By coincidence I was just telling people about my talk next week at Higgins, Bedford, when I received this flyer from Pentreath and Hall. Both their show and my talk are about Ravilious and Bawden, who were great pals from their first day in the Design School of the Royal College of Art, until the former's death.
Both were gifted illustrators and masters of various media. Rav may have been more at ease in the world than Bawden, who was famously so shy that he would rather walk across London than board a bus, but they shared a waspish sense of humour and a love of the absurd.
They also shared a passion for watercolour, working together so closely that their names were often mentioned in the same breath. Bawden and Ravilious were something of a curiosity to their peers, radical technicians who looked to the past for inspiration, painters who tackled humdrum subjects from unusual angles and, significantly, sold most of the work they exhibited at a handful of pre-war exhibitions.
Anyway, I'm looking forward to exploring this personal and artistic relationship at Bedford next week, so do come along if you can.
PS. Ed Kluz is a worthy companion to the pair, and if you've never been to Pentreath and Hall, it's well worth a visit.
When I was approached by the Portland Gallery to write a
book about Edward Seago I had little idea of the adventure ahead. Having lived
in Norwich for several years I was familiar with his East Anglian landscape
paintings, which I associated with those of his predecessors John Sell Cotman
and John Crome, but beyond that I was aware only that he had enjoyed a long
friendship with HRH the Duke of Edinburgh. So not entirely a blank canvas, but
close to it.
Over the following two years a portrait of Seago – Ted, as he was
always known by friends – gradually took shape, and I realised that this was no
ordinary artist. His education, for a start, was far from conventional, since
he was confined to bed for much of his childhood by a chronic heart condition.
Yet he was impetuous and determined and, having made up his mind at an early
age that he could only be an artist, he asked Bertram Priestman RA for
technical help and sought patronage from Lady Evelyn Jones, daughter of the 4th
Earl Grey.
With their support the nineteen year-old Seago held his first solo
exhibition in London and was an overnight success, although these early
paintings of horses and their riders owed rather too much to Alfred Munnings.
This didn’t prevent him seeking advice from the great man, who suggested he
apply to the RA schools. Instead, after only a term at Norwich School of Art,
Seago went off to join a circus as a sort of artist in residence, and for the
next three years travelled constantly.
As well as producing a remarkable body
of paintings and drawings, Seago found inspiration for a lively
autobiographical book, ‘Circus Company’, which he wrote with the help of poet
laureate John Masefield. The pair went on to collaborate on several titles,
including ‘The Country Scene’ – a sumptuous quarto volume filled with
Masefield’s poetry and Seago’s evocative paintings – and ‘Tribute to Ballet’, at
which point war intervened.
When Seago
was commissioned to the Royal Engineers in the autumn of 1939 he took the
opportunity provided by his first full time job to take stock of his career,
which had so far perhaps given him more success than fulfilment. His first
childhood sketches had been of the ever-changing sky, and he now perceived that
his true vocation lay here, in the study of light and atmosphere. There would
be notable achievements in portraiture, particularly two paintings of Queen
Elizabeth II on horseback, but Seago otherwise devoted the second half of his
life to landscape painting.
His vision was wide-ranging. Factories and building
sites interested him as much as Norfolk beaches; he was inspired equally by
sparkling Venetian canals and the dirty skies of a London winter. A great
admirer of John Constable’s oil sketches, he painted rapidly, with expressive
brushwork that he rarely attempted to conceal, and in later life worked from
memory. Having trained his mind to recall the significant details of any scene,
he astounded house guests with his ability to paint faraway places in his
Norfolk studio. He was, as HRH the Duke of Edinburgh put it, like a conjuror
pulling rabbits out of a hat. And, yes, his best work has a touch of magic.
An exhibition of Edward Seago's paintings, including many that have never been shown before, begins at the Portland Gallery next week. The paintings shown are all included, and each link will take you to the relevant page on the gallery's website. The text above is from the catalogue essay. My book on Edward Seago is out now from Lund Humphries. The estate of Edward Seago is represented by the Portland Gallery.
The editor of Selvedge kindly allowed me to post this sneak preview of the upcoming issue. To get hold of a copy or find out more, please visit the magazine's website. You should be able to zoom in to the page if you can't read the text.
'Peggy Angus: Designer, Teacher, Painter' is published by Antique Collectors Club this month, and in July the exhibition of the same name opens at Towner, Eastbourne. It should be pretty spectacular!
The open road held 1930s
Britain in thrall. Though Ravilious never learned to drive, his contemporaries
were taking to the road in ever-increasing numbers, encouraged by
advertisements and guidebooks that portrayed an idealised vision of the
countryside. The Shell Guides,
sponsored by the oil company and edited by John Betjeman, were aimed
specifically at the new breed of car-driving metropolitan tourist, with
highlights including Betjeman’s Devon
(1935), Paul Nash’s Dorset (1936) and
John Piper’s Oxon (1938). The worse
London’s traffic jams became, the greater the appeal of open country.
Ravilious
himself produced numerous wood engravings to advertise London Transport and its
offshoot Green Line Buses, and in 1936 made engravings for the first two books
of Country Walks, which described and
mapped forty walks accessible by bus or coach from central London. Not that the
artist had an aversion to cars. He once told Helen Binyon, he wished they could
drive fifty miles as fast as possible then go dancing afterwards. And in March
1937, shortly before painting ‘Wiltshire Landscape’, he noted that ‘Tirzah is
buying a year-old Morris for £70 tomorrow from the local garage, and it seems
to my eye to look as good as new. May it start up in cold weather.’
While
contemporary guidebooks and advertising focused on sights to be seen along the
road, this painting shows the road itself, from an odd, slightly raised
perspective. The spring countryside is peripheral, and instead one’s attention
focuses on the junction ahead and the red van approaching from the left. In
fact Ravilious did not see this vehicle on the road but spotted it in a Post
Office magazine when he got home and added it to the composition. Imagine the
picture without it and the mood is rather different, the road stretching ahead
perhaps less a route to freedom than a journey to be endured; hemmed in by
endless green verges, only the turning to the left offers respite.
A similar
melancholy pervades ‘The Causeway, Wiltshire Downs’, the other painting from
this short trip. As a non-driver Ravilious relied on public transport or the
good will of friends, and in April 1937 Helen Binyon was his driver and
companion. They stayed near Andover and drove out across Salisbury Plain, but
it was not the kind of great adventure they had enjoyed in the past. Binyon was
silent and distant, Ravilious said afterwards, which made him uppish and out of
hand; only a month later he was to end their affair, though they remained close
friends.
But this is still an image of the open road - the kind of byway that
city dwellers dreamt (and dream) of. The clouds may be grey and stormy but the
road ahead gleams silver.
This is an extract from 'Ravilious in Pictures: Sussex and the Downs', published by The Mainstone Press. 'Wiltshire Landscape' will be auctioned at Christies on 26 June 2014, alongside work by Lucian Freud, John Craxton, Graham Sutherland and Walter Sickert. I hope it is bought by a public collection...
Fleeing the crowds in Park Street yesterday (they'd come to see Luke Jerram's fabulous Park and Slide), we ducked into Red Lodge, the Tudor house on the hill above Colston Hall. As ever, the house was cool, calm and full of surprises, my favourite things this time around being the fireplace in the Print Room with its 18th century tiles, and the Skinner chair.
A bit of a mish-mash, period-wise, but I love the tiles
Scapegoat
Not at all sure what this is supposed to be, a sort of duck-billed horse?
Details of the carving on late c17 chair made for Bishop Skinner, showing Actaeon being turned into a stag by Artemis
Here she is, looking quite fierce
Actaeon about to be eaten by his own hounds. Prince Albert once sat here, apparently
Detail of stone carving in awesome Great Oak Room
Red Lodge was a guest house when Elizabeth I came to stay at the Great House down the hill, where Colston Hall now stands. Nowadays it's a welcome retreat for people undergoing treatment or supporting loved ones through illness at the hospitals down the road.
All the fun of the fair next Saturday (10th May), as the restored Gordon Cullen Mural is unveiled at Greenside School in Hammersmith. Should be a great day out with stalls featuring an array of 20th Century art and design, plus 21st Century work inspired by the period. The school itself is fascinating too, so definitely worth going along.
Eric Ravilious, Geraniums and Carnations, 1938, Fry Art Gallery
Rather short notice, I'm afraid, but I'm giving a talk on the life and work of Eric Ravilious at Heffers Bookshop in Cambridge on Thursday evening (that's 1 May I believe).
I'll be covering the artist's career as a watercolourist, also bringing in his book illustrations (wood engraving and lithography) and other aspects of his design work. The aim as ever is to make the evening enjoyable and informative.
Have just realised that Art and Life is still on at Kettle's Yard, featuring work by some of my favourite artists, especially Ben and Winifred Nicholson and Christopher Wood. Slight quandary as I've promised to go and see the exhibition when it reaches Dulwich Picture Gallery later in May...
Winifred Nicholson, Summer, 1928, copyright The Trustees of Winifred Nicholson
OK, quandary solved, I'll just go twice.
Meanwhile, if you're in the Cambridge area and you want to see an impressive collection of Ravilious paintings, prints and ceramics, trot along to the Fry Art Gallery, Saffron Walden - but make sure they're open before you go!
Curious scenes at the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery the other day. As well as the usual mums with pushchairs and kids wondering out loud when they'd be getting an ice cream, the entrance hall was abuzz with young adults brandishing mobile phones. They were all waving said phones at a gloomy-looking painting of a couple embracing while they too look their phones.
We Sit Starving Amidst our Gold, Jeremy Deller, 2013
Courtesy British Council. Photograph Cristiano Corte. Painted by Stuart Sam Hughes.
So this was the new Banksy painting that had been causing all the fuss (which I'd heard about courtesy of the ever-vigilant Bristol Culture blog). The tale of the painting's semi-miraculous appearance on a boarded-up door, its removal by a crowbar-wielding latter day Robin Hood, Bristol City Council's announcement that it was their boarded-up door and therefore their painting, the Mayor's involvement... All of this came back as I looked at the painting, which didn't seem to be one of Banksy's best but is nonetheless potentially worth a few bob to the cash-strapped local authority.
Quite by chance (if anything is quite by chance) the picture and surrounding furore made rather a good introduction to the main event: Jeremy Deller's 'English Magic' exhibition, which we are lucky enough to have in Bristol until September. It's already been to Venice, where it filled the British Pavilion at the 2013 Biennale, and to the William Morris Gallery in London.
Jeremy Deller: Ooh-oo-hoo ah-ha ha yeah (installation view, British Pavilion, 2013) Courtesy the British Council
I've no doubt the exhibition has divided opinion, given that it includes film of Range Rovers being cubed at the breaker's yard and a painting of Mr Morris dispatching an oligarch's super-yacht to the watery deep, but no one can argue with the artist's desire to share his work with as wide an audience as possible. According to him, no previous British Biennale exhibit has been shown in this country after being displayed in Venice, so this is an intriguing precedent.
On entering the exhibition a younger member of our party, who had been explaining for some time that a visit to the Museum was not his idea of fun, immediately stopped as he took in the on-screen automotive destruction and the off-screen crushed-car-sofa. Being able to sit on the latter to watch the former made the whole thing much more fun than your average museum installation, but unfortunately we got so engrossed in the film, which also features people bouncing on an inflatable Stonehenge and a parade through the City of London, that we missed the second half of the exhibition upstairs.
I got there as a caretaker was solemnly closing the doors, and just caught a glimpse of a giant painting of a hawk before it disappeared.
When I was studying at UEA in the 1990s my tutor Lorna Sage used to talk about Serious Laughter, by which she was referring to writers who approached life's most difficult subjects through humour. I've never met Jeremy Deller but his art is very much in this spirit, earnest in theme but presented simply and with a light touch.
He is particularly good at surprising juxtapositions, as in the room of photographs which feature alternately moments from David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust tour (1972/3) and news photos from the same days. Importantly, these are not labelled but are listed in a doorway, so that you have to work at making identifications and connections. As a measure of the artist's success, this appealed as much to the younger member mentioned above as it did to me, and he knew as little about Bowie as he did about the IRA.
Cultural references have been a staple of contemporary art for as long as contemporary art has existed, but rare is the artist who can create from those references something that transcends them.
English Magic is on display until 21 September in Bristol and then goes to Turner Contemporary, Margate.
Just got back from a short holiday in Almunecar, on the Costa Tropical, which included a day trip to beautiful Granada (a name I've associated for forty-something years with gritty northern TV). I don't usually give travel tips, but here's one for the Alhambra, one of the most sought-after European monument-type destinations. You basically have to book ahead, but the online booking is not very easy. If you should find yourself with an imminent visit to Granada and no ticket, go to the Granada tourist information website and buy one of their tourist cards - I think they're called Bono Turistico - which entitles you to several bus trips, free admission to the alarmingly grand cathedral (and other sights) and a visit to the Nasrid Palaces (the masterpiece of Moorish architecture that forms part of the much bigger Alhambra) at a particular time. These are available even when the Alhambra tickets are sold out, but are more expensive.
I know there are pictures of the Nasrid Palaces all over the internet, but the tiles just knocked me out, especially after researching Peggy Angus. She always said that tiles last well, and these have been on the walls for centuries, and have survived invasion, occupation, attempts by Napoleon's troops to blow the buildings up, etc, etc. Lots of info about the Alhambra and its astonishing decoration here.
Some of the tiles seem to be translucent, but they're just painted
The designs are full of life - this one reverses in and out as you look at it
These tiny tiles are set into the floor - I saw them around Almunecar as well, even in our apartment...
The colours are so strong...
Footnote: Granada was the last Moorish outpost in Spain, which fell to the forces of Ferdinand II and Isabella in 1492. More than 300 years later American writer Washington Irving rented part of the palace, where he collected the material for 'Tales of the Alhambra'.
Born in Chile in 1904 (to Scottish parents), Peggy moved as a child to London. A student of the Royal College of Art in the 1920s, her contemporaries included Eric Ravilious, Edward Bawden, Enid Marx and Helen Binyon. Peggy travelled extensively throughout her life, she captured places, people and scenes of everyday life with an intuitive perception. The portraits she painted are highly original; the designs she created for the wallpapers and ceramics that furnished her interiors are uniquely styled. Following WWII she began producing patterned tiles, adapting the design skills she had taught in the classroom, and up to the 1950s her colourful and decorative tile murals, commissioned by Carters of Poole, were used in a range of newly constructed buildings. Her success in this area prompted her to experiment with wallpaper design, creating a diverse body of work that carries echoes of an artist and designer whom she admired greatly, William Morris. Combining biography with a critical analysis of her work, this richly illustrated book aims both to celebrate Peggy's life and remarkable career and to bring it to the attention of a new generation.
'Peggy Angus: Designer, Teacher, Painter' is published by Antique Collectors' Club in June.
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