Mockford & Doig (plus new Ravilious date)

Harold Mockford, Eastbourne, 1958 (artist's estate)

It was great to see so many people at our talk in Eastbourne on Sunday - 150 or thereabouts, including an MP and the Mayor and his wife! Aside from a minor crisis in the biscuit supply chain, everything went very smoothly, and I managed to use a clip-on mic without sounding as though I were trapped inside a 1920s wireless... There was even a raffle, which came as a bit of a surprise. If you live near Eastbourne, join the Friends of the Towner! And visit the Harold Mockford retrospective, which runs until the end of the month and features a host of lovely, inventive landscape paintings.

Harold Mockford, The Long Man of Wilmington (artist's estate)

On the way home I stopped in at Tate Britain to see what was going on, and found a quite odd but interesting set-up in the main hall, with paintings like Paul Nash's 'Totes Meer' and Sutherland's 'Entrance to a Lane' presented salon-style with various related artworks, photos, etc. Unfortunately I didn't have time to work out exactly what it was all about, but it seemed like a good way to breathe new life into familiar paintings... By contrast the galleries of 20th century British art seemed a bit tired, although Peter Doig's 'Echo Lake' was fabulous. Here's an artist who manages to be both painterly and tuned in to our media-saturated world - I will definitely try and see this painting again before it vanishes back into the gallery's nether regions.

Constable vs Turner is one of my favourite Tate games, almost as fun as Spot the Lowry. I always want to like Constable more because Turner was such a thoroughly unlikeable man, but this time 'Norham Castle' beat one of the Brighton beach paintings hands down. Obviously not in the mood for all that leafy green...

Peter Doig, Echo Lake, 1998 (Tate/ artist's estate)

Have just discovered that my talk on Rav and Paul Nash at the Rye Arts Festival later in the month has sold out, so sorry if you haven't managed to get a ticket for that. During October I'm going to be busy launching a new, updated edition of The Naked Guide to Cider, and also pressing apples for the Totterdown Press 2012 vintage.

Then on November 6th I'll be giving an illustrated talk on Ravilious for Hungerford Books, though I can't remember off the top of my head where in Hungerford it's going to be. The time is 7pm, and I'm sure you can get further info from the shop.

After that, we have the V&A Study Day on Sat 17th Nov, then I'll be in Devizes the following Saturday, 24 Nov. Finally, there's the St Bride evening on Weds 5th Dec. More info on all of these HERE.

Parade's End: TV with an Eye for Painting

Fans of BBC costume drama may be slightly perplexed by Parade's End, which depicts the world of the upper classes in the early 20th century as cold and carelessly brutal. The first episode also had decidedly odd moments which may well have put off some viewers, such as the scene involving a vicar with Tourette's, but I was captivated throughout by the cinematography, which seems to reflect the director's interest in British landscape painting of the (approximate) period.

Many of the rural scenes, and particularly the panoramic landscape shots, might have been inspired by watercolours painted by Ravilious in the 1930s. One lingering image shows fields sloping downhill, striped by plough or roller, like the fields in 'Mount Caburn'. Another features a pale but incandescent sun rising over misty hills, and another a train steaming across a landscape dominated by the white horse of Westbury.

This is followed by a shot of the interior of the train, in which the white horse appears framed by the window. Perhaps this is coincidence - after all, anyone who has travelled from London to the south-west via  Castle Cary will have seen the same image - but I can't imagine there's a Rav fan who didn't immediately think of 'Train Landscape'.

Eric Ravilious, Mount Caburn (DACS/Artist's estate)

Damn, now I'll have to read the book to see whether Ravilious was inspired to paint his picture by a passage in it! And I never managed to finish 'The Good Soldier', which is much shorter than the four-books-in-one that is 'Parade's End'. I'm sorry, but I found Ford Madox Ford painfully dull.

Anyway, painting was in my mind as I started watching the show for a reason. By chance I had come across an article on the website of Broadcast magazine, in which director Susanna White talked about how she put together the battlefield scenes which I suspect will dominate the remaining episodes. Anyone who tries to dramatize the Western Front is going to be aware of all the films and TV series that have gone before, and at the moment the success of 'War Horse' must weigh particularly heavy.

Ms White says as much in the Broadcast piece, 'Tom [Stoppard, screenwriter] and I had visited the set of Steven Spielberg’s War Horse, trenches stretching as far as the eye could see, wide enough to gallop a horse down. How could we compete? We took the opposite approach and drew on documentary photographs to come up with narrow channels through mud walls, only just wide enough for two men to squeeze past each other.'

Paul Nash, Wire, 1918 (IWM)

I haven't seen the results yet, but the approach is absolutely right. The British trench system was famously inadequate compared to the concrete fortifications the Germans built, and in the front lines it was often little more than a shallow trough in which men cowered. The British top brass did not believe in fortification: they wanted the army to be mobile, constantly on the offensive, so trench-building was as minimal as possible. Read Edmund Blunden's harrowing but beautiful book 'Undertones of War' for more on this...

To create this non-'War Horse' vision of the Western Front, meanwhile, the director turned to another of my favourite artists:

Paul Nash, Landscape Hill 60, 1918 (IWM)

'We pared it right back – few duckboards, few sandbags, opting instead for organic curves of pure mud with bare shattered trees, like the spare landscapes in paintings by Paul Nash. One shot of the battlefield at night is a direct quote from a Nash painting, brought to life with moving flares and explosions.'

Is it unusual for a film-maker to seek inspiration in paintings? I don't know. But Nash was there, in the front lines, and he recorded what he saw in an extraordinary series of sketches and paintings. You can see a lot of them on the website of the Imperial War Museum, and they're as fresh and chilling as they were when he exhibited them in 1917/18. He made his first sketches as an infantry officer training with his men in preparation for the Battle of Passchendaele, and he was only able to exhibit them because he fell into a trench one night, broke a rib and was invalided home.

A great deal of cajoling then brought him a commission as a war artist, and he was able to return in the autumn to record the latter stages of the battle. These pictures, which he showed in the spring of 1918, were widely acknowledged as the most authentic vision of the life on the Western Front.

Paul Nash, Sunset: Ruin of the Hospice, Wytschaete, 1917 (IWM)

‘This is a beautiful and wonderful world, he seems to say,’ wrote a critic in the Times, ‘and see what man has made of it. See also how even man’s insanity cannot rob the tortured and battered earth of its beauty. In many of his drawings he has been struck by the strange, unaccountable beauty of the meaningless shapes of things so tortured and battered. They make an abstract music of their own, like the abstract music of form that the cubist tries to make for himself. Mr Nash has not had to make it; it was there for him to see; utter chaos, as of a world dead for a million years, frozen and without atmosphere, and yet beautiful to frightened human eyes…’

Herbert Read, a serving soldier who would become one of the most influential critics of his time, felt that Nash ‘could convey, as no other artist, the phantasmagoric atmosphere of No Man’s Land.’

I'm looking forward to seeing what Susanna White conjures from Nash's vision. Christopher Tietjens seems like the kind of honourable, sensitive man for whom the trenches will prove hellish but easier to cope with than Society.


 

Remembering Eric Ravilious (1903-42)

Eric Ravilious, Hurricanes in Flight, 1942 (DACS/Artist's Estate)

On 2nd September 1942 Eric Ravilious disappeared, along with four British airmen, when their Hudson aircraft failed to return from an air-sea rescue mission off the coast of Iceland. He had only just arrived at RAF Kaldadarnes, whence he had been posted at his own request and with the blessing of Kenneth Clark, head of the War Artists' Advisory Committee, who admired the work he had done two years earlier off the Norwegian coast. One can only imagine that he volunteered to join the air-sea rescue flight in the hope of capturing the moment of rescue.

This Sunday, to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the artist's disappearance, Alan Powers and I will each be giving an illustrated talk at the Birley Centre in Eastbourne, for the Friends of the Towner Art Gallery. I will be exploring the life and work of Ravilious the watercolourist, looking in depth at a number of his Sussex pictures and endeavouring to give a flavour of the artist and his times. There's a tendency these days to see him as rather an austere character - a haunter of solitary Downland ways - and I hope to show him as someone much more human, brilliant but down to earth.

Ravilious in uniform

Alan will then explore his work as a designer and, in particular, the reception of this work by his peers. What kind of reputation did Ravilious enjoy during his lifetime? How was his work perceived in the years following his disappearance? I'm greatly looking forward to hearing what Alan has to say on this subject, since I've always found it rather perplexing that an artist of such obvious talent could disappear so thoroughly from view for several decades.

I appreciate that fashions change, but I find it hard to believe that the people who enjoyed David Inshaw's work so much in the 1970s wouldn't have flocked to a Ravilious show. How could the painter of 'Train Landscape' and 'Chalk Paths', not to mention the designer of the Alphabet series, fall so far out of favour? All I can think of is that, with no monograph to encourage interest and only the occasional exhibition, people just didn't know about him. That they do now is thanks primarily to Anne Ullmann, Eric's daughter, who edited two major books on his work for the Fleece Press.

Anne was only a toddler when her father disappeared, but though she may have been too young to remember him properly, I wonder whether some recollection of his presence stayed with her. Few people remain alive who remember Eric Ravilious, however there have been in recent years several rather miraculous instances of lost artworks and artifacts returning from oblivion. Last year it was his dummy for a Puffin Picture Book on White Horses, and a few years before that a pair of early watercolours that turned up among the effects of a collector in Surrey.

On Tuesday 4th September a new find is up for auction at Sworders' auction house in Stanton Mountfitchet: five of the auto-lithographs made by Ravilious in 1940/41 and known nowadays as the Submarine Series. These were apparently found shoved down the side of a bed in north London, though whose bed it was and how they got there I have no idea. Sworders had great success with the White Horse Dummy, which was bought by the Museum of Wiltshire Life in Devizes, and they're hoping the new find will prove equally popular.

Eric Ravilious, Introductory Drawing (aka Submarine Dream), auto-lithograph, 1941

It is important to stress that these are not lithographs made by a printer from the artist's design but auto-lithographs. Ravilious himself prepared the plates for printing and then worked closely with the lithography team at WS Cowell's printing works in Ipswich. Unlike traditional prints, like etchings, which are sold in a numbered edition of very similar prints, these submarine lithographs are unnumbered and (mostly) unsigned, but the artist's presence can be felt strongly in the way they vary across the edition - in colour, tone and minor details. About fifty sets of ten were printed, one of which can be seen at the Fry Art Gallery.

Whether these five prints end up in a public institution or in a private collection, it's wonderful that they have reappeared after so long, to be enjoyed as they should be. And don't despair if you're not planning to bid: the full Submarine Series plus a number of the artist's preparatory drawings will be published this autumn by the Mainstone Press in a beautiful new book, 'Ravilious: Submarine'.

Ravilious Talk Dates: Eastbourne, Rye & Devizes, St Brides & the V&A

I can't quite believe that I managed to cycle from Bradford-on-Avon to Devizes one day, and back the next, without getting rained on. There was one meteorological challenge on the way back, though, namely a brisk sou'westerly blowing gustily in my face. With my shorts acting like a pair of small but effective spinnakers I was propelled backwards almost as fast as my legs could pedal me forwards, and it was a great relief to arrive at Bradford and consume a battered sausage and chips from the excellent chippy next to the station.

The visit itself was great fun, with a close inspection of the Ravilious White Horse dummy at the Wiltshire Heritage Museum followed by an unscheduled tour of the museum's unrivalled library of books relating to the county and its treasures. My talk was in the most beautiful Regency (or Georgian?) ballroom at the Town Hall, and, once we'd resolved a microphone issue that made my voice sound as though it were emerging from the speaker of a badly tuned 1920s wireless, everything went well. There was even someone in the audience who knew Peggy Angus, as there seems to be in every audience of Ravilious fans... Great to meet David Dawson and catch up with David Inshaw.

Anyone who was disappointed to miss the Devizes talk (which sold out) should keep an eye out for a repeat performance, which may well take place in November. **

Meanwhile, you can now book tickets for upcoming events in Eastbourne and Rye, and at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

The Eastbourne event, where Alan Powers will also be giving an illustrated talk, is on Sunday 2nd Sept and is timed to commemorate the disappearance of Eric Ravilious off the coast of Iceland in 1942. Tickets are available HERE.

On Friday 21st Sept, as part of the Rye Arts Festival, I'll be talking about Ravilious and Paul Nash in relation to the countryside and coast nearby. Tickets and information HERE and do check out the rest of the programme, which looks great.

And on 17 November I'm joining Alan, Brian Webb and Gill Saunders at the V&A for an Eric Ravilious Study Day. Information and booking HERE. 

Finally, Eric Ravilious and lithography is the subject for a St Bride Library lecture on 5 December, with Joe Pearson and Alan Powers taking part. More info on booking for that one nearer the time, but you can always look at the St Bride website...

** PS The rematch of Ravilious and the White Horses of Wiltshire will take place on Sat 24 November - for details please contact the Wiltshire Heritage Museum.

Eric Ravilious & The White Horses of Wiltshire

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

Although figures can be found carved into chalk hillsides all across the downland of southern England, a disproportionate number of the nation's white horses are in Wiltshire. I think there are eight altogether, with the Westbury Horse the most easily seen. Take a train from London to Devon or Cornwall via Castle Cary and you'll be treated to a view rather like the one Eric Ravilious portrayed (with a little help from his wife Tirzah) in 'Train Landscape'. The interior of a train may have changed but the white horse remains the same, which is no doubt one reason why people love them.

Quite how devoted people are to these equine carvings will be demonstrated over the coming week, as a whole series of related events gets under way. Tomorrow sees the launch of the Salisbury International Festival's celebration of Wiltshire's White Horses, which culminates next Saturday (30th June) with the illumination of the Devizes and Alton Barnes White Horses. The organisers promise a magical evening of fire, light and music at each venue, free of charge and with no ticket needed.

Between now and then, artist Ali Pretty will be leading a 100 mile walk around the county's chalk horses, with walks of varying lengths and difficulty on each day. As well as exploring the fascinating landscape of the chalk downs, walkers will have the chance to meet historians, environmentalists, writers (including Michael Morpurgo), artists and seasoned long distance walkers. There's no charge to join in, but you do need a ticket as numbers are limited.

Meanwhile, as reported in the New York Times yesterday, the Wiltshire Heritage Museum in Devizes is putting on show a new and rather extraordinary acquisition: the dummy of a Puffin Picture Book on white horses that was proposed by Eric Ravilious in 1940/41 and accepted by publisher Noel Carrington, but never produced. There's more on this story here, but the upshot is that the museum bid successfully for the dummy in January and is now revealing it to the public for the first time.

I'm planning to go and see this marvellous artefact in situ before I give a talk on the subject next Thursday at Devizes Town Hall, under the auspices of the Devizes Festival. The talk sold out a while ago but there are mutterings about a second one...

Meanwhile, exciting news from Museum chief David Dawson, who has been telling the BBC that he wants to produce a version of the Ravilious book:

"We would like to try and create the sort of book he intended," he told an interviewer. "It can't be a re-creation as there's not enough information - so it's going to take a lot of work."

I wonder whether the interval between proposal and publication would be some kind of world record!

Does Bloomsday Matter?

1992 Penguin edition, with embarrassing annotations...

This morning, for the first time since we moved here 7 and a half years ago, I took my old copy of 'Ulysses' down from the shelf. It's a 1992 Penguin edition designed for students, and I bought it a year after publication. Not because I wanted to, particularly, but because I was about to study the book for an MA in Modernism. I read it through at least twice and filled the margins with earnest pencilled notes about 'discourse', 'narrative disjunction' and, though I'm loath to admit it, 'phallocentrism'.

It seems impossible now either that I devoted so much time and energy to one book or that I swallowed all the critical hokum I was fed by my professor, an ardent post-structuralist with a reputation for seducing female students. But I was bright and directionless, and Joyce's mad book spoke to me. So I read, annotated and wrote about 'Ulysses' and then put it on the shelf, and have since moved it in and out of different houses without opening it again until this morning.

Flicking through the dusty pages the first thing that struck me was not the length of the book but the extraordinary power of Joyce's voice. From the first sentence to the last 'Ulysses' is one long bravura performance, a fantastically long and complex song. Think of the book as a novel and you're doomed to boredom by the end of the first page; there is no recognisable plot, and the characters are not driven by a novelist's sure hand. Instead they come and go like snatches of melody as the song rolls on.

This song is a hymn to Dublin, 'the second city of the Empire' as Joyce described it hopefully to London publishers (who took no notice), and to the Edwardian age. Did you see the films of Mitchell and Kenyon which were unearthed and shown on TV a few years ago? Made around the same time, though in England, they show city streets teeming with life, and it is this kind of human metropolis that Joyce presents in 'Ulysses'. If you want to know how many characters appear in the book, what their names are and who they are modelled on, you can easily find out, as 'Ulysses' has been picked apart and examined in every possible way by thousands of highly-trained academics. But you probably don't.

Instead, you may be wondering whether you should give 'Ulysses' a go. After all the book does have a day named after its main character, Leopold Bloom, which must give Joyce's ghost (who I'm sure wanders Dublin's streets alongside Molly Malone and her barrow of cockles) great pleasure. June 16 is, as you may know, the single day over which the action of the book takes place, and each year there seems to be a bit more fuss made over it. But does this make the book itself worth reading? Is this the sort of book that will change your life, as 'The Remembrance of Things Past' is supposed to? I struggled through the first volume of Proust, incidentally, but only just...

The trouble is that it's very difficult to sit down and read this book (I was going to say 'a book like this' but there aren't any others). Like many people I got to grips with it because I was told to, and I had time to read a difficult chapter over and over until it made sense. Even so, there are large chunks of the text that never did, particularly the sections where Joyce was sending up a now-defunct literary genre. There are passages written in the tawdry prose of Edwardian romance novels, for example, and I can't see any reason why reading those would change anyone's life.

But there are several reasons why I think 'Ulysses' is worth trying - and persevering with. If you can make sense of the writing it offers a wonderful picture of Edwardian Dublin, one brimming with life and music and character, and if you're interested in the poetic use of language you will find untold riches here. If you're sensitive to the power of words there are phrases and sentences in this book that will bring tears to your eyes, passages equal to anything in 'The Wasteland' (to take one example).

And then, above all, there's the voice within a voice, the quiet, wry counterpoint to Joyce's loud and insistent song. Though in some ways the most elusive of literary heroes, Leopold Bloom is a constant presence as you journey through the book. Sly, observant, packed full of strange and wonderful thoughts, Bloom makes his way around the streets of Dublin on an everyday journey made extraordinary by his intelligence.

For me, the book really gets going in Chapter Two (p65 of my edition) when we first meet Mr Bloom preparing breakfast for his wife Molly:

     Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liver slices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencod's roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.
     Kidneys were in his mind as he moved about the kitchen softly, righting her breakfast things on the humpy tray. Gelid light and air were in the kitchen but out of doors gentle summer morning everywhere. Made him feel a bit peckish.

It's that last sentence which is the killer, and it's the constant, earthy, human presence of Bloom which makes 'Ulysses' such a glorious, life-affirming book. Joyce invented him and wrote the book between 1914 and 1921, when Europe was in the process of tearing itself apart, and both book and protagonist stand as a defiant monument to civilisation writ small, the civilisation of ordinary men and women living ordinary lives. In that sense, 'Ulysses' is a life-changer; it can make you appreciate just how wonderful something as mundane as breakfast can be! You can always skip the hard bits.

Happy Bloomsday!

Ravilious: Submarine

Eric Ravilious, Commander... Looking through a Periscope, 1941

I'm hard at work on an exciting project, which is proving as much an adventure of discovery as the 'Ravilious in Pictures' books. For some time now Tim Mainstone and I have been plotting a book about the artist's second major foray into lithography, the set of prints he made in 1940/41 while working as a war artist. Known as the Submarine Series, these are, like the illustrations of shops in 'High Street', auto-lithographs. Ravilious made them himself, rather than handing his artwork over to a master lithographer, and individual prints vary widely across the edition, reflecting his tinkering during the printing process. Each one has the status of an original work of art, rather than a reproduction.

Most of the ten pictures show submariners at work or rest aboard their craft, while others focus on the kind of quirky subjects Ravilious enjoyed: the arcane equipment used by mine disposal experts or a diver preparing for the water.

The full set was on show at the Royal West of England Academy during their recent Ravilious show, and I was interested to learn from observant museum staff that the lithos were the most popular works, particularly among more youthful visitors. They are in some ways quite unlike his landscapes, being bold in colour and focused on people rather than place, but you can see the same economical designer's eye at work. Compare one of these interiors with, say, Barnett Freedman's interpretation of a similar scene, and you can see how much detail Ravilious has stripped away in his quest for clarity.

Barnett Freedman, Interior of a Submarine, watercolour, 1943 (Tate)

He had been rather taken to task when his magnificent paintings of the ill-fated Norwegian expedition of May 1940 were exhibited at the National Gallery, with critics suggesting that he was more interested in the effects of light in the far north than he was in the human drama of war. I think this was his response. In the best war art - like Paul Nash's visions of the Passchendaele battlefield - the artist's technique fits the subject matter so well that the finished picture serves both as a record of what a particular place or experience was LIKE and as a work of art in its own right. Nash's pictures of Flanders were beautiful and at the same time perfectly evocative of 'the phantasmagoria of No Man's Land', as one critic put it; similarly, the lithographs in the Submarine Series are beautifully designed and executed artworks that capture the intensity and human drama of the war beneath the waves.

Eric Ravilious, Diving Controls No.1, 1941

Anyway, the adventure for me - quite apart from discovering strange and wonderful details of the submariner's life - has been in learning about the extraordinary flowering of auto-lithography among British artists in the mid-20th century. The period from about 1930 until well after World War Two saw artists taking up the challenge of making their own lithographic prints, and some of the results are gorgeous. I just bought a copy of George Borrow's eccentric classic 'Lavengro', which was printed at the Curwen Press in Plaistow, Essex, in 1936 and illustrated with colour lithos by Ravilious's good friend Barnett Freedman. What a wonderful book! There's lots to say about Borrow and Freedman, but to start with, have a look at this.

From what I've seen of the preliminary design ideas, 'Ravilious: Submarine' is going to be stunning, illustrated not only with the Submarine Series and preparatory drawings but also with examples - some rarely seen - of lithography from Britain, Russia and France. Having said that, I better get back to work!

'Ravilious: Submarine' will be published by the Mainstone Press in October.


St Bride's Print Library will be hosting an evening devoted to early/mid 20th century lithography on December 5th. I'll be talking about the Submarine Series, while Alan Powers and Joe Pearson - an authority on Noel Carrington and the Puffin Picture Books - will discuss other fascinating aspects of the subject. More info on this to follow...

Edward Thomas & 'The Old Ways'

Edward Thomas, 1916, by John Wheatley (National Portrait Gallery)

A century ago, Edward Thomas was in his mid-30s and on the verge of despair. Though well known and respected as a literary critic of great skill and sensitivity, he hadn't come close to achieving the success he had dreamed of when he started out as a professional writer more than a decade earlier. Every month he read numerous books and sent in thousands of words of articles and criticism, and every year or so he was commissioned to write a book, which he generally did at great speed, with minimal editing. Unsurprisingly, neither the reading public nor his fellow critics were ever that impressed.

He considered suicide on more than one occasion, and what would have happened to him had war not broken out in August 1914 one hardly dare imagine. Thomas was immensely gifted as a writer, and published his first book when still very young, yet his books are for the most part difficult going. Even when he wrote about his heroes Richard Jefferies and George Borrow he failed to bring his subject to life. His problem, one not unfamiliar to writers and artists, is that he was endeavouring to support a family in a way that was all but impossible, as a principled, devoutly literary writer who refused to teach and was too burned-out to write the bestseller that would have made his name.

It took George Orwell decades to match, in his earnings as a writer, the salary he had enjoyed as a very junior Imperial officer in Burma, and the concomitant sense of failure drove him to the extreme, self-destructive behaviour that gave us 'Down and Out in Paris and London'. He at least knew success for a few years before his early death, but Thomas never even saw an edition of his poetry published under his own name.

Imagine, though, his joy when that first poem came bubbling into his mind, and then the next, and the next! Imagine, after having to write tens of thousands of words every month without a break, his pleasure in the long empty evenings and weekends at Hare Hall, the Artists' Rifles' Essex HQ and the simple notebook with its scribbled lines. He may have scrawled his verses without line breaks so nobody would suspect him of being a poet, but deep down he knew they were good.

Today, Edward Thomas is better known and more widely-read than many of the writers who outshone him during his lifetime. Who now reads Lascelles Abercrombie's gargantuan volumes of verse? Who goes to see plays by Gordon Bottomley? Even giants like GK Chesterton and Walter de la Mare are probably less known to some than Thomas. Let's hope there's a literary club in heaven and that he's up there enjoying all the attention.

There's the lovely new Faber edition of his poems, and Matthew Hollis's marvellous biography 'Now All Roads Lead to France'. This I avoided reading for a while as I knew the Thomas story fairly well (and his wasn't the most cheering of lives), but it proved to be a revelation. In an age of over-stuffed biographies here was a book that was light in tone, selective in content and very informative in its analysis of Thomas's poetry. There was even the suggestion of secret passion to offset the well-known and rather tedious platonic romance with Eleanor Farjeon. Fabulous!

And now Dear old Thomas (as Paul Nash refered to him) is back in the literary pages again, courtesy of Robert Macfarlane, whose book 'The Old Ways' covers some of the Anglo-Welsh writer's old stamping grounds. In 2009 Macfarlane wrote an introduction to Little Toller's centenary edition of 'The South Country', in which he reappraised Thomas's powerful but chaotic book:

'There's something hypermodern about the book's collage-like feel, its shifts and bucks. In topographical terms, the experience of reading "The South Country" resembles a Google-Earth fly-over of the chalk counties: zooming in here, settling there, lifting off, scrolling on... In tonal terms, the book slides without warning from the intensely observed to the extravagantly imagined. The effect on the reader is an intriguing cognitive dissonance...'

The subject of this praise might have offered a wry smile had he heard it, as Thomas was renowned for his plain speaking. He and Robert Frost sought to write as ordinary people spoke, and you need only dip into the work of Bottomley or Abercrombie to see that this was actually rather radical; apart from Thomas, critics of Frost's first efforts didn't get it. And this wasn't just a question of style. Thomas is sometimes described as a proto-environmentalist, and his politics were indeed rather ahead of their time. Here he is in full flow in 'The South Country':

'And those long wayside greens, no man's gardens, measuring a few feet wide but many miles in length - why should they be used either as receptacles for the dust of motor-cars or as additions to the property of the landowner who happens to be renewing his fence? They used to be as beautiful and cool and fresh as rivers, these green sisters of the white roads - illuminated borders of many a weary tale. But now, lest there should be no room for the dust, they are turning away from them the gipsies who used to camp there for a night... Give them a pitch for the night and you are regarded as an enemy of the community or perhaps even as a Socialist.'

Thomas saw no distinction between the countryside and the people who belonged to it, principally working people and travellers. He had an abiding respect and fascination for tramps, and personally secured the publication of 'The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp' by Welsh wanderer WH Davies; whatever his views on property ownership, he was no respecter of fences and the 'pheasant-lords' who employed gamekeepers to keep walkers off the land.

If he were alive today I think he'd be a figure more like Iain Sinclair than Robert Macfarlane, or perhaps he'd be a mixture of the two: caustic and poetic, as aware of the present as he was of the past, and as concerned with those dispossessed by progress as he was with the land itself.

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

Win the 'Ravilious in Pictures' Quartet!

Rather late notice - sorry - but if you enter this competition before 6pm (UK time) tonight (Friday 4 May 2012) you could win all four books in the 'Ravilious in Pictures' series. The question is below the picture and isn't very hard, just make sure you email the Mainstone Press rather than posting the answer as a comment! (It has been done)

The names of everyone who gets it right will be put into a hat and the lucky winner pulled out...