Ravilious is known for his work as a watercolourist, as well as a lithographer and wood-block cutter. I became interested via his work at Rye Harbour, and he has done a number of interesting paintings in Sussex.
A recent documentary Drawn to War concentrated more on biographical aspects and his employment (and subsequent early death) as a war artist, although both the film and a recent monograph of his watercolours also highlighted a particularly fruitful period around 1939-40 where he worked on downland landscapes.
I think my attention has been held by the unusual perspective he brings to his scenes – obviously as a painter he could and did arrange the elements as he liked, although the way he chose to do this in some of the work is more reminiscent of a photographic eye, particularly one that also enjoys playing with perspective – e.g. Bill Brandt.
Examples of this include Wiltshire Landscape, which uses a row of telegraph poles down a road to create linear perspective into the picture, and Wilmington Giant, which incorporates uses a barbed wire fence to lead the eye to the chalk figure but also incorporates elements of the fence as a framing device across the picture – something that a photographer would have worked with but another painter might have left out. This adds to the realism of the painting.
This is perhaps taken to an extreme in Coastal Defences (1940) where the close wall is picked out in great detail and dominates the foreground – in a similar fashion to Cezanne’s study of Paris rooftops (https://photo515050level3.wordpress.com/2022/12/08/cezanne/).
Ravilious seemed to have a fascination with unusual perspective, and in a way the Wilmington Giant is a study of an ancient experiment in perspective, since the Giant is elongated in a way that makes visual sense only from a distant viewpoint. In Runway Perspective (1942) the title makes clear the artists’ intention to experiment with angle to explore difficult, flat terrain. This is played with again in a different way in Ravilious’ study of the The Westbury Horse, which uses the nearness of the horse to contrast with the racing steam locomotive in the far ground, almost as a wide-angled lens might. In addition, different ages and rates of travel are apparently compared here, although in fact the chalk figure may not be that older than the train.
Indeed Ravilious’ handling of time, making “paintings like snapshots of a particular moment” (p90), also seems key to appreciating his images. Train Landscape (1940) features a crooked top frame and a white horse nearly passing out of shot “as if someone noticed the chalk figure, grabbed their camera and – … – focused briefly and pressed the shutter. The effect is spontaneous; the moment lives” (Russell, 2015:81).
Ravilious also uses repeated pattern, experience gleaned from his wood-cutting work, to great effect. In the seats of the Train Landscape this shows as attention to near detail (much as a camera would pick up) which again contrasts well with the more fleeting elements. In some images this pattern-making almost approaches the grain of a photographic print. With broader mark-making the sky in Vicarage in Winter conveys light in an almost abstract manner. This early example from 1935 would be developed into a signature effect for some of his later war work.
Ravilious liked to work at dawn, often looking into the light, and at times the effects he used would mimic overexposure in a photograph – for example Belle Tout Interior pictured from inside a lighthouse.
A further very interesting example of the photographic effect is Firing a 9.2 Gun (1941), where “the picture itself must have left artillerymen scratching their heads. Gunfire is all smoke, noise and confusion, but there is no smoke here, just a flower of flame” (Russell, 2015:145). And yet if you take a burst of images of a gun going off (either on a continuous shooting mode of a camera or as a video with 24 frames per second or more) this is what you see:
Yes there is smoke, and slightly later the noise (which of course is not captured in a still image). But at the beginning for a fraction of a second is the very bright flash that Ravilious pictured, almost like the painterly equivalent of Muybridge.
It’s tempting to see this occupation with time and the rush of productivity as some sort of premonition of an early death, but more likely that he was inspired by his critically-acclaimed exhibition at Arthur Tooth & Sons that preceded them.
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
- Ravilious, E. (1939) The Wilmington Giant. At: https://shop.townereastbourne.org.uk/products/eric-ravilious-wilmington-giant (Accessed 10.4.2023)
- Ravilious, E. (1939) The Westbury Horse. At: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/jun/02/eric-ravilious-westbury-horse-old-new (Accessed 10.4.2023)
- Ravilious, E. (1940) Train Landscape. At: https://shop.townereastbourne.org.uk/products/eric-ravilious-train-landscape (Accessed 10.4.2023)
- Lamb, J. (2017) Mr. Brandreth firing the Black Powder Muzzle Loader
BIBLIOGRAPHY
- Russell, J. (2015) Ravilious. London: Philip Wilson Publishing
- Eric Ravilious – Drawn to War, Dir. Margy Kinmonth, Foxtrot Films, UK, 2022, 87 minutes
Level 3.1 Learning Log 