Writing & Research
This part of the website consists of:
- Art in Eastbourne: a personal perspective on Eastbourne's links with art and artists;
- Art and History: an introduction to some of the links between these fields.
Art in Eastbourne
Ancient, modern; nautical, terrestrial; fleeting, timeless… All these facets of time and place in Eastbourne have been captured by artists and photographers, both traditional and cutting-edge.
Whether or not renowned for locally-inspired motifs, many artists have lived in Eastbourne. In the 19th century, for example, there was Augustus 
Leopold Egg, RA, friend of Charles Dickens, whose art was celebrated for its moral and historical themes. Born when Disraeli was Prime Minister but living into the Beatles era, children’s illustrator Mabel Lucie Attwell lived for a time at Ocklynge Manor. Born in Eastbourne, the printer Hilary Kepler founded the St. Dominic’s Press and established the Ditchling artists’ community with his brother-in-law, the sculptor and typographer Eric Gill. Photographer and stage designer Sir Cecil Beaton was a pupil at the prep school St. Cyprian’s, while Robert Tavener and Eric Ravilious had close connections with Eastbourne School of Art(s and Crafts), later renamed the College of Art and Design. Renowned printmaker Tavener taught there from 1953 to 1980; artist, illustrator and designer Ravilious studied and was a tutor there. His students in the 1920s included the wood engraver and weaver Stephen Fergus Champ, who later became a distinguished art teacher and administrator in his own right, both in England and New Zealand. Eric Ravilious’s wife was the artist Tirzah Garwood; their son James, born in Eastbourne, was a master photographer of rural life and landscape.
For devotees of Eric Ravilious himself, the new Towner art gallery (situated next to Eastbourne’s Congress Theatre) holds the largest collection of his work. This includes Cuckmere Haven and Downs in Winter. (Ravilious also created highly original compositions centring on the Long Man chalk figure at Wilmington.) 
The Towner also holds artworks by, among others, Pablo Picasso, Vanessa Bell, Walter Sickert and David Bomberg, and by contemporary artists such as Olafur Eliasson, Elizabeth Magill and Julian Opie. Victorian painters, such as J.F. Herring, are also represented.
There are other galleries, for example in South Street, exhibiting contemporary and more traditional art, while the Society of Eastbourne Artists (founded 1946) holds twice-annual exhibitions at the Lansdowne Hotel on the seafront. Other thriving organisations include the Eastbourne Group of Artists (professional and semi-professional; founded 1913). And there are locality-based groups within the Eastbourne area, for example at Wannock and 
Sovereign Harbour. The Eastbourne Festival and Artists’ Open Houses are a window for creativity in the visual arts.
In the hinterland, there lived Roland Penrose and Lee Miller at Farley Farm, visited by a pantheon of European artists including Picasso, Ernst, Miró and Man Ray. The Bloomsbury artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant were at Charleston Farmhouse. West of Firle, designer Peggy Angus had a holiday home named ‘Furlongs’, celebrated for its artists’ gatherings, while at Halland, architect Serge Chermayeff built his own house, Bentley Wood (1935-38), in Modern Movement style. It was at Bentley Wood that Chermayeff took the photograph of Eric Ravilious that appears on the left, and where in the garden they and their friends played boules. *
For the artist and photographer, the imagery of Eastbourne itself is rich, varied and often dramatic. Here follow some photographs, taken by me during 2006-2008, which underline the striking visual panorama that Eastbourne represents.
*I am indebted to Alan Powers, Professor of Architecture and Cultural History at the University of Greenwich , for this information about the Ravilious-Chermayeff connection.
 |  |
 |  |
 |  |
 |  |
 |  |
 |  |
Art and History
As a working artist, I find inspiration in the art of the past. I am drawn particularly to various forms of Impressionism and to those artists who moved on from Impressionism, finding new ways to interpret and analyse the world. Also fascinating are the wider connections between art and history and between art and politics. What were the historical contexts in which artists functioned as artists? How far were artists politically engaged? What were the political causes, social conditions and scientific discoveries that might have contributed to the way they made art?
I have enjoyed the field of art history since childhood. Eileen Jessop Price (see About the Artist) gave me a copy of Ernst Gombrich’s lucid and approachable The Story of Art, and for an Art Prize I was awarded a book on The Fauves (Matisse, Derain and co.) and those artists who influenced them - not least Vincent van Gogh. Art History was inspiringly taught by Brad Gooch at Suffield Academy, Connecticut, where I was a student in 1966. As part of Mr. Gooch’s course, I wrote a term paper on the ‘Ash Can’ School, a group of American social realists including John Sloan and Everett Shinn. These artists, working in the early 20th Century, projected the highs and lows of New York life and landscape so vividly that, for this viewer - fifty years on in the 1960s - art really did become experience.
Later in life I taught Art History at Woking Sixth Form College. At the end of the course, students sat two exams: one on the Art of Early Renaissance Florence, the other on Painting in Paris, 1900-1914 (basically the sources and practice of Fauvism and Cubism). Students were also required to write a piece of extended analysis: their projects included the history of Gauguin’s painting Nevermore; the use of perspective in art from Alberti to Vermeer, and the Guerrilla Girls (a feminist art collective in the United States). Some of my students went on to read Art History at university.
Teaching also gave me the opportunity to write on historical and art-historical subjects. In 2000, Routledge published my analysis of the origins and course of the Spanish Civil War in their ‘Questions and Analysis’ series, and I was later commissioned by two Spanish Civil War scholars, Daniel Kowalsky and Kenneth W. Estes, to write a closely-argued piece on the defence of Madrid during 1936-37. The resulting essay appeared in History in Dispute : Vol. 18 (St. James Press, 2005).
In 2002 my introductory study, Van Gogh: A Beginner's Guide, was
published by Hodder & Stoughton, and subsequently appeared in Korean and
Chinese editions. It is to be republished by Hodder Education in 2012 as an e-book.
