INTERVIEW
Lost and Found
The curator of the new Hastings Contemporary exhibition speaks to
Kent Barker.
“I was open-mouthed in wonder” James Russell told HIP. This was the moment he first laid eyes on the ‘lost’ Ravilious, Mackerel Sky. To be brutally truthful, the 1938 watercolour hadn’t really been lost at all. It was sold for 15 guineas the following year to a private collector. When Russell finally tracked it down it was hanging in pride of place over a mantelpiece in its owners’ home. Now it’s on show at the Hastings Contemporary summer exhibition, Seaside Modern, Art and Life on the Beach. Nonetheless stories of missing art works suddenly reappearing are grist to the mill of publicists, and this tale of the Ravilious got coverage on the BBC and ITV – and now HIP.
James Russell and Ravilious’ Mackerel Sky
CREDIT: Susan McFie
James Russell, the exhibition’s guest curator, is an authority on Ravilious. He’s written books on him and mounted a comprehensive exhibition at the Dulwich Art Gallery. “I was compiling a catalogue,” he told us, “and appealed for private owners to get in touch.” Nothing happened for a couple of months, but then he received a “low key note” inviting him to come and see the family that owned Mackerel Sky. “It looked like it just belonged in their house”, he told us. “It wasn’t just another Ravilious watercolour, it was a wonderful abstract composition with lots to study in it.” The owners were persuaded to loan it to the exhibition and it’s now on show along with another two of his works, Anchor and Boats and Rye Harbour.
Eric Ravilious was born in 1903 and grew up in Eastbourne. From 1924 he studied under Paul Nash, famous for his desolate depictions of WW1. He encouraged Eric’s woodcuts, but it was with watercolour that Ravilious found success and critical acclaim. At the outbreak of WW2 he became a full time war artist, but three years later failed to return ‘death presumed’ from an RAF sortie in Iceland. He was 39.
James Russell sees Mackerel Sky as a something of curiosity. “He’s painting boats in a new way,” he says, and points to ropes and pulleys that appear to have no function and may not even be connected to each other. But the composition is bold, with the main fishing boat sandwiched between a dark hull and the ribs of a derelict hulk. All shelter beneath a muted ‘mackerel’ cloud formation.
The work slightly pales in comparison to the striking, angular Rye Harbour. Ravilious visited Rye in 1938 and James Russell tells a story of him sitting sketching when a woman approaches him and introduces herself as proprietor of a local school for artists. Might he like to visit her studio for a glass of sherry? According to Russell he did do, but never discovered whether she knew who he was, or simply hoped to enrol him as a student.
• Read HIP’s review of Seaside Modern: Art and Life on the Beach James Russell here.
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