The Eric Ravilious Wall Calendar 2024 (Art Calendar)

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Her persistence has paid off. A circle of “friends” chipped in to help with the finance, and more than 70 cinemas have already signed up to screen a film, which is both a warts-and-all account of a passionate but unconventional marriage and a persuasive curatorial tour around a body of work whose quiet surfaces are never quite what they seem.

A study space and library, which focuses on the artists in the collection, offers the opportunity for our visitors to spend time getting to know the artists and works in the Towner Collection. Part of the story is told by Ravilious and Garwood’s daughter, Anne, who was a babe in arms when her father was killed (in her autobiography, Garwood recalled the effort of trying to lift her to wave a final goodbye) and just 10 when her mother also died. As Kinmonth points out, the film would not have been anything like as layered had she not made available the couple’s personal correspondence and all the letters between her father and his two lovers, which she inherited after their deaths. A bucolic landscape – with barbed wire … Chalk Paths, by Eric Ravilious. Photograph: foxtrotfilms.com In her autobiography, Long Live Great Bardfield, Garwood is open about the impact on her of two affairs that Eric publicly pursued, starting while she was pregnant with the first of their three children. Her account is painful but never self-pitying. “I like that combination of deep feeling that’s written on a very thin epidermis,” says Greig. “I find Margy’s storytelling very tender and elegiac.” Poignantly, it falls to the couple’s granddaughter, Ella Ravilious, now a curator at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, to read out Garwood’s passage bequeathing her book to posterity, should it have survived. “If you are not one of my descendants,” the passage continues, outside the film, “then all I ask of you is that you love the country as I do, and when you come into a room, discreetly observe its pictures and its furnishings, and sympathise with painters and craftsmen.” This might be the story of a great man, but it is a tale told by women.For all the turbulence and injustice of their relationship, there is a balance between Ravilious and Garwood as artists that is made clear in two of their pictures. Both were of third-class train carriages travelling across the countryside. But whereas Ravilious’s watercolour carriage is empty, giving centre stage to the white horse carved into the hillside beyond, Garwood’s woodcut is crammed with passengers. Margy Kinmonth (right) with Tamsin Greig, who voices Tirzah Garwood for the film. Photograph: foxtrotfilms.com The Chinese artist Ai Weiwei admits he knew nothing about Ravilious until Kinmonth approached him because of his installation History of Bombs at the Imperial War Museum. “I was curious to know how a war artist worked, so I accepted the invitation to participate in the project,” he says. He was astonished by what he discovered. “His expression is very calm, and he has such an innocent and almost naive painting style. I was deeply moved by the authenticity, attention to detail, and humanitarianism expressed in his artworks about war. He is able to observe and express in an extraordinary way. Although a lot of his works are watercolour paintings that seem like an understatement, they are profound, rigorous and meticulous. I think that Ravilious is one of the best artists in the UK.”