3 new woodcuts by Eric Slater

                                                                            

I say new not so much because they are new to me but simply because untill recently the subtlety of Eric Slater's colour woodcuts have not been done much justice by the kind of reproductions we have seen online. No one who reads this blog, or who goes out and buys a print on ebay, should complain. Almost everyone who does will know that ebay photos hardly ever do a colour woodcut justice. (An exception was the recent Mabel Royds, which came up very well).
                                                            

For Eric Slater all that has changed markedly through the photos published by James Trollope. A review of Slater's work in 1929 talks about 'his sensitive treatment of colour' and these new photos finally do bring that out. This of course is all by way of mea culpa to some extent. I've known Slater's work for many years but what you see here are subtle prints in good condition. No one really could deny that Slater's prints can be samey but I have come to the conclusion that isn't the point. By 1929 Slater had probably been making woodcuts for about two years and the same article starts out by saying, 'It has only taken Mr Eric Slater a short time to establish himself amongst those artists whose work one involuntarily looks for at an exhibition'. These images show why but they don't say how he got there.
                                                                      

 

By the late thirties, Campbell Dodgson, who had been Keeper of Prints at the British Museum and owned four of Slater's woodcuts, said the artist had learned the technique from a neighbour at Winchelsea. This must of course be Arthur Rigden Read, not just because he lived at Winchlesea for many years, but because Read's sense of light and colour was so good. That grey-greenish-blue in A misty day is almost straight out of Read. Even if some of Slater's prints can look rather drab at times, what I think he learned from Read was purity of colour and the way pure colours can be played off one against the other as he does so effectively in Japanese bush lanterns at the top.
                                                                                   

 

Finally, if, what I think is called Eventide Eastbourne does not recall the Sussex seaside town we know, I've included a jolly railway poster that puts the little headland you can see in the Slater into context. It does show just how true to the shapes of the landscape Slater was but the poster also brings out what I often feel about Slater; he's oblique, and more low-tide than cheerful. Now you couldn't say that about Read.