Yesterday’s post was largely about Eric Ravilious. Today it is about, inter alia, his son, James.
There is an exhibition of his work at the Royal West of England Academy until 6th September. This picture is called, Dick French and family watching the Cup Final. He took over 70,000 photographs in the 1970s and 1980s in North Devon. Photography can be very revealing and I think, referring back to yesterday’s post, that a war photographer sometimes has more to say than a war artist. Charles Woodruff’s father was both, albeit unofficially; see his comment on War Artists yesterday.
Something else comes to mind – the Low Life columnist in the Spectator. His predecessor, Jeffrey Bernard, was remembered last Saturday on Radio 4 in a broadcast of the play Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell that opened in the West End in 1989 with Peter O’Toole in the title role. This radio adaptation of Keith Waterhouse’s play had John Hurt playing Jeffrey. The now Low Lifer is Jeremy Clarke who writes about his life in South Devon. If he carried around a camera I like to think that he would be a worthy successor to James Ravilious, who died in 1999.
Here are Keith Waterhouse and Peter O’Toole in The Coach and Horses.
I was asked a few days ago for advice on buying contemporary art inexpensively. Unusually I was, temporarily, flummoxed. Now my recommendation is to go to the RWA in Bristol and see their Autumn Exhibition. It is similar to the RA Summer Exhibition but much more reasonably priced. Another idea, and even less expensive, is to go to the Royal Festival Hall for the Koestler Trust exhibition of work by offenders, secure patients and detainees. Here is Demon in Solitary by Dean Polley (HM Prison Littlehey).
It is an arresting image and deeply disturbing. I have only now (many years after it has been hanging on the stairs) thought to search the artist’s name and feel even more uneasy about it. Definitely not one for the nursery wall. However, I have no doubt that the Koestler Trust is making a small but positive impact to improve life for our alarmingly high number of prisoners.
A more recent acquisition from a Koestler Trust exhibition is this drawing that I include to calm us down, dears, as I think the Prime Minister more or less said.
The Trust no longer publish the names of their artists or where they are confined.
There is a marvellous DVD of James Ravilious at work and it is replete with stills of his work. His general approach reminded me of that of Jane Bown, with whom I quite often worked for the Observer in the 1970s. (I would come up with some lark or other, amongst aristocrats or blacksmiths or whatever, and then write up a sort of extended caption to her lovely understated pictures which were what the editors were really looking forward to.)
The Ravilious photos were of a rural life which I suppose sort of hangs on, though with fewer exigencies and cases of incest. I certainly saw almost everything he depicted, on dog-and-stick farms in grass and heather country, in the 70s. In Suffolk, then, one of my best friends was a much older man who was a socialist and could have walked straight out of Ask The Fellows Who Cut the Hay, or out of James Ravilious. By the way, all the rural types in the Ravilious photos seemed entirely, and, I would say, proudly, respectable. In that sense not what we might call Spectator Picaresque.