I try not to shy away from the unpopular points of view, to think over a problem you need to see it from many perspectives, so I pose a question out there that I think is unspoken, but worth mentioning. Was the death of Eric Ravilious the best thing that happened to Tirzah Garwood?
We know that while Eric was alive she had more or less stopped working on her art, turning to craft like many of the Bardfield wives, in order not to conflict with their husbands work. The only example who did keep her work up, was one of the younger artists in the village, Sheila Robinson, whose work was in demand from designing stamps to working with major publishers and brands as an artist and designer i the 1960s when social conditions had loosened up. But in the time of Tirzah’s life, she was expected to support her husband more and look after the children.
We know from her biography that Eric had intended to leave her and they had agreed to separate. This was a period when Eric was having an affair with Helen Binyon and Tirzah was having an affair with John Aldridge. Having been jilted by both their lovers, the Raviliouses came back together more in the hope that something was better than nothing.
When Eric died, Tirzah started to become an artist and painted many works. As she was being treated in Copford nursing home when she was dying from cancer, the works got more surreal as the medication she was on took hold of her more.
I always thought Tirzah was a better wood engraver than Eric. She had learnt his style, but it wasn’t so stiff. She had humor in her work and on a whole was less pastiche. Many of the wood engravings come from finding joy in the confines of the stuffy Edwardian upbringing she had.
Free of Eric she married again and found a husband that supported her both emotionally and creatively. Henry Swanzy was unlike Eric in many ways but he wanted what was best for his wife, where as Eric was a brilliant artist, but a selfish rotter, who if he was dating a friend of yours, you would tell them to leave him immediately.
In the time I have been blogging, there is a suburban calendar ideal of Ravilious, that if he was a wonderful painter, he must have been a huge loss to the world, but I think by the time he died he had expressed everything he had in him as an artist. There is a feeling of a holy nature about the man, thanks to a few bad documentaries that failed to get to any grit about his personal life and ended up being more about the celebrities point of view than about the character of the artist. So now Ravilious a pin up of the moment, but with little context about the life he lead or how it affected Tirzah. His work is banded about with the same sickening misplacement as the hype for Constables Haywain painting was in the 1970s and 80s, where the image would appear on placemats, waste paper bins, coasters, ‘collectable’ plates and a myriad of trash that one can see in any dead end charity shop.
There. I told you it was an unspoken point of view. This isn’t to say his work is without merit, the public enjoy the work because it has a nostalgic feeling and many of the paintings feel like places we know. The joy about Eric’s work in Essex is how many of the views still are recognisable today, but it is undeniable that the moment Eric died in the Atlantic that Tirzah was able to come alive.