There are 32 colour plates and 32 black and white plates in this book, as well as several reproductions of his woodcuts, and a photograph of the artist. Even the colour plates give only a faint reminder of the fine texture in the landscapes, the sense of every brush stroke across the paper, that I could see when we visited the Towner gallery. Ravilious's paintings could be explored most easily under a magnifying glass. Here they might sink a little into the page, as though they were between the war posters for a journey into the South Downs, something to be seen on a railway station.
But even here they evoke the Downs, and memories of repeated patterns, landscape as decoration, often empty of people or animals, just containing the machinery of living, the curves of a path, a rusted farm traction engine, a steam train cutting across the sky.
Freda Constable, writing about these landscapes, wants blank space to be sinister or threatening, creating a sense of foreboding, not just signifying a love of the clean line and a clear judgement about when to cut out detail and distraction.
Maybe there is a sense of putting it all down on paper before it might be gone. But these landscapes were painted with little sense of what would come after - the flotillas marking the horizon beyond Scottish islands, the turn of a submarine screw, flimsy planes on wet tarmac at dawn, water colours sketched from the sky, and then the artist himself going missing off Iceland.
The continuing concern is with pattern - and Ravilious moves from the pattern of a strawberry net in the wind, the criss-cross of chalk paths, and the lines of a ploughed field, to the curves of submarines, the complexity of camouflage, snow in Norway, and the radiating shock waves of a gun firing reverberating in the flowers on the cliff top.
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