Lucy Raverat

Among the paintings Lucy Raverat has assembled for her fourth exhibition with Francis Kyle Gallery there is a new, urgent emphasis on the natural world, triggered by one encounter in particular which she considers momentous, indeed life-changing. Typically graceful and stylised in their appearance, the human figures which remain an important presence in her work now are overshadowed a by new and powerful presence. It is the presence of the great river, the Rio Negro, major tributary of the Amazon, which impressed itself profoundly upon the artist in the course of a visit in 2007/8 to Manaos in Brazil.

‘One must float for months upon the surface of the Amazon,’ commented an early explorer of the region, ‘to understand how fully water has the mastery over land. Its watery labyrinth is rather a fresh-water ocean, cut up and divided by land, than a network of rivers.’ For Raverat the water imposed itself ‘as a natural frontier, sediment-free and utterly black, a place of eerie enchantment and multiple, hallucinatory reflection, an elemental force which stays with one long after, like encountering a new dimension.’ Downriver from Manaos the faster, warmer, chocolate-coloured Amazon collides with the Negro, both bodies of water taking some hundred kilometres to fuse, their edges generating fantastic whorls and curlicues of black and brown.

Raverat’s treatment of surface is particularly distinctive, involving as it does a simultaneous process of building and destroying. Deploying a formidable arsenal of techniques from palette knife and sponge to masking stencil she formulates an idea, then goes on to bury it, before ‘rediscovering’ it again in a new configuration of elemental patterns. As her grandmother the Bloomsbury painter Gwen Raverat once described the process, she positively revels in the ‘primordial mud-pie delight of dabbling about with lovely jammy paint.’ As Max Ernst found in his visit in the 1920s to the Khmer ruins of Angkor Wat, half-buried still in the Cambodian jungle, imagery that would haunt his future dreams and continue to reappear in many forms, so for Raverat the experience of Amazonia resonates through her new large-scale canvases, the great river’s depths and surfaces now ripple free, now dramatically turbulent, a paradigm of her fascination with the surface and texture of canvas and her energetic and masterful relationship with it, freeing up a new potency in her vision.

Returning to paint subjects triggered by her own home surroundings in the hills and vineyards of the Hérault region of southern France, Lucy Raverat has rediscovered her affinities, long nurtured, with the rhythms of rural life. Livestock farming, harvest time, the cultivation of her garden are celebrated in her distinctive, lyrical voice, sometimes in watercolour, alongside mellow, reflective interiors (Golden woman in the kitchen, Benediction).

With equal bravura Raverat completes the exhibition with a third group of works which have a less specific origin, relating to her more general concerns: the life we lead in cities today (Tomorrow), the changing character of our natural environment (Snail world, Rain in the valley). Within this wide and ambitious range of material, significantly broadening her perception of what can be achieved through painting, Lucy Raverat remains true as ever to that always surprising freshness of approach which Virginia Woolf saw as a defining Raverat quality: ‘all Cambridge, all Darwin, solidity, integrity, force and sense.’

‘… I think that the river
is a strong brown god… almost forgotten
by the dwellers in cities – ever, however, implacable,
keeping his seasons and rages… reminder of what men choose to forget.’
(Four Quartets: the Dry Salvages by T S Eliot)

Biography

LUCY RAVERAT was born in Cambridge in 1948 into an academic and bohemian family. Her father was a don at Trinity College, Cambridge, her mother Sophie, the daughter of Gwen Raverat, wood engraver and author of the classic PERIOD PIECE: A CAMBRIDGE CHILDHOOD. Gwen, granddaughter of Charles Darwin, married the French painter Jacques Raverat, and Lucy's mother and her sister spent their early childhood in St. Paul de Vence. Amongst their circle were André Gide, Rupert Brooke, Stanley Spencer, Eric Gill and Leonard and Virginia Woolf, who stayed with them in France and with whom Jacques Raverat conducted an extended correspondence (VIRGINIA WOOLF AND THE RAVERATS, London 2004). This Bloomsbury connection, along with a deep sense of a family community engendered by the large Darwin clan, has sustained itself into Lucy's generation. 'Painting,' Lucy recalls, 'was what grown-ups did and an entirely normal way of passing one's time.'

In the 1960s Lucy Raverat studied briefly at Hornsey College of Art, then travelled to India, returning to live for some three years in an isolated cottage on the moors near Lancaster. Now married and with children already, she was able to make painting her main pursuit once more. With the encouragement of Richard Demarco in Edinburgh she participated in several exhibitions, before moving in the early 1990s to live in southern France. Represented by Francis Kyle Gallery since 2001, Lucy Raverat contributed in 2003 to the theme exhibition Roma, in 2005 to Lair of The Leopard: Twenty artists go in search of Lampedusa's Sicily, in 2006 to Everyone Sang: A view of Siegfried Sassoon and his World by twenty five painters today and in 2008 to РОДИНА: twenty-five artists from the West winter in Russia. One-person exhibitions with Francis Kyle Gallery 2003, 2005, 2007 and 2009.

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