Taking a closer look at two master wood engravers

 

The Splinter Group had an outing on Friday, to see the exhibition of wood engravings by Eric Ravilious at Aberdeen Art Gallery.   We also were shown their collection of work by Claire Leighton, another consummate wood engraver who worked in the 1930s. 

Ravilious’ work was typical Ravilious, decorative, full of mark making, playful.  There was a strong sense of him testing out his tools to see what marks they could make, and the way he played with perspective gave his work a naïve feeling which I guess is reflected in the work of many designers and illustrators today.  Leighton on the other hand was more about the subject.  The Gallery’s collection was mostly from a series she did based on workmen in the US.  To me, the most successful were of men in snow, shovelling in the streets of New York or a wagon hauling through the backwoods.  The snow helped lighten the blacks, which dominated her images. Her work was all about outline and shape, beautifully athletic men and machinery in rugged landscapes.  Tone was minimal and just a few strokes of her spitsticker were all she used to relieve the black.  There’s a hint of that socialist worker stuff that was fashionable then in art but certainly not now.  Unlike Ravilious, whose decorative, not-quite-but-almost quaint, certainly charming, Englishness is still popular. Robert MacFarlane devotes a chapter to him in The Old Ways, so he must be in.

Not all Claire Leighton’s work was so dark, she wrote and illustrated a lovely book about her garden, Four Hedges, which was reissued in 1970 so not outrageously expensive on Abebooks.

Plenty of inspiration for the next Splinter project…..

Reconnections

Borenich is a tiny graveyard perched on a knoll and with views to Schiehallion a few miles west and Loch Tummel, just to the north.  There are only two gravestones and a little iron cross, though there are some recumbent stones. I couldn’t get the gate open so I didn’t go in, but I could read the gravestones, both with Stewart names engraved on them.  I went to visit after meeting Cathy Laing, who was born a Stewart, told me about the place on North Uist at the patchwork quilt meeting at Taigh Chearsabhaigh. Chrissie Kate Stewart, Cathy’s grandmother, signed her name on the quilt and her family, who were travellers, had strong connections with Borenich.  Isabella Christie taught down the road in Kinloch Rannoch and in Lochmaddy, at first sight completely unlinked places but it seems not.  There is a website about Borenich with lots of information about the people who lived there in the nineteenth century, when it was a reasonable sized village (www.borenich.co.uk).  Now there’s one farm, many piles of stones in the surrounding fields, a graveyard with a visitors’ book and the feeling that this place was connected in ways now long forgotten. 

Mistle thrushes were feeding on the anthills in the dry grassland where these harebells were still in flower, just.