Nick Hayes
Painting the Void
Eric Ravilious loved the edgelands. He would stake them out beforehand on his bike, plan his trip, often get up before dawn and take himself to where nobody else had cause to be – deserted yards of old Sussex buses, empty harbours, Brecon waterwheels. Then he would sit there for hours. He would take his drawings back to his studio and again he would sit for hours, working them into watercolours, layering wash upon wash, stippling, hatching, scalpelling, applying himself to the paper. There is a silence to his work, a stillness that is almost surreal. (Ravilious was influenced by Paul and John Nash; Paul especially dabbled with surrealism, which was flaring across Europe at the time.)
In his excellent catalogue notes to the new exhibition of Ravilious watercolours at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, James Russell describes his subject’s work as ‘depictions not only of a place, but of a place in which something is about to happen,
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'There are at least two dozen members of the House of Commons today whose names I cannot read without laughing because I know what poseurs and place-seekers they are.'
From the archive, Christopher Hitchens on the Oxford Union.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/mother-of-unions
Chuffed to be on the Curiosity Pill 2020 round-up for my @Lit_Review piece on swimming, which I cannot wait to get back to after 10+ months away https://literaryreview.co.uk/different-strokes https://twitter.com/RNGCrit/status/1351922254687383553
'The authors do not shrink from spelling out the scale of the killings when the Rhodesians made long-distance raids on guerrilla camps in Mozambique and Zambia.'
Xan Smiley on how Rhodesia became Zimbabwe.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/what-the-secret-agent-saw