Inspired by the Boy: In Conversation with Angie Lewin

A Ravilious Coronation Mug features in this linocut by Angie Lewin

I'm looking forward to joining artist and designer Angie Lewin on March 23 for an online event exploring her career-long fascination for Eric Ravilious. With Kirsty Rodda of Hampshire Cultural Trust keeping us in order, we will spend an hour looking in-depth at Rav's achievements in wood engraving, watercolour and ceramic design. I always enjoy hearing other people's views on artists I admire, doubly so when the views are coming from someone as talented and insightful as Angie. 

We will have some slides to share so you can see what we're referring to, but this is definitely a conversation rather than a lecture: we're bound to end up venturing down some unexpected avenues!

If you'd like to join us please visit The Arc Winchester website for details and tickets. 

 

Angie Lewin: New Watercolours in Edinburgh

Angie Lewin, Spey Still Life & Yellow Book (artist copyright)

Just received some lovely pictures of new Angie Lewin watercolours, ahead of her exhibition in Edinburgh. Is it my imagination, or is there a hint of Charles Rennie Mackintosh in some of these flower paintings? The layering of translucent colours seems to be new, or maybe I'm just looking properly! As ever, the paintings are carefully composed, at once structured and loose, realistic in some ways and stylised in others. Lots of energy too - I love the way the pattern springs away from the Persephone bowl.

Angie Lewin, Calendula Study (artist copyright)

Angie Lewin, Dice Cup and Feather (artist copyright)

Angie Lewin, Cone Flower  (artist copyright)

Angie Lewin, Persephone Bowl (artist copyright)

Angie Lewin, Wild Garden Seedheads (artist copyright)

Angie Lewin, Auden Thalictrum (artist copyright)

These and other watercolours will be shown in Angie's exhibition 'A Natural Selection' at The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, during May. Gallery Director Christina Jansen comments:

"We are delighted to present Angie Lewin’s first solo exhibition with The Scottish Gallery. She is best known as a designer and printmaker whose sensitive patterns and motifs are inspired by the English Arts and Crafts movement and the work of Bawden and Ravilious. She divides her life between homes in Edinburgh and Speyside and this geographic diversity is reflected in her plant observations and interweaving of the natural and domestic worlds.

"She walks, looks and draws; she collects and assembles and her studio is full of reference material, beautiful in itself witnessing a life lived in art and nature. Her chosen medium for this exhibition is watercolour, that most sensitive and difficult medium and her virtuosity is complete but should be no surprise in the context of her rigorous apprenticeship. The playful title for this show hints at her obsessive observing, refined through the artist’s editorial eye to make order out of chaos."

FFI: The Scottish Gallery

Random Spectacular #2

Cover of Random Spectacular #2 by Jonny Hannah

Amazingly, almost four years have passed since St Judes published Random Spectacular, a delightfully eclectic collection of words and pictures that reminded me of the old Saturday Books. The edition sold out so quickly that everyone was taken by surprise, not least editor Simon Lewin, and some St Judes devotees were unable to get hold of a copy.

This time around, Simon is taking the unusual step of basing the edition size on the apparent demand. Anyone interested in buying a copy should trot along to the St Judes website and enter their email address. NB this doesn't mean they're guaranteed a copy, but they will be sent payment information by email when Random Spectacular #2 is published in August 2014.

There are some treats in store for fans of Mark Hearld, Emily Sutton, Angie Lewin and numerous other artists, and the whole book is beautifully designed. I was delighted when Simon asked me to write something on Eric Ravilious's submarine lithographs: look out for some gorgeous full page reproductions.

FFI: St Judes

Angie Lewin at Yorkshire Sculpture Park

Angie Lewin, Persephone Shore, collage on driftwood

Angie Lewin has been busy. Her new exhibition at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park features paintings, screen prints, wood engravings and - my favourite - a series of collages on pieces of driftwood.

Angie Lewin, Festival Mug and Honesty, watercolour

Angie's watercolour drawings are wonderfully cool and elegant, and she acknowledges her debt to mid-century art and design with those precisely dated mugs. But I think her work really takes off when she balances the delicate tracery of natural forms with the strong colours and bold gestures she employs in her printmaking.

Angie Lewin, Lakeside Teasels, linocut

Some of the newer prints stay closer to natural forms, and they do have a lovely feeling of lightness and gaiety. As ever, it's great to see her explore the architecture and aesthetic possibilities of ordinary plants.

Angie Lewin, Ramsons and Campions, screenprint

But I keep coming back to the driftwood collages. I like their simplicity and boldness, and the fact that the artist has had to think carefully about how to work with an awkwardly shaped, three-dimensional ground. I think she had fun making them.

Angie Lewin, Windswept Shore

Angie Lewin: A Natural Line is at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park from 16 November to 23 February. I wish it was closer to Bristol!

Ten Printmakers: St Jude's in Auld Reekie

The Night Sorter, by Jonny Hannah

An unexpected treat came yesterday in the form of a printed catalogue for the latest St Judes exhibition, which is being held at the Scottish Gallery in Edinburgh. Fittingly the prints each have a Scottish theme, and a particularly nice touch is the inclusion of a brief comment by the artists on how they came up with their particular subject.

So we learn that Jonny Hannah was 'inspired by a little known song of the same name, by an obscure Edinburgh band' he played guitar with, while Michael Kirkman recalled a favourite Edinburgh pub, and that Christopher Brown drew inspiration from the wood engravings made in 1934 by Douglas Percy Bliss for the book 'Devil in Scotland'.

Bliss was a great friend of Bawden and Ravilious and the spirit of their time infuses much of the work of these ten very different printmakers; Bawden would have particularly enjoyed Angie Lewin's print, with its centrepiece of a Staffordshire Highland couple. Visitors to the exhibition will have the chance to see the work of the St Judes artists in relation to their illustrious forebears, as prints by Barbara Jones, John Piper, Edward Wadsworth, Bawden, Ravilious and others are also included. As if Edinburgh people weren't spoiled enough!

Christopher Brown, Weel Done, Cutty-sark!

Ed Kluz, The Dunmore Pineapple

Chloe Cheese, Passing Through Parliament Square, Edinburgh

Mark Hearld, Spey Salmon

Emily Sutton, The Fishing Lodge

Angie Lewin, A Highland Gathering

Michael Kirkman, The Canny Man's

Linda Green, Jencks - Landform, Edinburgh

Peter Green, Gehry - Maggie's Centre, Dundee

Ten Printmakers is at the Scottish Gallery until July 23.

If you'd like to know more about the design work of Eric Ravilious, I'm giving a talk at the Royal West of England Academy in Bristol this Saturday, 6 July, at 11am.

St Jude's Random Spectacular

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.