Eric Ravilious Carried On

the Knife Grinder

Eric Ravilious’ unpublished design for the Adhesive Stamp Centenary, 1940

Some of the subject icons Ravilious created for Everyman's Library.
These and more at the Collecting Everyman's Library site

shopfronts done for High Street, 1938

Ravilious was attracted to the light and radiance of the Sussex Downs

Not to forget he was an artist during wartime, this landscape is titled "Shelling by night", 1941

Eric Ravilious (1903—1942), British painter, designer, book illustrator and wood engraver, was inspired by the Sussex Downs of Southern England. His watercolors of the chalk paths and gentle scenery of the area are both serene and slightly discomfiting. There's an echo of the American Regionalism style of the same time, but Ravilious never seems to veer into what I think of as the Americans' fairy tale robustness or swirling animism. His is a quiet mysticism, drawing power from the ancient landscape and particular light.

Ravilious' commercial art on the other hand has a homey cheerfulness. There's a wonderful "Carry On" celebration of Britishness and day-to-day life in his series of storefronts, published as High Street by the Curwen Press. (All 24 lithograph views from High Street can be seen here.) He did work for Wedgwood with an extremely appealing child-like sensibility. He created wood cut spot illustrations, patterns and icons for the popular "Everyman's Library" imprint and designed for London Transport, among other highly visible —and quotidien—clients.

Ravilious was also an "Official War Artist"* during WWII  and received a commission in the Royal Marines. He was killed in September 1942 on a rescue mission with the Royal Air Force in the North Atlantic off the coast of Iceland.//

An excerpt from a beautiful essay by British essayist and travel writer Robert MacFarlane (which I found here):

Ravilious…Downsman, follower of old paths and tracks, lover of whiteness and of light, and a visionary of the everyday…’The Downs’, he wrote once, ‘ shaped my whole outlook and way of painting because the colour of the landscape was so lovely and the design so beautifully obvious’. ..He made expeditions, slept out and walked for hours following the lines of the Downs, their ridges, rivers and tracks…

The light of the Downs is distinctive for its radiance, possessing as it does the combined pearlescence of chalk, grass blades and a proximate sea. If you have walked on the Downs in high summer or high winter, you will know that Downs’ light also has a peculiar power to flatten out the view – to render scattered objects equidistant.... In these respects the light of the Downs is kindred with another flattening light, the light of the polar regions, which usually falls at a slant and is similarly fine-grained. The light and the path: the flattening (the light) and the beckoning (the path). These are Ravilious’s signature combinations as an artist.

* Did the United States have Official Artists for the war? Any war? It seems so odd— 'go out while people are getting killed and sketch.' But there were official photographers I suppose...

snow day details

I feel sad for the horses

why do I like this so much?

cigar store Indian

fingerless gloves?

"shine downstairs"

It is snowing yet again here. 
Herewith, a snowy day, January 24, c 1900, "on the East Side."
I would say my favorite thing in this image is the cafe sign. Although it was a bright moment, too, when I recognized that is a true cigar store Indian laden with snow behind the the older gentleman. One other detail to puzzle over— are those sidewalk grates being uncovered? If so, that means the subway was up and running, no? Then this image has to be 1905 or later.
Enjoy.

foreign territory

Liking California artist Allison Schulnik's work is a complete anomaly for me. How it is that I've fallen for her? The crude anti-pretty harshness, the accretions of paint (impasto-- I hate impasto!) and did I mention the disturbing clowns? It reminds me a bit of Gaetano Pesce (ghastly), and of Paul Evans furniture (the horror). But I also see Francis Bacon and James Ensor and despite all the names I've mentioned, I also see a really singular vision that somehow I find really arresting. She has an emotionally uncompromising and focused style. Yet through sculpture, painting and claymation film I dont find her repeating herself. The work seems like a progression... and I like that it leads me to foreign aesthetic territory.

Do not miss her video for Grizzly Bear—it's mesmerizing.

I found Allison on my other discovery, the eminently likeable (and linkable) Teenangster. Teen' is wide-ranging: street style to street views, from obscure art, and vintage, to-- very importantly— cute kitties. Intelligent but not highfalutin', stylish without a self-conscious hipster demeanor. Check her out too. UPDATE: Teenangster is no more//

Happy 2011

This was to have published at 11:55 last night but it didnt!

Ice caps and cold sheets

I just found out about Nicole Dextras on the blog Bird in the House but it seems Google is well acquainted with her work. Dextras is a Canadian multi-disciplinary artist who has worked with photography, installation, book arts, textiles, and paper working. The specific projects of hers that particularly drew me in were her ephemeral ice sculptures. Conveying both solidity and fragility, fixed and transitory, the literal and the figurative, these works are really striking and poignant.

Frozen typography * is an ongoing series of placed words —in parks, on the street—made up of letters created by freezing water into molds. The larger installations, like the 6 foot tall VIEW, involved hard labor of  building, arranging and filling the plywood and/or plastic molds, and then uncrating each letter. Some letters are tinted with coloring, some experience accidental intrusions of sand or leaves. All crack, disintegrate, melt, and eventually disappear, leaving only the photographic record. Placed in their landscape settings, the words seem like silent annotations. (see this blog for even more images)

Garments encased in ice * is a series installed on Toronto island. Skirts, blouses, dresses— are they vintage? they often dont look of "our time"— are embedded in blocks of ice or draped and frozen. Transparent, suspended the fabrics become sculptural evocations of sea life or shipwrecks washed ashore. Or more to the point— absence— evidence of something that was. 

*Both link to wonderful flickr collections by the artist

cheerful greetings

photograph by Doug Clouse

One of my favorite things about Christmas when I was little was the WPIX Yule log
and its hours of anonymous carols.

My family wheeled a tv into the living room, opposite the tree.

It didnt strike me as an odd urban replacement for a fireplace until much later.//

I hope your holiday is filled with cheer and wonder.

Thank you for reading, following, commenting, or just stopping by.
Please come again.

a seasonal interlude

the ghost of subways past

Broadway Local, 1973. Photo from the US National Archives on Flickr.

New York, 1973. Photo from the US National Archives on Flickr.

New York, c. 1980, by Bruce Davidson

New York, c. 1980, by John F Conn

New York, c. 1980, by Bruce Davidson

The other day I took the J train, not something I ordinarily do, and I thought it was a clever, native-New Yorker maneuver on my part. I was at Canal Street and needed to get further downtown and over around the Seaport. The trains I was most familiar with galloped right past the bowels of lower Manhattan whereas this mysterious and foreign (to me) line would swing over to right to where I needed to be. Good.

I found the J in the direction I thought said "Downtown." New York being New York, this didn't mean further down to where I needed to be, it meant "on the way to Brooklyn." That dawned on me as we came to "Bowery", a station apparently not used by anyone who actually paid a fare to be down there. At Essex Street, utterly chagrined I'd taken the train going the wrong way (only tourists did that), I was able to catch the J going the other way. 
The train was oddly screechy, and unpleasant. The car was old with gray bench seating and harsh fluorescent lighting. I swear it seemed like I was stepping back into 1980. Everyone appeared to be hampered, mentally or physically. People with hoods pulled over their heads nodded off in corners. Although the ride was all of about 6 minutes, it was like a train ride back to a New York I'd forgotten.

Looking at these images above, I cant believe I was around for it. This was when New York was "Fun City": garbage strikes, Bernard Goetz and a burned-out South Bronx. (It was when my father would launch into rants about living in "this Great Big Wonderful Town.") I would have been taken on the subway by my parents in the 70s and certainly I must have taken it myself by the early 80s? I don't have a strong negative memory of the graffiti, I kind of remember it neutrally. It was there in the same way the doors were orange and the benches gray. The Bruce Davidson couple at bottom is humorous but unsettling at the same time. The way she's clutching her bag is a distantly remembered feeling I internalized a long time ago. I look at images of New York like this and I think, how did we all not just think the world was ending? // More visions of the Golden Age of New York subway squalor at TwoFour Flinching. //

Someone at the Transit Museum said, "maybe it was one of our Holiday vintage trains?!" Um, no.
Every year at Christmastime and around July 4th several charming vintage subway trains in the collection of the Transit Museum get put into regular service. I would love to be waiting at 34th Street and have this roll up:

Poking around the internets I discovered that the J train has been rated on Yelp—as if one might give it 1 star and complain about service as you would to warn people off the latest beer garden. Here's what Victor C writes: "This train is terrible and dangerous. It's always freezing and filthy on the J. I've been mugged, punched and offered drugs many times on this train. Terrible train. Also, I have seen grown men completely naked on this train. I'd rather walk than take this train, really."