Eric Ravilious At Dulwich

The Westbury Horse

I went to see the Eric Ravilious exhibition at Dulwich yesterday. Besides being a chance to catch up with a few Rembrandt portraits that I hadn’t seen for years, this was an opportunity to see a lot of Ravilious all in one place. It might look at first sight that this is an old fashioned, should have been forgotten, very conservative English watercolour artist. What you might ask, has his work to offer someone working today? After all he died during the Second World War, 8 years before I was born.

There is though something quietly powerful about his work. He has a very strong sense of design and organisation, this coupled with a sharp grasp of how perspective can be almost hallucinatory and a way of making marks in watercolour that shifts between the fluidity of a stain and the dynamic vibration of graduated mark making. His colour is refined and sensitive to atmospheric changes, in particular he can suffuse an image with light, which he controls with an often dry-brush technique, coupled with a scratching out process that he uses to bring back the white of the underlying paper.

He constructs his brush strokes very subtlety, combining changes in direction with graduations of colour. In particular his grasp of atmospheric perspective is coupled with a clear design sense, that allows him to use elements such as this post above, to frame his view of the Long Man of Wilmington. 

Ravilious uses perspective to create emotive spaces from interiors as well as landscapes. His use of pattern in the bedroom above creating a strong sense of claustrophobia, the sprung ironwork of the bed-heads, inhabiting the space as a substitute for the missing figures that would have inhabited this space. He is aware of the potential of pattern to be a powerful emotive force, thus being able to avoid the accusation of being a 'decorative' image maker, whilst being able to carry off the use of pattern to unify his images. This is a difficult tightrope to walk and it's his use of perspective that allows him to solve this conundrum. The interplay between structure, space and decoration is kept in balance, in this way the images stay 'alive' the eyes switching between the strong stabilising verticals, spacial mark making and rhythmic pattern. 

His grasp of underlying geometric form is perhaps at it clearest when he deals with engineering. The huge ship propeller sitting on a rail carriage in the image above is beautifully realised, the mark making following the propeller's curvature, taking the eyes into and around the space, the perspective rectangle of the carriage stabilising the torque of the propeller. At the same time the 'realism' is of course a construction, one that is so intense and stripped down that the image feels almost dreamlike. In writing this is sometimes called 'magic realism', images having an almost hallucinatory intensity. 

This exhibition was really useful for myself. Ravilious' work reminding me of how important it is to reconcile the various elements that make up a drawing. In particular I was reminded that drawing can work very powerfully on that edge between movement and vibration (gestural direction and mark making) and stillness, (structure and composition). By holding all these things within a simultaneity that our eyes 'see' all at once, drawing can be used to reflect on a deep inter-relationship between structure, pattern and process that in turn reflects a further  recognition of "autopoiesis". Autopoiesis is a system capable of reproducing and maintaining itself, such as an eco-system or a human being. Any life form depends on its survival by being able to reproduce and maintain itself and this means that its physical structure must be synthesised with its 'pattern' or shape and it has to be integrated into a process that links it successfully into its environment. 

In my mind I was left thinking about how Ravilious' marks weave themselves together in a similar way to what we could call the 'web of life'. His visual patterning integrating with muscular structures, his process being one of the sympathetic and embedded observer, whose perceptions were ordered in a manner that reflected a fully empathetic human being. 

The Ravilious exhibition is open until August: see