjects, passing on a hilltop path - she heading for Charleston, he making for his favourite location, the Asham Cement Works...

The mining and processing of chalk had begun at Asham in the 1920s, close to the house where the Woolfs had lived when they were first married and during World War One, and where Virginia wrote 'The Voyage Out'. This house had been built in a downland valley by a lawyer from Lewes in the 19th century, and was discovered by the couple in 1912. As Leonard described in his autobiography:

Asham House

When I was staying in her Firle villa, we walked over the downs one day to the Ouse Valley, and in one of those lovely folds or hollows in the downs, we came upon an extraordinarily romantic-looking house. It was upon the Lewes-Seaford road but a great field, full of sheep, lay between it and the road. It was due west, and from its windows and terrace in front of the house you looked across the great field and the Ouse valley to the line of downs in the west of the river…

Asham was a strange house. The country people on the farm were convinced that it was haunted, that there was treasure buried in the cellar, and no one would spend the night in it. It is true that at night one often heard extraordinary noises both in the cellars and in the attic. It sounded as if two people were walking from room, opening and shutting doors, sighing, whispering…I have never known a house which had such a strong character, personality of its own – romantic, gentle, melancholy, lovely...

Asham Cement Works

The Woolfs were happy at Asham but, when their landlord refused to renew their lease, moved across the river to Monks House, Rodmell. From the windows of the summerhouse where Virginia like to write you could see the exposed chalk of the cement works, which expanded around the abandoned house during the 1930s. When Ravilious visited Peggy Angus in 1934, he walked over Beddingham Hill and saw the chalkpit and the works below him.

Approaching closer, he was excited by the strangeness of chalk-whitened buildings, dolly engines and a landscape dusted with fine white powder; with Peggy Angus as his guide he went back at night, when work continued by the light of arc lamps and flares.

The pair went to see Mr Wilson, the manager of the works, who was surprised but pleased to meet artists who could see beauty in an industrial operation that others tended to regard as a blot on the landscape. Given free run of the place, they returned together in all weathers to sketch and paint the chalk pits and works, the chimneys, sheds and railway lines. (from 'Ravilious in Pictures: Sussex and the Downs')

The extent of the works was considerable, and Olivia Laing recalls in her book that:

Before the cement works closed there used to be an aerial ropeway, dismantled now, that ran down the hill to the water's edge, linking the quarry to a concrete wharf where barges delivered coal and collected cement. It was here that Virginia's body was found, on 18 April 1941, three weeks after she'd walked into the river...

River Ouse, with landfill site, capped in chalk

Six months later Ravilious too was lost when his plane disappeared off the coast of Iceland, and for decades thereafter his reputation languished. By 2003, when the Imperial War Museum held the landmark retrospective that fired public interest in his work, the cement works had closed and the chalk quarry was being filled with rubbish from nearby towns. Now it is full, and has been capped with chalk and, while local binmen search for other places to dump their trash, the hillside has begun its return to the wild.

'Ravilious in Essex': Location Location Location

2011-06-17T02:55:00.000-07:00

Eric Ravilious, Village Street (1936)

I'm looking forward to visiting Saffron Walden on 13 July for my 'Ravilious in Essex' talk. I was there for the opening of the show a couple of months ago and took the opportunity to do a little detective work around Castle Hedingham and Great Bardfield.

One can get a bit obsessed with finding the locations of paintings, but I love exploring an area with an artist as a sort of invisible companion. I find I look at everything that much more closely and remember what I've seen, heard, smelt and otherwise noticed that much more clearly. In September 2008 I spent a crazy day racing around London looking for shops, pubs, etc that Rav depicted in 'High Street' and that journey is etched into my memory along with incidents that happened along the way.

Falcon Square, Castle Hedingham, today

Similarly, I can close my eyes and picture the walk up from Glynde station to Bedingham Hill, scene of so many of the pictures in 'Ravilious in Pictures: Sussex and the Downs'. As the popularity of Radio 4's literary walks show 'Ramblings' demonstrates, there's something tremendously appealing about walking with a cultural goal, or with a writer or artist as a ghostly guide. So often I seem to walk without noticing my surroundings - mind elsewhere, daydreaming or worrying. On a Rav walk I'm focused, alert, looking for clues.

The Hovis Mill

The weekend of the Fry launch I camped near Castle Hedingham and walked (child-free!) for miles, into the village, on to Sible Hedingham and along the river to Hull's Mill. One of the things I love about Ravilious is his fascination for both the conventionally beautiful - fine Georgian architecture, for example - and for places, objects and scenes that other people might dismiss as ugly or inappropriate as a subject for picture-making.

Hull's Mill, 1935

Junkyards were a favourite haunt, and brickworks, and coalyards. He plucked abandoned vehicles from a jumble of rubbish and made them into things of beauty, and preserved for prosperity humdrum industrial scenes that few others thought worthy of notice.

On my rambles I found places that had scarcely changed in the seventy-plus years since Ravilious lived and worked in Essex. Other scenes had disappeared under housing developments or become overgrown, and it was interesting to see just how change had occurred and to compare Rav's vision with reality. I'll be showing some of the pictures I took at the Fry talk - and at future events.

The highlight of the Castle Hedingham walk was reaching Hull's Mill - which you can get to via a circular walk from Sible Hedingham that runs along the river and then back up over the hill and through a glorious old wood. The old Hovis Mill has been a private house for years, but it still looks much the same as it did in 1935. What really struck me, though, was the noise. You can't tell this from Rav's painting, but the stream in the foreground goes over a weir just after it crosses the road and the sound of falling water is almost deafening.

Hull's Mill today

To sit at the water's edge is to be lost in the white noise of falling water, and I wonder if that was why Rav kept going back there in the weeks before and after the birth of his first child...

'Ravilious in Pictures' - Competition and Talk

2011-06-09T00:18:00.000-07:00

THE COMPETITION:

The arts website Culture24 has just launched a competition: three sets of the 'Ravilious in Pictures' books are up for grabs, and the question you have to answer if you want to enter is not too tricky...

On the same site there's also an interesting review of 'Ravilious in Essex', the fabulous show which is currently running at the Fry Art Gallery in Saffron Walden. Fans of Ravilious will be well aware that you don't often get the chance to enjoy a dozen or more of his watercolours, and there are some gorgeous paintings on display. The Fry also has an unrivalled collection of Rav's woodcuts and blocks.

THE TALK:

I'm heading over there on July 13 to give an illustrated talk on the artist and his work. It's at 7.30pm at the Friends Meeting House on the High Street in Saffron Walden and tickets are a very reasonable £6 on the door. I always enjoy getting out and about and showing people pictures I've taken and garnered during the research process, so I'm looking forward to it.

'Gillespie and I' & The Glasgow Boys

2011-05-18T05:47:00.000-07:00

As I'm currently reading - and thoroughly enjoying - Jane Harris's new book 'Gillespie and I', I thought it might be fun to look up the artists she mentions. While Ned Gillespie, the artist at the centre of the story, is invented, the context is real. Glasgow in the late 1880s was the scene of an artistic revolution, as a loosely-affiliated group of young artists - later known as the Glasgow Boys - sought to portray the world they knew in new and exciting ways.

Earlier this year the Royal Academy in London held an exhibition of their work - the first major London show in forty years. It drew attention to their experiments in technique, particularly painting outside, rather than in a studio, and to their choice of subject matter, which tended to be urban and everyday.

In the book, narrator Harriet Baxter urges Gillespie to paint the crowds at the International Exhibition (1888), but Gillespie is doubtful, commenting that 'nobody wants to buy paintings of the city. They'd far rather hang haystacks and cottar's gardens on their walls.'

John Lavery, Queen Victoria at the Glasgow International Exhibition 1888

Hardly has he finished speaking when they spy an artist who is out sketching the crowds. 'It's Lavery - confound him!' Gillespie cries...

EA, Walton, Joseph Crawhall

Born in Ireland and trained in Glasgow, Sir John Lavery enjoyed a long and illustrious career which was kick-started by his victory in a competition to paint a portrait of Queen Victoria for the 1888 International Exhibition. In the book, Gillespie competes against him but - fortunately for art historians everywhere - comes second.

Joseph Crawhall, The Pigeon

Another artist who gets a mention is Joseph Crawhall, who has the misfortune to be caricatured in a local newspaper; he is 'depicted as a scrawny scarecrow, dour of countenance and sat upon by numerous pigeons and crows'.

Gillespie himself recommends 'Guthrie and MacGregor'. The former's painting 'Hard At It' shows an artist at work on the shore at Cockburnspath in Berwickshire - the village where Gillespie yearns to live.

WM MacGregor, Vegetable Stall 1884

James Guthrie, Hard At It, 1883

This Green and Pleasant Land: Art on BBC4

2011-05-18T04:07:00.000-07:00

Thomas Gainsborough, Mr & Mrs Andrews 1750

Four hundred years of art history in ninety minutes? If something sounds too good to be true then it usually is, and BBC4's latest art programme was a bit of a dog's dinner. Sorry, 'eclectic' is the word I was looking for, but I was put in mind of dogs and their dinners by a strange and wonderful segment of the show in which a countryman with a lurcher and a box of ferrets went rabbit hunting. The dog sniffs out the bunny, the countryman sends in the ferret, and the rabbit emerges to find its neck swiftly broken. With this chap around, 'Watership Down' would have been about three hundred pages shorter.

John Constable, Chain Pier, Brighton 1826-7

What on earth, you may wonder, has this to do with the history of landscape painting? Hang on... No, I can't remember, but the ferrets were amazing - the personification of cute, furry death. The countryman was good too, pointing out that landowners in the early 19th century owned not just the land but everything on it - berries, mushrooms, rabbits, even the twigs on the ground. He sounded as if this was not only a grave injustice, but one that still resonates today.

Back to the show, which began with informative sections on Rubens, Claude, Gainsborough, Constable and Turner. There was a lovely part in which Ralph Steadman satirized Rubens' 1620 painting, 'Landscape with St George and the Dragon'; he was one of several contemporary artists featured in the show and in general their views and visions were illuminating.

Holman Hunt, Our English Coasts 1852

After Turner we had William Holman Hunt and an art historian who assured us that Victorians were neither repressed nor uncreative, but that their period represented a British visual Renaissance. It was unfortunate that Hunt's sheep on a coastal hillside came immediately after a succession of glorious, imaginative, uplifting late watercolours by Turner.

As if to confirm the deadly effect of Victorian values and aspirations on our visual culture, the show lost its way at this point. We had Will Self - who has rescued many a documentary - talking about Hampstead Garden Suburb for reasons that aren't immediately clear, and we had Peter York extolling the virtues of the dreadful Atkinson Grimshaw (was this ironic or populist?)... Why include this stuff and not mention Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, or JM Whistler, or... The list is long.

Atkinson Grimshaw, Going Home at Dusk 1882

Hooray for Paul Nash, who came in just before the last to remind us that British landscape painting has a long, venerable and continuing history. With 'Landscape of the Vernal Equinox' and 'The Battle of Britain' (the latter discussed thoughtfully by film-maker Nic Roeg, who also gave some insightful remarks on Constable's work in Brighton), Nash represented single-handedly the tradition of mystical-poetic landscape painting (William Blake, Samuel Palmer and onward to Sutherland, Piper, Ravilious, Inshaw...).

Paul Nash, The Battle of Britain 1941

And then there was David Hockney, who stole the show with his iPhone drawings. You don't need a glass of water, the great man pointed out. There's no mess. You can draw a sunset at 6am and send it to twenty people by 7. You do need an iPhone (other brands also available), but nobody seemed interested in making that point.

This Green and Pleasant Land: Pylon Field

2011-05-14T07:04:00.000-07:00

I'm looking forward to BBC4's programme on Tuesday about landscape painting in our 'green and pleasant land'. One of the intriguing aspects of the subject is the way artists over the centuries have focused on particular places and types of landscape. Post-war there was a lot of opposition to electricity pylons (as there is today to wind turbines), but there's something compelling about the characters gathered together in this pylon field.

Pylons as far as the eye can see...

Presumably each of these structures has a specific function relating to the mysterious doings of the National Grid, but they also resemble a strange family group...

Functional beauty...

The rooks have adopted this one, and in wet weather cattle shelter underneath. A sign warns anyone thinking of climbing this rustic Eiffel Tower to 'treat the whole thing as live'.

I wonder whether the engineers who built and arranged these pylons had any sense of their potential as figures in the landscape... It would be nice to think that they did. There are certainly plenty of people who appreciate the strange beauty of pylons these days: go here to find out more...

Enjoying Leonardo in Peace

2011-05-10T01:34:00.000-07:00

La Belle Ferroniere - sure to attract a crowd

In an effort to combat 'gallery rage' caused by over-crowding at major exhibitions, the National Gallery has decided to reduce visitor numbers for its exhibition of work by Leonardo da Vinci, which starts in November...

Whistlejacket by Stubbs

The National Gallery is more than an art collection: it is the modern equivalent of a medieval monastery, a place of constancy (and relative calm) at the heart of London. I've been visiting since my mother took me as a child and - bar the odd alteration like the addition of the Sainsbury Wing - the place is always the same. Walk through a certain set of doors and there is Stubbs' 'Whistlejacket', leaping against that strange opalescent background. Turn a corner and there are Gainsborough's daughters, still vainly pursuing that butterfly.

An excellent guide is still '100 Details from Pictures at the National Gallery', which was assembled by then-director Kenneth Clark in 1938, a year before the gallery was stripped and its treasures sent off to a Welsh quarry for safe-keeping.

Erasmus - note inky fingers

No doubt everyone has their favourite pictures and their favourite routes through the building. My tastes have changed slightly over the years but when I jotted down some highlights after a recent visit they were mostly familiar: Cranach's Venus, a Christ of El Greco, Degas' women rather than Renoir's, Duccio's Virgin... Increasingly I find the giant, boldly coloured paintings of the high Renaissance too intense. Give me Holbein's Erasmus and his inky fingers.

My absolute favourite picture is currently hidden away behind a gilded altarpiece, in a dim room which you could easily mistake for a cupboard. It's a drawing, not a painting, and it isn't even finished. The other day I sat and stared at it for some time in the soothing dim light without being disturbed by a single soul.

The Burlington House Cartoon

The cartoon of 'The Virgin and Child with St Anne and John the Baptist' (aka The Burlington House Cartoon) is assumed to be a study for a painting, made by Leonardo da Vinci at the very end of the 15th century. No painting survives, but this study is a work of great beauty. Where some historic artworks seem overly stylised - examples from the pages of an art history book - the sketch is simple and fresh. The marks made by the artist on the paper are clearly visible; we can see how the image was conjured from nothing with charcoal and chalk, and we can wonder at the dexterity of the artist's hand and at the sensitivity of his vision.

You can visit the Virgin and St Anne tomorrow. You don't need a ticket and there won't be a crowd.

Richter's Skater: Paintings Lost and Found

2011-05-03T04:55:00.000-07:00

Found: Gerhard Richter, 'Eisläuferin' (Skater) - detail

Why should the discovery of a lost painting be so exciting? I've been a fan of Gerhard Richter's figurative paintings ever since I bought a Sonic Youth record with his candle on the cover twenty-five years ago, but I'd never heard of his 'Eisläuferin' (Skater) until this morning. I suppose the fact that the picture is potentially worth £3 million makes this newsworthy, but there's something compelling about stories of paintings lost and found.

Lost: Georgia O'Keeffe, 'Special No.21' 1916

I was in Santa Fe, New Mexico, when Georgia O'Keeffe's painting 'Special No.21' was stolen from the Museum of Fine Arts. By all accounts someone simply walked in and pocketed the picture, which isn't very big, and it was gone. At the time I was selling art at a local gallery, so I was used to the constant coming and going of artworks, but this was different. Here was a painting that had been part of the public realm - a shared pleasure - and someone had taken it from US.

One might argue that the same happens when a less enlightened collector buys a painting at auction and then squirrels it away for their own personal enjoyment (or, worse, stores it in the hope that it will appreciate in value).

Found: Munch, 'The Scream'

The FBI may have wished that O'Keeffe was still alive, as she herself tracked down three paintings stolen from Alfred Stieglitz's New York gallery in the 1940s. It took her thirty years, but in 1975 she spotted them at the Princeton Gallery of Fine Arts and sued successfully for their return. When a painting is stolen there is always a chance that it will be recovered, as happened most famously with 'Mona Lisa'. Two versions of Edvard Munch's 'The Scream' have been seized from museums, and both have been recovered.

Gerhard Richter, 'Eisläuferin' (Skater) early 60s

In the case of Richter's 'Skater', it was believed for years that the painting had been destroyed, leaving the world with only a black and white reproduction, so this discovery is more akin to a return from the dead. Every artist's catalogue has some gaps like this, where pictures have been destroyed or have simply vanished. I posted last year about Churchill's refusal to send the National Gallery's collection to Canada during World War II, and an incident later in the war confirmed that he had made the right decision.

Lost: Eric Ravilious, 'Light Vessel & Duty Boat' 1940

In August 1942 a merchant vessel carrying works of art from Britain to South America was sunk by a U-boat. In all, 96 paintings were lost, including three by Paul Nash, and one each by Graham Sutherland, Eric Ravilious and John Piper. They are unlikely to reappear.

Tirzah Garwood, Eric Ravilious, Tirzah Ravilious

2011-05-02T08:26:00.000-07:00

Tirzah Ravilious, The Old Soldier, 1940

It's been an exciting weekend for fans of Eric Ravilious and Tirzah Ravilious (nee Garwood), with a double-page spread on the former in the Review section of Saturday's Guardian followed by a display of the latter's work on the Antiques Roadshow (17-18 mins in). I hope people will be encouraged by all this publicity to visit the Fry Art Gallery in Saffron Walden, where you can see work by both artists.

If Eric was neglected by the art world in the decades after his death, Tirzah was doubly so, and she remains a little-known figure. Accounts of her husband's life tend to portray her as 'the wife', faithful in spite of his infidelities, and rather dull - the sensible woman who prefered not to swim naked in the River Pant with her husband and various Bardfield visitors. For excitement (we imagine, from this reading) he ran off to the Sussex Downs with Helen Binyon, and at her side produced some of his most memorable watercolours.

Eric Ravilious, Train Landscape, 1939

This interpretation does Tirzah a great disservice, since she was not only a woman of great courage and resolve - in 1942 she underwent an emergency mastectomy for breast cancer only months before her husband's death left her almost penniless and with three young children - but also a tremendous personality. Skinny-dipping may not have been her thing but she embraced all the uncertainties and trials of the artistic life, accepting financial insecurity and accommodation that was at times unfit for habitation. A generous friend, she could when necessary write a scalding letter.

Having embarked on her own career as a wood engraver in the late 1920s she gave this up to raise her children, at the same time supporting Eric in his work. The extent of her influence may never be known but in one important instance - the well-known painting 'Train Landscape' - she worked on the picture itself, pasting a white horse over the Wilmington Giant. Earlier she had been, in the most straightforward sense, her husband's muse, and her figure appeared repeatedly in the murals he painted at Morley College... They shared many interests - in mechanical toys and old-fashioned shops, and in the landscape of the Sussex Downs.

Tirzah Ravilious, landscape, 1944

I've been lucky enough to see quite a few of Tirzah's oil paintings and 3D collages of houses and shops, but I'd never seen the painting of the South Downs shown on the Roadshow until last night. I was immediately reminded of the fact that Eric tried to paint in oils but didn't get on with the medium. Tirzah evidently did, producing this witty landscape (apologies for poor repro) with its downland hills and toy train - a cousin to the train in Eric's painting 'The Westbury Horse'.

I enjoyed the presenter's remark that she had 'taken her husband's view of landscape' and altered it, evidently unaware that this was both condescending and inaccurate. Tirzah had already demonstrated in her wood engravings (which she made under her maiden name), that she was her own woman, following creative impulses that were quite different from her husband's and using her own techniques too. This oil painting - I haven't found out yet what it's called - is all her own, but alludes in its subject matter to her late husband's fascination for trains in landscape.

Anne Ullmann, the couple's daughter, has been unstinting in her efforts to win proper recognition for their work, and she has been working for some time on an edition of her mother's diaries. Judging by the extracts published in the Fleece Press editions of Eric's letters, they should make entertaining and occasionally eye-opening reading. In the meantime, I recommend Olive Cook's excellent essay on Tirzah's life and work, and this survey of her wood engravings.

Eric Ravilious: A Life in Pictures

2011-04-29T06:31:00.000-07:00

I've put together an illustrated talk based on the 'Ravilious in Pictures' series; you can hear/see it at the Yellow-Lighted Book Festival in Nailsworth, Glos on Friday 10 June or in Saffron Walden on 13 July. This date is being arranged by the Fry Art Gallery, venue TBC.

I'll also be signing copies of 'Ravilious in Pictures: A Country Life', volume 3 in the series, at Ben Pentreath's shop in Bloomsbury, on May 11 at 5.30pm.

This is a follow-up to illustrated talks I've given at the Towner Gallery in Eastbourne and the St Bride Library in London, and it should be a lot of fun. What I do is select some particularly interesting Ravilious watercolours and go behind the scenes, exploring places, investigating mysteries, telling stories and introducing characters that are relevant to a particular picture.

The aim is to paint a portrait of the artist in words and pictures, and if you've enjoyed any of the books in the 'Ravilious in Pictures' series I think you'll find the talk entertaining and thought-provoking.

I'm planning to take 'Eric Ravilious: A Life in Pictures' to more venues, and will be sending out a brochure in due course. In the meantime, if you'd like to book the talk for a venue or arts group, please get in touch via the Comments, our Facebook page or Twitter.

David Hepher at Kings Place

2011-04-28T14:24:00.000-07:00

David Hepher, La Francaise, 1985

Eric Ravilious, Vicarage, 1935

The view today

Artists leave a legacy beyond the inventory of their work and the story of their lives. The influence of artists who have been dead a half-century or more can still be seen in the work of living painters and sculptors - and not just in the work. As David Hepher explained in Saffron Walden the other day: in his case it was probably the fact that he knew Eric Ravilious that made him become a painter at all.

Since Ravilious died almost seventy years ago there aren't too many people left who knew him. David was asked to share a few thoughts and memories at the launch of the show 'Ravilious in Essex', which is currently running at the Fry Art Gallery, and he began by admitting that his memories were few; he was only a child when Ravilious died.

The Old Vicarage (note Wellingtonia)

They knew one another because Guy Hepher was vicar of St Nicholas church in Castle Hedingham when the Ravilious family lived in the village. They had one of those rare family friendships where each member is friends with their opposite number - Eric with Guy, Tirzah with Evelyn, and David with John, who was his age - and during the very cold winters of the late 1930s Eric and family took refuge at the vicarage - where David remembered them all sweeping snow off the roof of the enormous house (today, the 'Old Vicarage').

St Nicholas, Castle Hedingham

Guy Hepher's Plan of St Nicholas, 1937

David's father was evidently both cultured and curious. The vicar explored his church and its records, and one winter's day Ravilious found him at work - as the artist wrote in a letter at the time - 'drawing out a plan of the church in seven colours – for each period – and cheered him on and offered him stick ink to pull it all together.’ The plan is there today, on the wall of St Nicholas, behind the main door as you go in.

David Hepher, Study for the Wandsworth Road Estate III, 2007

That plan was made in 1937. Over seventy years later David Hepher is a respected artist and teacher of artists, best known for his paintings of tower blocks and other architecturally-inspired urban scenes. His work is detailed, atmospheric and idiosyncratic, the canvases covered in graffiti like the walls of the buildings he represents. But he has for many years, on holidays spent in France, also been painting pastoral landscapes, and these are about to be shown for the first time alongside his urban pictures at the Kings Place gallery in Kings Cross. Entitled 'A Song of the Earth and the Cry of Concrete', the show opens on 6 May. Meanwhile, an hour or so up the M11, Ravilious's paintings of David's childhood home are hanging on the walls of the Fry Art Gallery. Together these two exhibitions tell a fascinating story of tradition, influence and change. FFI: Kings Place Gallery
Fry Art Gallery