Ordinary Marvels: Eric Ravilious

(Extraordinary Everyday: The Art and Design of Eric Ravilious @ The Arc, Winchester)

The little I’ve seen of Eric Ravilious’ work I’ve always found a bit twee and rural. Until now! Completely proved wrong as this underrated artist showed me his watercolours produced in submarines and unexpected Impressionism, even almost Seurat-like Pointillism - but with lines.

What I really hadn’t appreciated was an artist who celebrated the ordinary; everything became fascinating and drawable. The bottles in a chemist’s shop became almost magician-like by night, with exaggerated exotic looking bottle shapes and beautifully framed by a backdrop of curling trees in silhouette. A Tiger Moth plane in flight celebrated the motion, the crops moving in the breeze. A Welsh mountain had hilariously blobby brown cows at the bottom. Rye Harbour blazed with Impressionist light — the slipway becoming almost geological in its portrayed layers.

A barbed wired beach, the wire surrounding beached fishing or pleasure boats, made me compare with Pandemic Lockdown images — where a park might be suddenly closed off or a normally busy street deserted. With its spools of barbed wire and concrete blocks, the beach is protected — but also extraordinary, as it’s no longer a beach as we know it.

Ravilious’ perspectives and use of colour are extraordinary too — and sometimes odd. A scene of Navy personnel on a fishing boat in Grimsby was both fascinating with a circular swirl of colour and also sea sick inducing as it was painted at such an angle that the water definitely seemed to be lurching up and down. Alarmingly the Navy personnel are faceless. A harbour scene focused the eye (all at once) on a convoy crossing the sea, the dramatic waves crashing over and — a horse — at the end of the way. Yet the pathway down to the sea doesn’t easily lead there — there is more than one way to look. In another scene we get distracted by red barrels, big anchors and other materials — until lifting our eyes above the colour, there are barrage balloons!

Infinitely curious, a literal ‘up periscope’ moment inside a submarine is portrayed with all the busy dials behind (the light from this work at a distance glows), as are the almost audible groans of a sleepy submariner as they are woken by someone coming in through the door and filling the room with light. There is even new military technology. Beautifully, victorious planes circle and swoop over a dazzle camouflaged carrier in a beautiful jagged burst of sunlight. A Seurat moment! A woman waits for bread from a cart side delivery — I feel the shiver of snow behind her on the trees. Extraordinary!

Additionally (this exhibition is billed as the one with the Coronation mugs) he made royal mugs which look very now with their colour clashes, and alphabets for nursery sets — Z is Zeppelin anyone?!!!!

There are fun moments — a glimpse of the White Horse from the windows of a 3rd class railway carriage; the somewhat mouldly looking cottage with infinite patterns of rugs and carpets and a runner in the corridor, which leads to where the door should be — only there is no door….Has the artist cheekily trapped us in a room? The vase of flowers in a cottage room with a painting of a vase of flowers behind it (no doubt also shown in a room with a painting….) Ravilious’ flowers are so delicate and his trees so curving and fern like. There are also tangles of pipes — hosepipes in Kew Gardens or all kinds of intriguing pipework on a submarine.

I think I’ve always found (until now) Ravilious’ work a bit gloomy and lithograph like. This exhibition has completely changed my mind — the playfulness of a brilliant yellow ship’s funnel; the beauty of the everyday things he saw around him; the fun of all kinds of model boats and ships for sale and being too old to purchase them, but going in anyway! Not to mention the Jazz Age Boat Race bowl. I end with another favourite — literally Bird and Tree, and yet the leaves could be bushes or something else in their star shapes. Extraordinary perspective!

@ Images shown are used purely to illustrate the author’s work and are the property of Eric Ravilious, linked to the exhibition at the Arc, Winchester, May 2022