David Inshaw, Roland Collins... & Picasso at the Courtauld

David Inshaw: Bonfire, Tree, Moon & Firework, 2012 

Yesterday I finally got to see David Inshaw's unsettling masterpiece 'The Badminton Game' in person, hanging in its rightful place on a gallery wall. Meticulously painted with a crazy sort of pointillist-meets-pre-Raphaelite attention to detail, it transforms a summery moment into a scene that is both whimsical and ominous. This sense of something unknown lurking behind an otherwise beautiful scene gives David's best work its attention-holding power, and if you're a fan of British landscape painting, post-war art in general or just wonderful pictures, I would hightail down New Bond Street to the Fine Art Society and have a look at the exhibition.

The Fine Art Society, with Badminton Game and mink.

Some of the figures are good, particularly the triptych of a woman draped in a towel, but I think the countryside brings out the best in an artist whose work is in the great tradition of visionary British landscape painters. Like Paul Nash he has a peculiar feeling for trees, and like Eric Ravilious he finds imaginative ways to explore chalk figures - particularly the Cerne Abbas giant. Crows in flight, bonfires, cliffs and water-filled ditches are all presented coolly and without fuss, yet each motif is charged with ambiguous emotions.

15 Paintings by David Inhaw, Fine Art Society (a bit dark, sorry)

If you want to know more, have a look at what Andrew Lambirth has to say, visit David's website, or best of all go along to the show.

Meanwhile, in another part of the city... in fact just round the corner in Cork Street, Browse and Darby have an exhibition of work by Roland Collins, who at the age of 94 is enjoying a well-deserved popularity. After a sold-out show at Mascalls last year he has recently exhibited at the Rye Art Gallery, and now has this small but lovely London exhibition.

Roland Collins, Belgrave Mews

His are paintings that do better with fairly subtle lighting, so that the colours are more natural, and this is the case here. Rather than being dazzled you can focus on his wonderful compositions, the best of which draw the eye through the foreground into some half-hidden scene behind. This show also features watercolours from the early part of his career - in the late 1930s - so you can see how his work exploded into life after the war, when he loosened up and grew more bold.

Roland Collins, A Shore Off the Yacht Club, Whitstable

Meanwhile, in another part of the city... As I had a little time before going to Greenwich to talk about 'Ravilious: Submarine', I trotted along to the Courtauld Gallery - surely one of the most civilized places in London. In fact it's more or less the perfect art museum, being small, fairly quiet and full of interest. Trying to order a cup of tea in the cafe proved to be a bit of a challenge, but then I was able to sit outside and look up at the sky...

If you have a friend who is interested in art history but intimidated by the vastness of most museums, the Courtauld is the perfect place to start. Starting at the bottom and working your way up through the three floors you see examples of work from diverse periods in European art, from the 14th century to the 20th. It's unusual to see such a carefully selected group of pictures covering such a wide time-frame, and fascinating to chart developments and influences.

It struck me that the figures in the current exhibition, Becoming Picasso: Paris 1901, have much in common with the very earliest pictures in the collection, being simplified and expressive. The overwhelming impression, though, was of the Spaniard's sheer energy; accompanying photos show the maniacal light in his eyes, while the paintings themselves are bursting with life. One day, I think, people will look at Picasso's more grotesque work and wonder what all the fuss was about, but in these youthful paintings his brilliance, emotional power and vitality is clear to see.

View of the Courtauld, with melancholy barmaid

Still, the picture I spent longest enjoying was 'A Bar at the Folies-Bergere'. A couple were very earnestly discussing the fact that the girl's reflection isn't quite right - it should be directly behind, perhaps, rather than off to the side. Meanwhile, the barmaid gazed out, as she has done for more than a century, waiting without much hope for her shift to be over.

Devizes Festival Preview: Eric Ravilious & The White Horses of Wiltshire

Eric Ravilious, Train Landscape, 1939 (DACS/artist's estate)

STOP PRESS! DEVIZES TALK SOLD OUT! 2ND DATE POSSIBLE...

On June 28th I'll be at Devizes Town Hall, giving an illustrated talk on Eric Ravilious and the White Horses of Wiltshire as part of the Devizes Festival. After very enjoyable events at the RWA Bristol, Much Ado Books in Alfriston and Greenside School in west London I'm looking forward to it, especially as I'm planning to ride my bike at least part of the way from Bristol.

Apart from the wonderful enthusiasm for Ravilious's work I find in all these different places, the thing I enjoy most is meeting people with a connection to the world I've studied through books and correspondence. The number of people, for instance, who were taught by or are related to Peggy Angus (artist, teacher, tenant of Furlongs in Sussex) is astonishing, and everyone has something fascinating to add to the picture.

Ravilious disappeared on active service 70 years ago this coming September, and his world grows ever more remote. There are few people left these days who remember him personally, although artist David Hepher shared some tantalizing childhood memories at the Fry Gallery last year.

People grow old and die; letters and sketches and so on are scattered and lost. But whereas this process is irreversible for us mortals, the things which surround us can return from the dead - or appear to. Which brings us to my reason for coming to Devizes in June...

Eric Ravilious, White Horse Dummy, c1940

Earlier this year a remarkable artifact came up for auction: the dummy of a book of white horses and other chalk figures which was put together by Ravilious in 1940. He had already made the drawings he needed, and he prepared the dummy for Noel Carrington, editor of the new Puffin Picture Books series for children. Carrington was all set to go ahead with the project but due to time constraints Ravilious was forced to postpone.

For years it was believed that the artist had taken this dummy to Iceland with him, and perhaps had it with him when he disappeared. Then it turned up in London, and I assumed someone had found it as people do sometimes when they go through boxes of old papers. But even this was wrong. The dummy wasn't lost. Rather it was in the possession of artist Roland Collins, who had been given it by Noel Carrington when they were neighbours in Percy Street, Bloomsbury during and after the war.

I wrote a post on the dummy in January, just before the little book came up for auction. I hoped that a museum would buy it rather than a private collector, and in the end the bidding was won by the Wiltshire Heritage Museum in Devizes. There's something particularly satisfying about this, given the proximity of the white horses at Westbury and Uffington, both of which Ravilious drew, and it gives me a chance to revisit the landscapes I explored in 'Ravilious in Pictures: Sussex and the Downs'.

Eric Ravilious, The Westbury Horse, 1939 (DACS/artist's estate)

Curious to think that when Ravilious sketched the white horses in December 1939 they were about to be turfed over, to prevent them being used as navigational aids by enemy aircraft. It was by no means certain that they would be uncovered again.

I'm at the Town Hall, Devizes at 8pm, 28th June. The Devizes Festival runs from 13 June to 1 July and there are all kinds of strange and wonderful events to choose from: details are here.


Future talks:


Alan Powers and I will be talking about Eric Ravilious for the Friends of the Towner in Eastbourne on September 2.


I'll be discussing Ravilious and Paul Nash at the Rye Arts Festival later in September.

A Point of Departure: Eric Slater to Wolfgang Tillmans

Eric Slater, Cuckmere Haven, 1930s

These days departure from Britain tends to involve taking off into the sky or descending into a tunnel, but until recently the idea of doing either would have been fantastic. If you wanted to leave these islands at any point up to about 1960 you had to take a boat. Ports were not only strategically important but emotionally charged; people left London, Bristol, Liverpool and Southampton knowing that they might never return. During the Great War the ports of southern England were gateways to France and the Western Front, particularly Portsmouth and Newhaven. How many soldiers watched the chalk cliffs recede, wondering whether they would see them again?

This thought struck me when I first heard about the current exhibition at the Towner in Eastbourne. 'A Point of Departure' refers specifically to Newhaven, a port which played such an essential part in supplying men and materials to the battlefields just across the Channel that it was taken over by the military for the duration of the conflict. In peacetime the quickest route from London to Paris was by train and steamship via Newhaven and Le Havre, and during the war men and materials followed a similar route.

Eric Ravilious, Beachy Head, 1939 (DACS/artist's estate)

One can imagine the delight of the surviving soldiers when, returning at the war's end, they came in sight of Beachy Head or the Seven Sisters. But if the white chalk cliffs symbolised home to the returning armies, they soon came to mean something different: freedom from the constraints of modern urban life. This is what I feel, certainly, in the coloured woodcuts of Eric Slater, which are featured in the Towner show (there's a nice introduction to his work here). At the very edge of the land, the cliffs and beaches offered the promise of escape to sea and, more literally, the possibility of a new life in the unplanned housing developments and bungalow towns springing up along the south coast.

Artists continued to come to Sussex, as they had done for generations. Where John Constable had found inspiration in the marine light and nautical incident of Brighton, artists of the 1930s were now drawn to Newhaven. I've posted before on Ravilious, Bawden and Piper, all of whom stayed at The Hope Inn beneath the ramparts of Newhaven Fort, and looked out to sea. It was the light that interested Ravilious, as it had the film-makers who set up a studio on Shoreham Beach before the Great War, whereas Piper seemed more attuned to something wild and elemental in the place.

Ravilious returned on numerous occasions to this coast, exploring clifftops and estuaries and finding novel approaches to famous sights. After World War Two Roland Collins built on the foundations laid by Ravilious and the rest, creating colourful multilayered pictures that present familiar scenes in new ways. One of the fascinating things about this exhibition is the artists' ability to look again and again at the same old places, finding new inspiration where most of us would think none could be found.

Wolfgang Tillmans, End of Land 1, 2002 (Towner)

In this spirit, look at Wolfgang Tillmans' photograph 'End of Land 1', which shows a woman approaching the clifftop at Beachy Head in the only sensible manner. But where is the photographer taking the picture from? We seem to be looking back at the cliff, as if slipping down the face, and it isn't a comfortable sensation. We are a long way here from Slater's woodcuts, or Vera Lynn's bluebirds over Dover. Although an island nation, we're becoming increasingly cut off from the sea; to previous generations the white cliffs may have been a Welcome Home sign chalked across the horizon, but today they mark the edge of our world.

A Point of Departure runs at Towner, Eastbourne until 11 November 2012

Long Term Memory: Roland Collins' Found Landscapes

Rye Harbour, 1958

There can't be too many living artists who exhibited in the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition of 1937, but painter Roland Collins did just that. He was eighteen that year, and his drawing 'Riverside, Chiswick' shows the vision and talent that would sustain him through a long career; the current retrospective at Mascall's Gallery in Kent features a painting from 2005, which means he must have been painting for seven decades.

If there's one word I would use to describe Collins' paintings, most of which combine gouache with pen and ink, it's 'jaunty'. Here is an artist who is enjoying himself thoroughly, seeking out interesting sights and scenes and painting them in a style that mixes carefree brushwork with detailed architectural drawing. Sometimes it seems as though a topographical drawing has collided with a colourful abstract painting, creating a highly individual picture that is strangely compelling.

Newhaven Harbour, 1962

Mascall's is one of those small, idiosyncratic galleries (like the Fry Art Gallery and Kettles Yard) that have done so much to maintain and reawaken interest in 20th century British art. Last year curator Nathaniel Hepburn gave us 'John Piper in Kent and Sussex', a fascinating survey which went on to the Towner; two of the paintings were then bought by the Eastbourne gallery and will, I believe, be on display this summer alongside work by Ravilious, Bawden and Collins himself, in Towner's exhibition 'A Point of Departure'.

It was as a result of the Piper show that Hepburn discovered Collins. As he told me, "A chance remark was made by Andrew Lambirth about Collins' work being in a similar romantic topographic tradition and I leapt at the opportunity to meet an artist still working in this genre. Once I saw the works in his studio it was obvious that this was an artist who deserved wider recognition and would be loved by our visitors."

Lambirth wrote an essay for the unpretentious and rather beautiful catalogue accompanying 'Found Landscapes', in which his enthusiasm for Collins and his work comes through strongly.

Gunnersbury Park, 1990

Growing up in London between the wars, Collins evidently took notice of the exhibitions at Tooth's, the Zwemmer Gallery and other venues in the capital. Look at his pictures and you see echoes of Ravilious and Bawden, Piper and Paul Nash. There's a similarity to Kenneth Rowntree's work in some of the paintings, but Collins is a good enough artist to have absorbed powerful influences and created a body of work that stands on its own and which is still fresh and exciting today.

Fans of Ravilious and co. will recognise many of the scenes and subjects chosen by Collins. Rye Harbour features in one picture, Newhaven in another. There's a lovely painting of Beachy Head painted from within Belle Tout Lighthouse, which is a wonderful foil to Ravilious's painting of the same view. Whereas the earlier watercolour captures the lantern room in all its interwar glory, Collins shows the old lighthouse after being used as target practice by Canadian troops.

Beachy Head from Belle Tout, 1958

Did the two artists ever meet? I suspect not, since there is no mention of a meeting in the catalogue. However, Collins did get to know many other artists and writers of the time. In 1940 he moved to 29 Percy Street in Fitzrovia, an address shared by publisher Noel Carrington (Dora's brother and editor of Penguin's Picture Puffins), and a haunt of creative types like the poet Kathleen Raine. Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant had a flat next door during the late 1950s, a connection which takes us back into the Victorian age.

The Old Neptune, Whitstable, 1986

But though there is inevitably something nostalgic about these paintings and about the exhibition, I don't feel as though I'm looking respectfully at a collection of past art. In fact, given the recent rediscovery of Bawden, Ravilious and their peers by younger artists and illustrators, you could - if you knew nothing about Roland Collins - easily mistake this for an exhibition by an up-and-coming young painter who is looking at interwar paintings of place through the filter of Pop Art. Fabulous.

'Roland Collins: Found Landscapes' is at Mascall's Gallery, Paddock Wood until 30 June.
The accompanying catalogue is available from the gallery, price £10 plus p&p.

Paintings featured are all by Roland Collins and remain his copyright.