I thought I would feature this Mine as an unlikely source of inspiration. I came across two works on the same day and I thought it was nice to show an alternative to artistic inspiration in Cornwall other than St Ives.
Sammy Solway – Wheal Friendly Mine, 1905
The Wheal Friendly Mine in Cornwall was a small tin mine at St Agnes which formed part of the more famous and rich Wheal Kitty tin mine. It was operating prior to 1863 but was out of use and abandoned by 1930. Below it is imagined when working from a 1966 Match box cover.
Below is a photograph of the mine by John Piper taken when he was researching the Shell guide for Cornwall. It is a romantic ruin but also looks like an outpost for Mars.
John Piper – Wheal Friendly tin mine engine house, St Agnes, Cornwall, 1933
The last picture is a painting by Olive Cook for the Recording Britain project. For Olive Cook it is a rather lovely watercolour.
Olive Cook – Tin Mine, St. Agnes, North Cornwall c1940.
Here is a series of prints I made as a student. Time gives a distance of how you feel about work made but I was clearly angry about the wars happening and going on in these prints. Many of the images were constructed and then printed after.
I liked the mess of printing things wrong, I thought it gave more texture to it all and I enjoyed the abstract nature of making things. At this time I only really knew the works of Michael Rothenstein and had seen a few Robert Rauschenberg prints in books.
The Academy was a cinema located at 165 Oxford Street, London. Replacing another cinema, in 1931 the Academy opened, becoming London’s pre-eminent art house cinema, and for over 50 years introduced British audiences to major films, beginning with auteurs such as Jean Renoir and Marcel Carné; in later years the Academy largely established the reputations of Ingmar Bergman, Andrzej Wajda, Satyajit Ray, Jean-Luc Godard, Miklós Jancsó and others in Britain.
The Academy’s high standards were maintained by a succession of three managers: Elsie Cohen, George Hoellering and Ivo Jarosy. The cinema was damaged during a bombing raid in 1940 and re-opened in 1944.
In 1948, in order to remedy the lack of initiative shown by the Tate Gallery (and other institutions) in informing the British public about contemporary artistic movements, the ICA (with offices in Charlotte Street) mounted its first exhibition, ‘40 Years of Modern Art: a Selection from British Collections’. The ICA signalled its new approach to the arts by choosing the basement of the Academy rather than an already sanctified ‘art space’. Organised by Roland Penrose, this groundbreaking exhibition opened in February 1948 included works by Pierre Matisse, Pierre Bonnard, Pablo Picasso, Salvadore Dali, René Magritte and Vassily Kandinsky, as well as British contemporaries Francis Bacon, Eduardo Paolozzi, Victor Pasmore and Barbara Hepworth
Academy One opened in May 1964, the small Academy Two in March 1965, and Academy Three in April 1967 after some considerable strengthening and rebuilding in the basement. Hoellering died in 1980; the theatres closed permanently on 2 April 1986 and were demolished in 1989.
These posters are all designed by Peter Strausfeld and I really love the alternative take on poster design with a simple illustration to sum up the film. Poster design is rarely uniform but somehow Strausfeld’s style and punchy bold typefaces make for a beautiful combination.
Todd Hido is a photographer based in San Francisco. Many of the photographs here are from the book ‘Roaming’. I originally thought that the pictures were original chance moments taken from inside a car when it was raining, but now I know this is not the case.
Hido keeps at least three water bottles with him in his car. One time, I watch him spray his windshield before taking a landscape photograph. ‘I’ve learned from sheer disappointment that sometimes I need to take pictures, but it isn’t raining outside,’ he says.
Sometimes the artist sprays glycerin on the windshield, for a different kind of effect. It’s a technique he compares to changing paintbrushes. The size, direction and position of drops of water on the car window inform the photograph that results, and within these fictitious raindrops, Hido says he can ‘compose’ the real picture that he wants to see. Ultimately, each photograph is a composition. It is a way of giving shape to a mental state, as opposed to capturing an actual setting.
To me it doesn’t really matter if the subjects of the photos below are staged or not as they are just unusually beautiful to my eyes.
Years ago I was asked not to make a music video, but to find some footage for a song. It happened that very weekend I was in a car in a thunderstorm near Ashley and I shot some footage of a tree being distorted in the window screen with lightning. The song was a statement of forlorn hopelessness and the tree looked sad to me, it was the perfect moment. The result is here.
Decimal Day in the United Kingdom was on 15 February 1971, the day on which each country decimalised its respective £sd currency of pounds, shillings, and pence.
The first decimal coins that appeared in the United Kingdom back in 1968 were a well-loved representation of British heritage at that time. 40 years later, in 2008, we wanted to update the coins with a fresh set of designs.
The process began with a competition. The Royal Mint asked people to submit designs for the six coins that could stand alone or work as a set. We were looking for designs that would symbolise Britain, perhaps by using traditional heraldry, though designers were free to explore all options.
As well as inviting specially chosen artists and coin designers to submit designs, we also opened the competition out to the general public. People were invited to send in their designs for six coins: the 1p, 2p, 5p, 10p, 20p and 50p pieces. The £1 was initially left out of the competition.
Avebury is a Neolithic henge monument containing three stone circles. The Village of Avebury in Wiltshire was built around them and now bisect the circle with a High Street. Avebury contains the largest megalithic stone circle in the world. Constructed over several hundred years in the Third Millennium BC, during the Neolithic, or New Stone Age, the monument comprises a large henge (a bank and a ditch) with a large outer stone circle and two separate smaller stone circles situated inside the centre of the monument.
Paul Nash – Avebury, 1936
When England was converted to Christianity, Avebury was considered a non-Christian monument. At some point in the early 14th century, villagers began to demolish the monument by pulling down the large standing stones and burying them in ready-dug pits at the side. During the toppling of the stones, one of them (which was 3 metres tall and weighed 13 tons), collapsed on top of one of the men pulling it down, fracturing his pelvis and breaking his neck, crushing him to death. Trapped in the hole that had been dug for the falling stone he was found by archaeologists in 1938. They found that he had been carrying a leather pouch, in which was found three silver coins dated to around 1320–25, as well as a pair of iron scissors and a lancet.
In the latter part of the 17th and then the 18th centuries, destruction at Avebury reached its peak. The majority of the standing stones that had been a part of the monument for thousands of years were smashed up to be used as building material for the local area. This was achieved in a method that involved lighting a fire to heat the sarsen, then pouring cold water on it to create weaknesses in the rock, and finally smashing at these weak points with a sledgehammer.
In the 1920s Marconi wanted to build a radio station on the hills above Avebury and the Air Ministry wanted to close Wayland Smithy area with standing stones as a bombing range in the 1930s . †
Paul Nash – Avebury, Personage, 1933
In July 1933 the ailing Nash went on holiday to Marlborough with his friend Ruth Clark. From there they made a day trip to nearby Avebury. ‡
Paul Nash – Avebury Stone (Double Exposure), 1933
The epiphany that Paul Nash had to use he standing stones artistically, seems to have come with an interest in the Neolithic period in publishing with the British Public. It is an era where Paganism has become popular, as many alternative religions did after the First World War. In trying to make sense of the carnage and brutality of the War the public looked for ancient wisdom and this maybe why we have to tolerate people smothering themselves over Stonehenge every solstice.
In these paintings and photographs Nash was also documenting an interest that other artists such as Henry Moore had in the primitive. Moore looked towards early Peruvian pottery and flints for organic shapes and old works made by early man. These monuments are the few examples of art that survive. Even in the medieval period the only arts to survive in Britain of the common man would be the carvings of bench-ends in churches, pottery or other folk art.
Paul Nash – Landscape of the Megaliths, 1934
Margaret Nash said this was Paul’s first painting of the Avebury stones, which he saw in August 1933. Nash himself gave the following description of Avebury in ‘Picture History’ The preoccupation of the stones has always been a separate pursuit and interest aside from that of object personages. My interest began with the discovery of Avebury megaliths when I was staying at Marlborough in the Summer of 1933. The great stones were then in their wild state, so to speak. Some were half covered by the grass, others stood up in the cornfields were entangled and overgrown in the copses, some were buried under the turf. But they were always wonderful and disquieting, and, as I saw them then, I shall always remember them … Their colouring and pattern, their patina of golden lichen, all enhanced their strange forms and mystical significance. Thereafter, I hunted stones, by the seashore, on the downs, in the furrows. ♣
Paul Nash – The Nest of Wild Stones, 1937
I found my first nest of wild stones on looking closely into a drawing I had made of some bleached objects on the Swanage Downs. It lay just below the level of my consciousness, slightly out of focus. But there was no mistaking its lineaments a moment later when I moved the dry thoughts to one side. ♠
Below Paul Nash writes of the effect of Avebury on his work. That he wasn’t only painting the stones themselves but placing ordinary stones he found in a picture as if they were large monuments.
In most instances, the pictures coming out of this preoccupation were concerned with stones seen solely as objects in relation to the landscape. But later certain stone personages evolved, such as the stone birds in the ‘Nest of Wild Stones’ and the more ‘abstract’ forms in ‘Encounter in the Afternoon’. ♣
Many of these works may be down to another external influence, Eileen Agar. Nash had met and fallen in love with Agar, who was a surrealist artist and using stones and found objects in her works around the same time.
Paul Nash – Photograph of Stones in his Studio, 1936
Paul Nash – Encounter in the Afternoon, 1936
Paul Nash – Landscape of Bleached Objects, 1934
Paul Nash – Circle Of The Monoliths, 1937-8
In the painting above (Circle of the Monoliths) is the stepped hill what is likely Silbury Hill. The construction of the hill in the Late Neolithic period was originally stepped, then filled in. Silbury Hill is very close to Avebury.
When the artist Paul Nash first visited Avebury in 1933 he was amazed by the scale of Silbury Hill and by the ancient circle of megaliths, the great glacial boulders that had been dragged from the Downs in prehistoric times. ♥
Paul Nash – Silbury Hill, 1938
Paul Nash – Silbury Hill, c1937
All Nash’s other statements about Avebury and stones are much more direct, it is almost as if he contrived to intellectualise his ideas simply to be provocative, but in face the Landscape of the Megaliths Nash does resolve the equation. The picture shows the adventure of stones receding away from the spectator, in the foreground in the convolvulus curls round a snake which rises upwards. ♦
Paul Nash – Avebury Stone, 1933
The stones at Avebury come up again when Nash was asked to illustrate a cover to the magazine Countrygoing. Though I think it was commissioned in 1938 it was published in 1945.
A Paul Nash Cover to Countrygoing, 1945
Paul Nash – Circle Of The Monoliths, 1937-8
Above is the finished painting of Circle Of The Monoliths. Below is the study for the work that was found painted on the back of The Two Serpents c 1937.
Paul Nash – Circle of the Monoliths, 1937-1938
Nash’s abstraction of stones in the 1930s went on with his distortions of landscapes, found stones and the real Neolithic stones. In we see Mên-an-Tol and the stone ring there placed in the top right corner in front of more found stones. To the right is a grid that can only be echoing Encounter in the Afternoon and Circle Of The Monoliths.
Paul Nash – Nocturnal Landscape, 1938
Below we see the same Avebury stone used on the cover to Countrygoing with the wedge shaped cut in the side.
Paul Nash – Druid Landscape, 1938
Initially, using a No.1A pocket Kodak series 2 camera, Nash captured images so that he could refer to them in the creation of his paintings. Increasingly, however, he saw his photographs, not as aids or sketches, but as artworks in their own right.
Here Nash depicts one of the Avebury Sentinels, and his choice of subject matter is characteristic. Nash was always interested in landscapes and aspects of the natural world, not for their historical or aesthetic interest per se, but more because he thought that certain places as he called them (see Biography) had about them a mystical importance, a genius loci; which lent the place, the stone, the tree, an importance which transcended its apparent properties. As he wrote there are places whose relationship of parts creates a mystery, an enchantment. It is this mystery, this enchantment, which Nash tries to capture in his photographs. ◊
Paul Nash – Avebury, Sentinel, 1933
Some of the quote below may be a repeat of what has been read about Nash, but I featured it for the Convolvulus park that features in Landscape of the Megaliths. In the background of the watercolour and lithograph below are two hills, both likely to be a Neolithic Sidbury Hill and how it looks today.
Last summer I walked in a field near Avebury where two rough monoliths stand up … miraculously patterned with black and orange lichen, remnants of the avenue of stones which led to the Great Circle. In the hedge, at hand, the white trumpet of a convolvulus turns from its spiral stem, following the sun. In my art I would solve such an equation
Paul Nash – Landscape of the Megaliths – Watercolour, 1937
Paul Nash – Landscape of the Megaliths – Lithograph, 1937
The photographs below are dated 1942 by the Tate. I don’t know is Nash went back to Avebury or if they are catalogued wrongly. But I thought it was worth including them with the car by the roadside.
Paul Nash – Avebury, 1942
Paul Nash – Avebury, Sentinel, 1942
Paul Nash – Avebury, Sentinel, 1942
Paul Nash – Avebury, Sentinel, 1944
Paul Nash – Avebury, Sentinel, 1944
Paul Nash – Avebury, Sentinel, 1944
Paul Nash – Avebury, 1944
† Joanne Parker – Written on Stone: The Cultural Reception of British Prehistoric, 2009
‡ David Boyd Haycock – Paul Nash, p54, 2002
♠ Andrew Causey – Paul Nash: Writings on Art – Page 142
♣ Paul Nash – Paintings and Watercolours Exhibition Catalogue, Tate, 1975
♥ Julius Bryant – The English Grand Tour, p16, 2005
♦ Paul Nash, Places, South Bank Centre, 1989 ◊ Art Republic
In this blog are a series of paintings by John Nash of Bristol.
In 1925 and 1937, on the latter occasion with Eric Ravilious, he visited Bristol, which he greatly enjoyed, especially the docks and paddle-steamers; these, he wrote, ‘were the inspiration of many works’. At the same time he visited Bath, which he found equally stimulating.
Nash had been advised to work at Bath and Bristol by Edward Wadsworth when they were working together in 1920 on a mural project. Nash went to both cities in the summer of 1924 and again in 1925. Looking at the painting below of Seaport by Wadsworth it is clear his style and suggestion had an effect on Nash.
Edward Wadsworth – Seaport, 1923
John Nash – The Dredgers, Bristol Docks, 1924
John Nash – Bristol Docks, 1924
John Nash – The Dredgers, Bristol Docks, (likely 1924)
John Nash – Bristol Docks, 1925
Ravilious and Nash had got to know each other at the Royal College of Art as pupil and teacher, then later as colleagues. It was Nash’s recommendation that they both went to sketch at Bristol Docks. Ravilious wanted to try to subjects They painted the same location at night, when the docks were quiet and the boats tied up. It was about the same time as Ravilious painted Newhaven also.
Eric Ravilious – Bristol Docks, 1938
Above is the Eric Ravilious painting he made sitting next to John Nash at night, so they could paint the docks while the boats were tied up. Below is the John Nash painting and a cleaned up version of the drawing.
John Nash – Nocturne: Bristol Docks, 1938
John Nash – Nocturne: Bristol Docks, Gridded Sketch, 1938
John Nash – Study of ‘Pump Room’, Plymouth Dockyards, WW2
Above is one of John Nash’s war paintings from his brief stint as a War Artist in the Second World War. It was sketched on site and it has notations for colour to be worked up later into an oil painting. I mention it as the figure head was used below.
John Nash – Handbook of Printing by W S Cowell, 1947
In the Handbook of Printing by W.S. Cowell there is an illustration by Nash of Bristol, it’s a modern day version of Turner’s The Avon Gorge and Bristol Hotwell as seen below. I thought it was a nice way to see him looking back twenty years whilst winking at Turner.
J.M.W. Turner – The Avon Gorge and Bristol Hotwell, 1792
The Kennet and Avon Canal in Bath was built between 1796 and 1810. Before the age of steam with the railways, canals were the main super highways of Britain. This Canal enabled goods to be easily transported between London and Bristol.
Many of the pictures in this blog post are dated 1927. There are a few painted and listed as 1926. Dating works by John Nash can be tricky, he often spent the summers making watercolour sketches with colour notes in his sketchbook so the works could be painted in oil over the winter. There is another complication when artists date work and that is usually because they are only dated when exhibited – sometimes the date when sold becomes the date of the picture. Nash just signed his paintings and so dates are guesswork.
Many of these were sold at an exhibition at Goupil Gallery in March 1928 with Gilbert Spencer and Neville Lewis.
Nash had been advised to work at Bath and Bristol by
Edward Wadsworth when they were working together in 1920. Nash went in the summer of 1924 and again in 1925.
John Nash – Canal Bridge, Sydney Gardens, Bath, 1927
John Nash – Lock Gates at Bath, 1926
Above is the view today, of the picture below.
Roderick Jones suggested the picture below has a Cezzane feeling to it in the angles and lay out of the buildings but they miss Cezanne’s gradient shading and the colours are very flat. I think what I like about the picture below most is the canals were used and you can see the desire lines in the grass where people walked from lock to lock.
John Nash – The Old Canal, Bath, 1927
Another photograph above is of the view below. The watercolour below has the oil painting under that too.
John Nash – Canal lock before a town, 1926
John Nash – Lock Gates, Bath, 1926
The bridge pictured below is the Grosvenor Suspension Bridge. It was demolished in 1929 and since then the area has been built over.
John Nash – Suspension Bridge, Bath, 1927
John Nash – Pulteney Bridge, Bath, 1926
John Nash – Avoncliffe from the Aqueduct, 1926
Above is a wash painting by Nash. It has been gridded to Nash could work it into the oil painting below.
Kenneth Rowntree – Ethel House, Great Bardfield, 1942
In a previous post I featured the work of Walter Hoyle and his drawing of Little Saling Church in Bardfield Saling. In researching that I found the lovely paintings by Kenneth Rowntree below. The image above is Ethel House, Great Bardfield, where his friend Michael Rothenstein lived.
Rowntree trained at the Ruskin School of Drawing in Oxford, and then at the Slade in London. In 1939 he married the architect Diana Buckley. They associated with many of the modernist emigr architects in London at that time, and a strong architectural sense can often be felt in Rowntree’s work. He was a Quaker, and during the war became part of the ‘Recording Britain’ project, in which everyday life in wartime Britain was captured by a range of artists. When Diana became pregnant in 1941 they wished to move out of London, and Eric and Tirzah Ravilious found them a suitable house in Great Bardfield, close to the Bawdens’ home. Local churches provided a strong inspiration for much of his work here, but he also worked in London, Kent and Wales.
Kenneth Rowntree – SS Peter and Paul, Little Saling, Essex, 1942
Kenneth Rowntree – Interior of SS Peter and Paul, Little Saling, Essex, 1942
Kenneth Rowntree – The Organ Loft, SS Peter and Paul, Little Saling, 1942
And here are two bonus pictures of nearby church in North End, again, inside and out.
Kenneth Rowntree – Exterior, Black Chapel North End, Nr. Dunmow, 1942
Kenneth Rowntree – Interior, Black Chapel, North End, near Dunmow, Essex, 1942
Eric Fraser was born in 1902. Known principally as an illustrator, he became most famous for his work in the Radio Times as well as designing many dust jackets and print advertisements for companies. Today he would be known as a graphic designer, in the 1930s he was known as a commercial artist.
The Radio Times cover above was to celebrate the release of the wonderful BBC Radio Drama of Lord of the Rings in 1981, following the 1968 Hobbit.
This blog is just a look at his work for the Folio Society editions of Lord of the Rings (1977) and The Hobbit (1979). Fraser was a specialist in illustrating classic scenes from mythology.
The Hobbit
Lord of the Rings
The drawings Eric Fraser made for Lord of the Rings were not of his own inspiration but from designs by Margrethe Alexandrine Þórhildur Ingrid, or Margrethe II, Queen of Denmark. She is also an artist whose works have been inspired by J.R.R. Tolkien’s literature from a very young age and she used the pseudonym Ingahild Grathmer.
The same illustration as the BBC Radio Times would be used for the soundtrack to Lord of the Rings by Stephen Oliver in 1981.
