TIRZAH GARWOOD LECTURE NEWS!

Tirzah Garwood, Erskine Returning at Dawn, 1950, oil on canvas

I'm thrilled that my exhibition Tirzah Garwood: Beyond Ravilious will be opening at Dulwich Picture Gallery on 19 November. It's been a fascinating journey since I suggested the show to them three or so years ago, not least because so little study has been made of Garwood's work before. Her life is quite well-documented, thanks to her autobiography Long Live Great Bardfield (written 1942 and after, but only published recently) and to Margy Kinmonth's film Eric Ravilious: Drawn to War. But few outside a close circle of family, friends and fans know her wood engravings, marbled papers, model house constructions and paintings at all well.

So it's been exciting to bring together eighty-plus of these works (along with ten by her first husband, Eric Ravilious) and arrange them in what I hope is a helpful way. I've been wanting to do this for a long time, and in 2018 did bring together Garwood and Ravilious in my exhibition In Relation: Nine Couples who Transformed Modern British Art at RWA Bristol. That experience persuaded me to include a few pertinent wood engravings and watercolours by Ravilious in the first half of the Garwood show; the artists' contrasting approaches to similar motifs are fascinating, and the comparison sheds valuable light on Garwood's creative development.

You'll have an opportunity to get to know Tirzah Garwood a bit better before the exhibition because I'm giving an online lecture on 1 October, which will be recorded and made available to ticket holders for the rest of the month. If you follow the link you should find all the info you need.

 

Seafaring: the Movie!

Well it's less than a minute long, but I think this is a great introduction to my exhibition Seafaring, which runs at Hastings Contemporary until the autumn. Made by Ali Jassim - who can find on Instagram as @just_jassim - the film follows two young visitors as they tour the exhibition, stopping to look at an array of works by artists such as Cecily Brown, Eric Ravilious and Maggi Hambling.

Seafaring runs until 25 September: you can find out all about the show here.

David Remfry: Watercolour - New Book and Exhibition!

Over his long and successful career David Remfry MBE RA RWS has achieved a mastery of watercolour that few have matched. Unusually for the medium, he works on a large scale and often focuses on people, exploring the dance hall and the nightclub in breathtaking images that are at once beautiful and edgy.

This book is the first full-length monograph devoted to the artist's watercolours. Its author, James Russell, is well known for his writing on 20th-century British artists. Russell brings his scholarship, humour and fascination for people and their lives to his study of Remfry's career, tracing the evolution of a remarkable talent, looking in depth at the most significant works and placing Remfry in the context of both the British watercolour tradition and international contemporary painting. This is at once a glorious art book and an intimate portrait of city life.

Having spent 20 years living and working at the legendary Chelsea Hotel in New York, Remfry has a following on both sides of the Atlantic. New Yorkers - often in party mode - feature in many of his watercolours, and his recollections of people and places add colour to the text.

I thoroughly enjoyed working with David on this book and on the accompanying exhibition, which runs until July at the Royal Watercolour Society's beautiful new gallery at Whitcomb St, London W1 (an addition to its Bankside Gallery, NB, not a replacement).

We're going to be In Conversation at the gallery at 6pm on Friday 20 May. Having spent a lot of time chatting with David over the past year I can recommend buying a ticket - he's great fun!

Info and tickets available from the Royal Watercolour Society.

 

 

SEAFARING EXHIBITION AT HASTINGS CONTEMPORARY!

Richard Eurich, Survivors from a Torpedoed Ship, 1942, Tate

 

From fishermen to submariners, migrants to merchant seamen, people throughout the ages have shared the experience of being at sea. Seafaring explores the perils and pleasures of life at sea, while at the same time taking visitors on an art historical voyage from the early 19th century to the present.

At the heart of the exhibition is Lost at Sea, a show-within-a-show featuring three oil paintings by innovative contemporary artist Cecily Brown from her critically-acclaimed Shipwreck series. These are set alongside works by three Romantic artists who inspired her. Eugène Delacroix, Théodore Géricault and J.M.W Turner were among the first painters to focus attention on the plight of  shipwrecked mariners, ordinary people who found themselves at the mercy of the sea. Géricault’s painting The Raft of the Medusa inspired another contemporary artist, Martin Kippenberger, to explore his own mortality in a set of lithographs.

The themes of shipwreck and rescue also play out across the wider Seafaring exhibition, as do those of voyage and migration, work and leisure, war and peace. The exhibition includes works based on artists’ observation of the sea and the creatures that inhabit it, and depictions of the people who, for different reasons, travel the sea by ship or boat. In the late 19th century James Tissot studied travellers embarking and disembarking at the Port of London, while Edward Burne-Jones painted a poignant portrait of a young wife longing for the safe return of her husband from sea. Early in the next, Frank Brangwyn portrayed trawlermen battling rough seas. World War Two gave artists such as Ronald Searle and Edward Ardizzone the opportunity to observe maritime life at first hand. Eric Ravilious briefly became the unofficial artist-in-residence aboard a training submarine. More recently Peter de Francia and Maggi Hambling have explored very different aspects of migration by sea, while Chris Orr offers a light-hearted view on life aboard an ocean liner that complements the elegant posters of the interwar years.  

Seafaring opens at Hastings Contemporary on Saturday 30 April!

Eric Ravilious: Downland Man - opens 25 Sept!!

Front cover, catalogue of Eric Ravilious: Downland Man exhibition

 

Almost a decade after Wiltshire Museum director David Dawson suggested the idea, Eric Ravilious: Downland Man is set to open at said venue on 25 September. Having been forced to delay the exhibition by a year because of Covid I'm excited to be hanging the show this month, especially as there are one or two works I haven't seen for a very long time. 

The catalogue has been sent to the printers by designer Lucy Morton of Illuminati Books, who designed the 2015 Dulwich catalogue and has created another gem for this show. It will be available in the museum shop and on their website. My essay explores the artist's relationship with the chalk hills of southern England, putting his passion for the landscape in historical context. The 1920s and 1930s saw  a great upsurge of interest in the Downs and their history, encouraged by archaeological discoveries at Stonehenge, Avebury and Maiden Castle, where Mortimer Wheeler's excavations were funded by public subscription.  

Downland Man is the title of a 1926 book by philosophically-minded countryside writer HJ Massingham. It was also a title mooted by publisher Noel Carrington for the Puffin Picture Book of chalk figures and other monuments that Ravilious planned to create; the dummy for this book was won at auction by David Dawson in 2012 (on behalf of the museum). It is from the acquisition of this humble but emotionally-charged object that the exhibition grew.

Of course Ravilious had a personal relationship with the chalk hills that began with his boyhood move from London to Eastbourne, and was still going strong when he explored coastal defences at Dover the year before he died in 1942. It was, in his interpretation, a human landscape, scarred and furrowed, and lived-in.

Eric Ravilious: Downland Man opens on 25 September 2021 at the Wiltshire Museum, Devizes. Please book via the website before you go.

I'm giving a lecture on 5 October for the Friends of the South Downs exploring the themes of the exhibition with a particular focus on the region of the national park, entitled Eric Ravilious and the South Downs. It will be via Zoom and booking is open now on the Friends' website.

John Nash: The Landscape of Love and Solace

 

John Nash, The Cornfield, 1918 (Tate)

Few paintings express a soldier’s joy in returning safely home as beautifully as The Cornfield, John Nash’s gilded vision of corn stooks dancing a jig (or so it seems) on a Buckinghamshire hillside. In the summer of 1918 the war was still raging, but he had been plucked from his foxhole in the Flanders mud to work as a war artist alongside his brother Paul. Their days were spent in a former herb-drying shed, working for the Ministry of War on paintings that would serve as a memorial to the conflict. While Paul recreated the phantasmagoric landscapes he had witnessed as an observer in the autumn of 1917, John worked from his firsthand experience of battle to produce first Over The Top, a painting that simply and hauntingly portrays the human cost of war, then Oppy Wood, in which the ghastly trench landscape is shown beneath a sky of blue. The battle was dreadful, the painting seems to say, but it is over.

Think of John Nash and it is probably one of these three oil paintings that will spring to mind. The long and productive career that followed Nash’s brief sojourn as a war artist has largely been forgotten. Indeed, Andrew Lambirth’s elegant 2019 monograph is the first major book on the artist ever published, and The Landscape of Love and Solace, accompanying the new book of the same title by Andy Friend, is the first large-scale exhibition since Nash’s 1967 retrospective at the Royal Academy. Without a strident champion many artists fade from public view after death, and only the best have a chance of being resurrected years later. In Nash’s case such a revival has been on the cards for a while, but the timing of this joyful, sensitive exhibition could not be better. After a year of gallery deprivation visitors to Towner are in for a treat.

Although he lacked formal art school training Nash was from an early age both a gifted draughtsman and acute observer of nature. His love of plants evolved into a passion for gardening, and with a large swathe of the British public sharing this enthusiasm, magazine and book publishers commissioned him to make exquisite botanical illustrations in a variety of media. His line drawings are sensational but Nash was also, lest we forget, one of the pioneers of modern wood engraving. His wicked, wonderful 1927 book Poisonous Plants is a treasure that reveals both his skill as an engraver and the complex chiaroscuro of his personality. Nash experienced more than his share of heartbreak and suffered lifelong from periods of depression. But he retained a delicious sense of humour and a passion for the countryside, the latter inspiring the oil paintings and watercolours of hills and farms, woods and ponds that are his true legacy. There is no overt symbolism or overpowering design in paintings like The Lake, Little Horkesley Hall. The composition is subtle, the tones carefully balanced and the brushwork delicate. These paintings need to be savoured. Like the hidden places Nash sought out, they reveal their secrets slowly. 

John Nash: The Landscape of Love and Solace is at Towner, Eastbourne. I wrote this preview for the May 2021 issue of World of Interiors.