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…..
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