I'm a great fan of the warm humour, infused with a love of the countryside, that is found in The Detectorists. Shown on the BBC, over three series and a Christmas Special, it follows the personal trials and detectoring tribulations of Andy and Lance as they scour the breathtakingly beautiful Suffolk countryside in search of treasure from bygone civilisations that shared the same earth.
In a recent interview, Mackenzie Crook, the programme's creator and an enthusiastic detectorist, described how his love of nature goes hand in hand with an appreciation of the secrets it keeps.
"Metal-detecting is an incredible, rather spooky, experience. Often you’re alone with the ghosts of the past, looking for signs of people that are long dead. And they’re everywhere, because every field in England has been trodden or inhabited before."
This pull of the land, a deep yearning to be identified with and by it, was felt particularly strongly in England in the years between the two World Wars and one of its most eloquent voices was that of the artist Eric Ravilious. In preparation for my first talk on a selection of paintings and photographs set in winter, I visited the wonderful Wiltshire Museum yesterday, to see their gem of an exhibition called Eric Ravilious: Downland Man.
Downland Man is perhaps a reference to an influential book by H J Massingham who wrote a series of popular books on English rural life in the 1920s and '30s, and who was a founding member of the Soil Association and pioneer of organic farming.
Eric Ravilious loved wandering and exploring; taking a path as far as it would lead him. In his youth, he would often disappear for days, walking and sleeping out on the highest points in Southern England, The Sussex Downs. Disappearing is something Rav, or The Boy, as he was affectionately known, did. It's what he died doing. There is a familiarity about his watercolour paintings of the Sussex and Wiltshire countryside, but also a distinct absence. You will not be here for long, they seem to say. There is a delight but also an intensity about the way in which he captured the familiar and the mysterious, the work-a-day and the timeless. Coming to watercolour later in his career as an artist, he developed a highly sensitive and individual approach to the medium. Instead of building up washes in which the greatest constituent was water, he used a dry, or starved, brush and almost incised or scratched the surface of the paper, building up a network of patterns which give an idiosyncratic texture to both air and earth. The tiny flecks of paper that are left exposed by this method are like tiny patches of the chalk downland beneath the turf. He was, by all accounts, a tremendous dancer and tennis player and the variety of his directional brushstrokes have been compared to tennis strokes or the patterns made by a dancer's feet.
Whilst lyrical about the land and drawn to sites of an ancient pedigree, Rav was no lofty Romantic. His pictures combine the managed landscape and evidence of modernity, like the railways and barbed wire - much loathed by the recently founded Ramblers' Association (1935) - and the magnificent folding stretches of land formed by geological shifts and pre-historical endeavours.
One of my favourite paintings in the exhibition was The Westbury Horse, painted in 1939, a year before this great white beast was covered up with turf to deter enemy reconnaissance. The painting has Ravilious' trademark criss-cross patchwork of fields and hedges and the steam-blowing train makes its way from east to west in the distance. All is held by the watchful gaze of the white horse of uncertain heritage.
The visual and symbolic dialogue between ancient and modern, familiar and inscrutable, near and far, is what makes his paintings so alluring. There is a benevolent sense of pleasure here but also detachment, an absence. Very few of Ravilious' paintings of the countryside contain human figures, even if there is evidence here and there of their presence - a signpost, a roller, a picket fence. It is as if the people have just slipped away, leaving the land to its ancient guardians.
Image credits: The Detectorists Chris Harris/BBC
The Westbury Horse 1939 - Private Collection, on loan to Towner Museum, Eastbourne
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