I am delighted to be heading to Marlborough at the end of November, having been invited to take part in St Peter’s Charitable Trust’s Christmas Fair.
The fair runs from 10am to 3pm in the historic St Peter’s Church on the high street, just ahead of the Marlborough’s Christmas lights switch on.
This is the first time I’ve brought my Ancient Wiltshire themed prints to a fair in the county that inspires much of my work, so I’m looking forward to hearing more memories and stories from those with an intimate knowledge of this wonderful landscape. Expect megaliths, mounds and chalk horses.
I’ll have limited-edition linocut, woodcut and wood engraving prints, cards, digital artworks and perhaps some seasonally-inspired things too.
Following Liverpool Print Fair last weekend I’m now adding all the new limited edition hand-made linocuts, wood engravings and digital prints I’ve been working on recently.
Lindeth Tower Garden
Lindeth Tower Garden, Silverdale. 2-colour reduction lino print on 100% cotton rag paper
This was a fun exercise in brevity and abstraction – taking a complex view of a walled-garden with many kinds of trees and shrubs – as well as a Victorian folly – and reducing it to a limited palette on a small scale.
Printed on 100% cotton rag Khadi paper made for much variation.
The edition is limited to 15 prints and is available now in the Print Shop.
Avebury Cove
Wood engraving
Close up through a magnifying glass of the Avebury Cove wood engraving
I was long overdue depicting one of my favourite ancient sites. This is a view of the Cove at Avebury – a complex within a complex. Carved in lemonwood and around 6cm wide, this is now available in an edition of 50.
The design in process for Dorothea – limited edition lino print from the ‘Invisible Cities’ series
This is the first of the cities from Italo Calvino’s novel that I chose to try and describe.
Dorothea is a city precious in the memory of those who pass through it, and I wanted to capture something of how those memories are carried back into the wild.
The second city in my series, this was created digitally following plain old pencil sketching. Sophronia is a city with an interesting custom of separating along surprising lines. A reduction woodcut of this subject will also soon be available online.
There’s still some new limited editions – more from the Invisible Cities and a short edition of my homage to 1980s handheld gaming, which will be added to the shop over the next week or two.
To be sure of despatch in time for a Christmas delivery, please order before midnight on Wednesday December 14th, and I will make sure your order is sent Royal Mail First Class on or before the last First Class posting day, Friday the 16th December.
Orders placed after Wednesday 14th December 2022 will be sent by standard, normally Second Class delivery and are not likely to be will your for Christmas. Processing times may also be longer after the 14th.
Today I dropped off three framed works at the ArtHouse gallery, Southport for inclusion in their Spring Open. Works include the the limited edition ‘Landscape Study’ and ‘Cherhill Down and the White Horse’, which looks great in a black frame with a white mount.
For the foreseeable future, I will be making a personal donation to the Disasters Emergency Committee Ukraine Humanitarian Appeal every time a print is sold from this site.
If you’d like to buy a print from the Print Shop, I will make a personal donation equivalent to the sale price minus postage and packaging costs.
Please note that for sales from this site I only ship to the United Kingdom.
Wiltshire Museum is currently hosting Eric Ravilious: Downland Man, exploring the ways in which the artist’s long association with the chalk downland of southern England influenced and inspired his landscape paintings.
Guest curator James Russell presented a Zoom webinar recently offering perspectives on the man, his art, his collaborators, and the locations he visited and painted.
While familiar with many of the paintings, I was less familiar with Ravilious the man and artist. James described the artist’s process of observation that led to what are often carefully constructed lanscapes, views conjured from observed elements, repurposed and repositioned to make a new composition. This is more obvious in some works than others. His usual habit was to sketch on site and record colour notes, and then painstakingly work up full-colour compositions from those sketches back in his work room.
I had the good fortune to visit the Westbury Horse last year, the massive chalk figure overlooking the nearby town, believed to be the oldest site of its kind in Wiltshire. In his watercolour of 1939 Ravilious captured arguably the best view of the Horse’s full height, a short distance south west from the figure, with the hill dropping down to the north from the tip of the horse’s nose.
The scene is remarkably unchanged today.
Working up my own gouache sketches of the horse revealed something of the accuracy of representation in Ravilious’ work. The type of train and the chalk fragments dropping away from the hooves are the only evidence of the passing of time. The short, grassy path down to the horse’s nose is still there, 8 decades on.
Eric Ravilious – The Westbury Horse 1939
At the end of the webinar, many of the questions to James referred to Ravilious’ watercolour technique, which is notably dry, spare and transparent in many of his works.
James talked about Ravilious’ painstaking technique employed on ‘final’ pieces, working on a scale not common for watercolour, and taking many hours to complete. For every completed work of this kind, Ravilious would discard three or four prior attempts and start from scratch, or as noted by one of his contemporaries (Margaret Nash perhaps?) he could often be heard running the paper under a bathroom tap, washing the paint off to begin again.
In the Westbury Horse Ravilious uses contrasting lines and hatching to describe the form of the hillside and the field systems beyond – techniques essential to relief printing, but rarely seen in ‘realist’ painting.
Ravilious is well-known for his wood engravings, and would be most familiar with the techniques of suggesting landscape forms using only black and white, and yet here are very similar marks in a full colour work.
Seeing the view in person, I was struck by some compositional differences. In particular, the train line is far more distant and difficult to make out than in the painting, and the passing trains difficult to see in detail.
Perhaps this was his way to remind us that while the view might be familiar, this is indeed a design: a collection of elements arranged, presented and described in a language that allowed him to direct our attention. Never let the truth spoil a good painting.
At the same time we have to recall that the view itself is subject to change, the current hill figure’s appearance being relatively new, and quite unlike the records we have of earlier designs on the same site.
