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.
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.