He was the first war artist to die on active service – and one of the greatest. Now, a new film, featuring Alan Bennett and Ai Weiwei, uncovers his complicated life
: they didn’t have to go to war or climb Everest, and all of them died in their 30s living out lives they had dreamed of as children. It’s this old, fatal love for the landscape.” The result, says Macfarlane, is that “both Thomas and Ravilious are thought of as quaint ruralists when really they’re not – they’re modernists”.Photograph: foxtrotfilms.comapproaching the junction of a road that stretches towards an ominous future .
The film begins and ends with the doomed plane bleating out a mayday signal that was never heard, before looping back to Ravilious’s childhood in the Sussex countryside where he took pleasure in sketching commonplace objects – a brush and bucket, his father’s collar and tie, as well as the planes flying over the chalk hills.
, 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.”