LANDSCAPES AND LOOKING: Reflections on Eric & James Ravilious. by Penny Dolan

This week, I am sorting through the too-many books here at home. I am culling some, and collecting others into “families”: shelves of books inspired by the same theme.
 
One bookcase is now home to a family of books about aspects of the English landscape, from Alison Utley’s A Country Childhood through to Oliver Rackham’s books about trees to George Ewart Evans Ask the Fellows who Cut the Hay and more. Some we bought and some were given as gifts. Others, often the hardest to discard, were inherited.
 
Standing within the waves of scattered volumes, I start wondering what other titles should join this family: those by Robert Macfarlane, perhaps, or Roger Deakin? Or large-format books about landscape art or painting or photography? Where does the family of "landscape" end?

All at once I remember landscapes by a favourite artist: Eric Ravilious, painter, wood-engraver and designer. I went to the Dulwich Picture Gallery’s retrospective Ravilious exhibition in 2015, and in the video below you can see James Russell, the curator, talking about Ravilious and his pictures and the “scratch” technique that gives the artists pieces such luminosity.

Entry was for strictly limited periods but, once inside, I avoided the exit. I wove my way up and back though the exhibition, living with the Ravilious paintings throughout a wonderful afternoon. His work seems full of rolling downs, of chalk cliffs overlooking the sea and of lanes winding through peaceful fields: an essentially English rural landscape. 

For some time, Eric Ravilious and Tirzah Garwood (also an artist and wood engraver) were part of an influential group of figurative artists living around Great Bardfield in Essex, although the landscapes of the South Downs dominate many of his most popular images.

In 1939, Eric Ravilious signed up as a war artist with the Royal Marines, moving from one posting to another. He painted on land and from the moving decks of warships, watching the planes overhead. Ravilious brought the same sense of enigmatic light to all these harsher subjects: the airfields, the waiting planes and broken machinery, the men walking across wet sand to defuse a beached mine. 

He learned to fly and was sent to Iceland. On the first day of September 1942, he joined one of three planes sent out to search for a lost aircraft. Ravilious’s aircraft never returned and, four days later, he and the crew were reported lost at sea.

I am often intrigued by how the making of art can run in families, both through what could be called the genes and also through the family culture: those families where the possibility of making art is acknowledged and celebrated. So, very recently, hearing the same surname again, I was immediately interested.  

This “new” name was James Ravilious, Eric’s middle child. Born in 1939, James's only memory of Eric was running down the lane to hug his father as he left for war, and being given a threepenny coin from father's coat pocket. Sadly, after Eric's death, Tirzah’s already poor health worsened. She died, leaving her children orphans. James was only eleven. Growing up, he studied at St Martin’s School of Art, and afterwards taught painting and drawing in London. He fell in love and married a kindred spirit, Robin, in 1970. She was the daughter of the glass engraver and poet Laurence Whistler, and she also shared a sorrowful childhood.

During 1972, James and Robin left London for the countryside, and around that same time, James abandoned drawing and painting and took up photography. They settled by the village of Beaford, in what was then a largely unspoilt area of North Devon. James started taking photographs to record the landscape, the seasons, community, customs and people, but what began as a short project grew into a seventeen-year archive covering the changing rural life of the area. James added to it as well, copying earlier photographs of the same area. All the collected images now form the Beaford historical archive, whose images have been exhibited around the world.

Whether James’ talent was inherited though the genes, or learned through the artistic culture of his parents and family friends, one thing stands out for me. James Ravilious’s black and white photographs seem to share the same quality of quiet observation and love of the light visible in his father’s work. They both seem filled with a quiet but real passion for the English landscape.

James Ravilious died too, in 1999, but his wife Robin has published an account of his life in 2017.  Here, also is a clip about an influential film that James Ravilious made about photography:

So how does this post link with History Girls and writing? 
James Ravilious met the French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson and was very influenced by him, adopting Cartier-Bresson's approach in his own photography, even down to using the same model of camera, a LeicaM3. James followed Cartier Bresson’s approach, including the rule about never posing a subject or cropping an image, so his subjects display a natural grace.

Additionally, James also took to heart Cartier-Bresson’s most fervent mantra:

There is such a thing as The Moment. 
It is mysterious, but if you look at several shots of the one scene, 
there is one that has it – as if there were a little poem there.

Today, revising a piece of fiction, I paused and pondered about this concept of that one essential mysterious “Moment”. Although painting and photography are visual art forms, I think that writers, too, try to choose that one specific “Moment”, try to write the one specific, telling scene, try to capture that one perfectly imagined visualisation in the hope that the magic (and poetry) will make the words live?

Oh, and then the scene after? And then the scene after that . . .?

I’m going back to sorting out my book families: it’s easier than art.

Penny Dolan

ps. A travelling exhibition, “Ravilious and Co”, about Eric and his contemporaries opens at Compton Verney Gallery, Warwickshire, in March 2018.

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Landscape by Maria McCann

We have today a post from one of our marvellous team of Reserves, Maria McCann.

With Jane Borodale, Jane Feaver, Gabrielle Kimm and Michael Arnold, I recently took part in a Historical Fiction Day at the splendid Weald & Downland Open Museum in Sussex.  The topic for our panel was landscape.  I found myself focusing on it as I'd never done before: what could I say about my use of landscape in fiction?  What did I find most important and compelling when writing about it?

I began by considering the psychological relationship between characters and their physical environment.  This has always interested me: how would characters have understood the country surrounding them?   Would they conceive of it mainly in terms of inheritance, of money, of physical labour and the many skilled tasks that make up farming, in terms of an enduring (benign or oppressive) social order?  Would rusticity seem a refuge, or a banishment from everything that gave variety and savour to life?  Which modern associations and resonances would be alien to them? 

Religion would certainly shape their perceptions to some degree.  At this point I recognised something more, something central to my own work that had previously been almost invisible to me.  (My unconscious, like the shoemaking Elves, had done most of the work when my analytical mind was off duty; I won't say that I was entirely unaware of it, but I'd never looked at it head-on before.)  I realised that lost Edens and false paradises have always been central to my work, as have journeys, expulsions and the whole concept of life as pilgrimage that finds its most developed expression in The Pilgrim's Progress but stretches right back to the Biblical metaphor of the narrow path to salvation versus the broad road that leads to Hell.     

 

Engraving by Thomas Conder.  Photo: Jo Guldi.    Licence: see flickr.com/photos/landschaft/7035370

As we all know, journeys in the past were slow and inconvenient, events in their own right.   Novelists  are often advised to cut journeys from their narrative and jump straight to the arrival, but I love journeys (in fiction as well as in life) and am fascinated by their psychological resonances.  It's many years now since I was a religious believer, but at some point during my upbringing that metaphor of the true and false roads obviously sank deep. 

Two years spent teaching pastoral texts to seventeen-year olds also had its effect.  Some pastoral themes are very similar to those of the expulsion from Eden - nature, lost innocence - and during that time I became aware of pastoral's enduring appeal.  Amorous herdsmen may have vanished from Arcadia, but not from Brokeback Mountain.  Nymphs bathe al fresco to advertise shampoo and Italian peasants are still flirtatious at ninety thanks to the simple country goodness of Bertolli margarine.  People who have never heard of the word 'pastoral' still respond to the imagery: we still yearn for that impossible place, the countryside as it never was.

 

As a result of mulling over these influences, I'm now much more aware that in my own work,  landscape is sometimes in realistic mode, sometimes symbolic (though I hope not anachronistic), sometimes both, according to the demands of the narrative, while the characters' responses to it are mediated by the ideas by which they interpret the world.  Jacob Cullen, the tormented narrator of As Meat Loves Salt, is troubled by repetitive nightmares while working the land (a detested job, perceived by Jacob as futile) in an idealistic Digger commune: 

'Often, of late, I flew over Hell and looked down on the damned, whose punishment it was to mine rocks with picks and spades.  They flowed over the black surface like ants.  From time to time a flame would lick up and burn some of them off.  The rest kept digging.' 

His friend Ferris (who conceals a love letter inside a map, something I noticed with amusement when re-reading the novel)  dreams of the same commune becoming not an Eden (for 'Eden may not be regained') but the next best thing,  'a happy and prosperous Israel.'  He reads the landscape in terms of the opportunities it holds out for freedom and self-determination: not damnation, but redemption.   

In The Wilding, the shallower and more complacent Jon Dymond congratulates himself on being not an outsider, but 'a proper village man, woven in': a true countryman, living the pastoral idyll.  His self-satisfaction, however, cannot last: his Eden carries the seeds of its own destruction.

In future, when I begin a new piece of writing it will be with a deepened awareness of my own ways of working with landscape.  There are other aspects yet to explore, in particular why I keep coming back to lost Edens and find them so resonant.   Is there a connection with a traumatic house move at the age of six?  I rarely dream of landscapes but for many years now, houses where I've lived in the past have made regular appearances in my dreams.  I'd like to unravel that strand since I suspect there's creative energy bound up in it ― but this blog isn't the place for doing so. 

What are your thoughts on landscape?  And is there some important aspect of your work of which you are now aware, but which wasn't obvious to you at the time of writing?