Mike, thanks for the heads up on my Kitty Hauser goof. I don’t know what part of my brain wanted to call her book “Silent Stones”. I confess to having only read what is available on Google books: I’m too mean to spend £65 to find out how well she fulfills the promise of the introduction (all of which can be read online, albeit at the cost of some moral misgivings . I try to keep inline links subtle as I hate the way they interrupt my reading, but that light underlining in the text indicates a link to the scanned version at Google. The book looks fine, but at that price I want to hold it in my hand before buying.

Leighton has a bit too much yearning for the olden days for my taste, but it is fascinating how successful she was in the U.S.A. with such a strong element of socialist realism in her work. Nostalgia for the agrarian past is something both left and right seem to be able to agree on. Gwen Raverat and ‘BB’ are two woodcutters who had a large influence on my youthful soaking up of image styles, but they are also a little too straightforward in composition to tickle my art bone as an adult.

One of the things I like about Ravilious apart from his formal qualities is his inclusion of the modern world alongside the ancient. He is much easier to read as nostalgic today, now that steam trains and stevedore-loaded cargo ships are firmly things of the past, but at the time I suppose he would have seemed modern, if not modernist.

I’m not sure there is a ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ side of the preservationist/archaeological line, just different attitudes and purposes. The preservationists can seem too romantically arbitrary in deciding which periods of landscape history to cast in aspic, and the archaeological thinkers can be accused of a lack of discrimination – as Auden did at the time, saying that they would be happy with *any* mix of old and new. One of the themes that runs through my current projects is that you cannot preserve a European landscape by leaving it alone. Doing nothing is still doing something: it still favours some landscape processes – particularly the growth of secondary woodland – over others. So the archaeological approach seems essential to me, even if your goal is preservation.

I started photographing seriously a few years back with the deliberate intent to work a more linear sense of composition into my work, and the American abstract expressionists were a major compositional inspiration. To find myself ‘coming home’ is an interesting, and unintended, experience. I’m waiting a while to let it sink in, but I suspect it is part of the same process that has me using my mother’s admonitions on my own children. Childhood goes deep.

Tim: I have always loved the applied decorative arts, and I personally find it very hard to distinguish the aesthetic pleasure I get from, say, arts and crafts textiles, from more supposedly high art objects. That said, one lesson of the various C20th art-for-living movements is that making your life a Gesamtkunstwerk is mostly a game for the rich. Perhaps the internet offers a way out of relying on philanthropists to fund affordable access to art.

I’d like to hear about the Ravilious book. You’re not thinking of the re-issue of “The English Eye” by his son, James?

I had a brief enthusiasm for Clare Leighton’s wood engravings after picking some up in a junk shop (I had no idea who they were by until coming across them on the web), though I think she probably crosses that preservationist / archaeological line too often in the wrong direction, and the illustrative work of Tristam Hillier in the Shell Books of the 1950s. As you say, it’s the background noise of a 1950s / 60s childhood.

N.B. I’m not aware of a book by Kitty Hauser called “Silent Stones” — I don’t suppose you meant “Shadow Sites” ? She visited our campus gallery last year in connection with the exhibition of aerial photography of O.G.S. Crawford, and gave a talk with Jem Southam and Roger Palmer — a curious combination.

I get the feeling that some people are moving out of the long shadow of American art and Modernism (which had probably helped people move out of the even longer shadow of British Empire!), and rediscovering an alternative heritage — “Britain” as an interesting regional culture, not as a universal brand.

Tim