Here we are, it's November at last and launch week for the two books on James Ravilious which I have been excited about for ages now. I’m going to the ‘do’ in Exeter and I can’t wait to see these books out on the shelves and into people’s lives.
James Ravilious A Life by Robin Ravilious and firstly I have to mention the book itself, a thing of beauty from Wilmington Square an imprint of Bitter Lemon Press. The book is an unusual size, slightly squarer than the average, a delight to hold and read with 250 pages of the smoothest of smooth paper which shows the photographs off to their very best advantage.
Author Robin Ravilious, the daughter of artist and glass engraver Laurence Whistler (will I ever forget that day at Moreton Church looking at the Whistler windows) and married to James Ravilious for twenty-nine years before his untimely death from lymphoma in 1999 at the age of sixty. Robin has done a magnificent job of portraying both James’s life before she met him and their life together afterwards.
The couple would move to North Devon, to a cottage left to Robin by her grandfather, and a home for which she frequently mentions her attachment and her gratitude for the life and the inspiration that it offered in the ensuing years. The couple integrated into the rural North Devon community with ease and James, never backwards in coming forward where conversation with strangers was concerned, quickly built up a reputation as a likeable man of honour, a genuine soul, a photographer who could be trusted, and that rapport translated into an archive of pictures nonpareil.
Ashwell, Dolton, 1977 by James Ravilious © Beaford Arts
It was never going to be easy being the son of the more famous Eric and the (now) equally famous Tirzah Garwood, it would take time and much soul-searching before James could find his own metier, and ultimately work towards the many years creating the Beaford Archive from which we all benefit today (and from where copies of the pictures can now be bought) . I'm going to leave Chris Chapman to elaborate more about this on Wednesday.
Farmhouse window ledge by James Ravilious © Beaford Arts
Robin Ravilious doesn’t put a gloss on any of this aspect of their lives. James was often at odds with Beaford Arts, an organisation that aimed to bring cultural events to rural communities but often, through successive managements, failed to see the value of the work that James was doing for them. In a bizarre twist of early contractual negotiations (and pre new copyright laws) James surrendered all ownership of his images after his death. The negatives and copyrights would belong to Beaford Arts not to his family, and whilst the relationship currently seems to be on an even keel with the digitisation of the archive now in progress, it was not ever thus.
What becomes abundantly clear in the book is that any lack of appreciation did not extend to those whose lives James was photographing...
’His love of the landscape and his rapport with its people, so clearly seen in his work, gave them...a sense of their countryside’s identity as a special place: not just a rundown backwater where life was a struggle, but a precious piece of old England worthy to be looked at intently, and evaluated, before it disappeared... ‘The thing about James is, he makes our lives seem important.’
And that was so apparent to Bookhound and I on the day we went to the event at Hatherleigh recently when the community came out in their droves to see the photographs and talk about their memories of them.
The village hall was bursting with pride and awash with reminiscences...we went up to complete strangers with a picture in their hands and they would tell us about the location, the day, the weather, what was happening in the world at that time and what their lives had been like.
I like to think that James was looking down on that day and was well pleased with his work because, as Robin Ravilious elaborates in this book, James was often deeply depressed and, despite his innate 'sense of responsibility towards the future', frequently convinced that his life's work had been of little use and would be worthless.
Two of James’s subjects who Peter, Chris and I talked about at Port Eliot were Olive Bennett and Archie Parkhouse and Robin Ravilious’s chapter on Archie in particular articulates something so evident in many rural communities...the presence of the wise old souls who have lived there all their lives, barely travelling further than the next market town but knowing their patch intimately, surviving by the code of make-do-and mend born of the poverties of the past.
Archie Parkhouse and his dog Sally by James Ravilious © Beaford Arts
We have known them around us here though sadly, like Archie, they are a dying breed, but I doubt we will ever forget Jack, then in his eighties and wearing his old brown overcoat with its baler twine belt, who turned up at our gate one day soon after we had moved in (bearing in mind we live three miles out, up and down steep hills and along narrow lanes, from the village and Jack’s cottage) and proffered a rose cutting that he had picked from the garden of the derelict mill along our lane as a gift of welcome. My abiding sadness is that I didn’t manage to cultivate it into the glorious climbing rose that he had remembered from the days when the mill still stood, and I’ve been down there and looked since and I can’t see any trace, it’s long gone.
I would love to have met James Ravilious, indeed talking about him so much with those who did know him has been a real pleasure and inspiration this year, and now that I have read Robin Ravilious’s book I almost feel that I have met him. The book is beautifully written and James presents as an easy subject from whom to glean inspiration, the way that James Ravilious saw what he was looking at...if that makes sense, translates readily into my wanderings around us here. I find myself seeing with different eyes.
And I admire so much about him....
....the way that he 'despised jargon and impenetrable 'artists statements' full of pretentious claims and concepts'
...the use of black and white film as a more profound medium without the distractions of colour..
...the way that genes will out revealed in James's shared love with his father Eric of 'English light, abstract pattern, muted colouring, old-fashioned shops, old machinery and quirky corners of junk half-buried in nettles'
Archie Parkhouse's shed collapsed in a blizzard, Millhams, Dolton, Devon. 1978.by James Ravilious © Beaford Arts
...the recognition 'that the rural idyll comes at a price: hard physical work.'
Archie Parkhouse and Ivor Brock moving a sick ram by James Ravilious © Beaford Arts
And so much more besides.
As I highlighted yesterday, Chris Chapman has written a fine and moving piece about his own friendship with James Ravilious especially for you (and with some pictures from Chris's own collection), which will be on here on Wednesday, but he recalls that whenever he answered the phone to James a voice would say 'It's James...' with a slightly questioning inflection...almost as if he needed to apologise and wasn’t expecting the person on the other end of the phone to remember who he was. Chris has signed my copy of James Ravilious A Life accordingly and I hope to add more signatures to it on Thursday.
What a precious book and please come back later in the week, because don't forget I'm sharing the love...there will be gifts.
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