Gymnopedie III: Spring, mixed media 2007

Lucy Raverat

Recently, Lucy Raverat has assembled several sequences of works in oil which draw on a significantly broader spectrum of inspiration than the works in her earlier exhibitions. For some paintings the experience of travel (Vienna, the Caribbean) is still an important trigger but increasingly ideas, sensations, challenges of a more painterly and sometimes also more abstract nature come to dominate. Beyond their formal content, these interiors as much as the landscapes speak of states of mind.

A consciousness of the passage of time is embedded in many of Raverat's paintings. It may strike a note of regretful nostalgia, as in Thinking of Guayasamin. It may also take an imaginative leap into the future, as in the utopian, brave new world of Marseilles Park. In tune with the strongly physical, sensuous quality of the paintings in which surface textures count for so much, there is in many of these compositions an impression of the passage of the seasons, most typically from high summer into autumn. It is in these works (such as Hide and seek, Jacaranda tree, Fire on the mountain) that the artist clearly responds to the environment of her home in southern France among the hills and vineyards of the Hérault.

In almost every composition there is a human presence, occasionally hinting at self portraiture (Park in spring), more often taking the form of Raverat's characteristic, benign 'presences' which give a graceful focus to both interiors and landscape. This is intriguingly in evidence in her gymnopédies, a sequence of smaller works in oil on board which are among the most abstract works in the exhibition, though in each of these energetic, colourful pieces a figure can still be detected.

At the heart of Lucy Raverat's approach to painting, and central to its appreciation, is a distinctive treatment of surface. Achieved through a variety of techniques, from the application of palette knife to sponge and masking stencil, the artist first builds up her surfaces layer by layer, then proceeds to strip these back, eventually achieving the effect she desires, where her subjects almost have the quality of found images, discovered half by chance instead of ones laid down with brush marks. Such effects reinforce the impression of a temporal experience, as if the viewer has unearthed imagery concealed under later accretions, rather like laying bare some ancient Etruscan tomb painting, revealing from under the dust of time just such a happy, festive scene (be it banquet or picnic), given new and commanding life through Raverat's distinctive, lyrical idiom.

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 and in 2006 to Everyone Sang: A view of Siegfried Sassoon and his World by twenty five painters today. One-person exhibitions with Francis Kyle Gallery 2003, 2005 and 2007.

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