two months pass...
two weeks pass...
(post post observation – sorry this is so so tl:dr)
so, i'm not sure I'll be able to put down anything coherent (which is probably just as well), but I did retrieve my notes on the Eric Ravilious exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery a few years ago. I didn't know his work beforel, so these were first impressions on a single exhibition. and i haven't got the catalogue but someone did buy me Bawden, Ravilious and the Artists of Great Bardfieldfrom their time in Essex. Also includes Edward Bawden, John Aldridge, Bernard Cheese and Sheila Robinson, Walter Hoyle, Michael Rothenstein, Kenneth Rowntree, Marianne Strawb, and there's some lovely stuff in there.
I know the first thing that struck me in the exhibition was the presence of discarded machinery in pastoral landscapes. I scribbled 'material objects like Kipling' by which I think I meant, an intrinsic interest in the aesthetic qualities of engineering and purpose. this is not to say for Kipling certainly that this is some Futurist crash bang wallop aesthetic, but the non-traditional beauty of efficient purpose, the new environmental qualities our mechanical productions bring, of, if you like animate inanimacy (the mechanical paradox).
couple of opaque scribbled lines:
the bric-a-brac of a previous age, just, that seems to point to a future different to that of human history – bus on barrels pointing to the sun
http://a68.tinypic.com/mv0r5j.jpg
i'm struggling to recapture exactly what I meant by that, but i think it was a sense of a sort of recent history archaeology – things we no longer want or use, but imbued with formal or even ritual significance that implies also discarded meaning.
i have a bad mental tendency to abstraction and allegory in mediums I'm not very fluent in - that's the plastic art and music, so i kind of missed the pictorial elements that gave me that lenten thought:
- the underpopulated nature of his pictures – the reason i assumed that archaeological aspect is because there's no fucker around. my immediate response to this sort of thing is that it looks like 'an alien landscape' as a consequence; a not very useful ahistorical description, but it gives the idea of 'what are these and what did they use them for?' of objects in his pictures
- the bleached nature of his 'starved brush' watercolours. this is immediately striking of course, and it didn't strike me other than in a 'these look different' sort of way, but it's the main thing really, and again, moves away from immediacy to other lights, other times and towards a formal emphasis on line
- 'pointing to the sun' - well yes, this was part of the point. this wasn't a traditional way of doing things - pointing into the sun created a flattened image. Apparently he and Bawden used to compete for hardship when painting (out in the rain, on top of roofs, facing into a blinding sun etc).
material=secret life humans – south coast beach of a life confined.humans engaged in an activity subsidiary in importance to the meaning of that which they inhabit or contemplate or have ceased to inhabit. the meaning of the world is in these objects (inc rooms)
we enter them as we might realms of consciousness or meaning.
no real idea what that latter part means, but detailed, well observed objects and materials are insightful to people. his great interiors say 'these are the materials and things people who have been in this room have seen and contemplated, and with which in some cases they have chosen to surround themselves (in the book, the chapter on Ravilious regrets that he didn't do more of them as he was so good at them).
http://a65.tinypic.com/2gshit2.jpg
tangles are imposed upon the picture indifferent to perspectives and structures
structures are vivid – there is a comedy and life to the objects – a chirpiness
chirpiness is right, but 'humour' is better than 'comedy' unless i was pointing to some sort of physical comedy (of which that bus on barrels is possibly a good example). the indifference to perspectives i've already mentioned. it's too strongly stated, but flattening things out you can almost see the objects as hieroglyphs.
alien objects almost - contain the tension of hidden or static purpose - sweep and curve of lines, represent the vector on which they appear in the material world (ships screw)
greenwich observatory - more lines of cryptic intent, mysterious vectors
religious bit – these look like pure objects, items deprived of their meaning with a formal importance.
https://pallantbookshop.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Ravilious-Observatory.jpg
i love the almost ornate almost Byzantine behaviour of the implied lines of direction here – meridian and weather. That Byzantine feel was what led me to buy a print now hanging in my bedroom, uncharacteristic, but still containing much that is definably Ravilious:
http://a66.tinypic.com/2ujmpg5.jpg
going through these notes, it's clear i was waaaay too obsessed with line though I have said further down
light is also an object to which my response now would probably be 'the objects are also light that's painting u fule'.
the lines give everything a tilt, they direct the content
the long lines of access into an object and later - mystical access.
the same lines that give access to the beyond are also those that give the beyond access to the object
and i was also obsessed with the 'object' of the painting, without taking into account how he took the pastoral line and changed it from classically influenced and sculpted landscapes to a new one that was given to him by his observation of the Sussex landscape. He reminds me slightly of some of Samuel Palmer's etchings sometimes, and he captures the South Downs perfectly, so that when I'm there, I see it with eyes influenced by Ravilious' paintings.
I think this is probably all too mystical, too religious, though the sussex downs and pastoral are vehicles for a southern english version of pastoral mysticism – John Ireland, Jocelyn Brooke, and with the addition of a version of Ravilious' detailed understanding of objects, though in his case the minutiae of dolls houses and chinoiserie, Denton Welch. In Ravilious' case it is not influenced by the detail of that mysticism (roughly Roman military + Eleusinian + late neolithic/beaker/bronze age stuff). his mysticism is softer
The second painting I bought was a consequence of this thinking, and was late in the exhibition, and is the one that now strikes me, even irritates me, as platitudinous and lacking the pleasure of the other paintings:
http://a68.tinypic.com/2m2jghe.jpg
as i wrote in my final note:
as if they are labouring at some ultima thule on the brink of existence but going through the laborious toil - process, material delivery.
― Fizzles, Sunday, 9 December 2018 11:44 (five years ago) link