English painter, wood-engraver, book illustrator and designer. "...one of the best British watercolourists of the 20th century, was the very opposite of a tortured artist. It helped perhaps that he always enjoyed acclaim, for his many book illustrations and his ceramic designs, as well as for his paintings. But it was also a matter of temperament. He loved dancing, tennis and pub games, was constantly whistling, and even in the mid-1930s found little time for politics, working up only a mild interest in the international crisis or the latest Left Book Club choice. He was, by all accounts, excellent company. ... His delight in the world informs his work. Alan Powers, probably the greatest authority on the artist, has written that 'happiness is a quality that is difficult to convey through design, but Ravilious consistently managed to generate it'. And David Gentleman has remarked that Ravilious is "an easy artist to like". His woodcuts for books and vignettes for Wedgwood (the alphabet mug, the boat-race bowl), are regularly described as witty and charming. And many of his watercolours, too, attract such epithets as 'friendly'. ....In fact his watercolours are never cosy and never merely pretty or tasteful. This is partly to do with his work's complicated relationship with modernism and with his training in design (at the Royal College of Art he studied in the design school). 'I like definite shapes,' he once wrote, and his landscapes approach the abstract in their preference for flat planes and hard lines and patterns. ...on 2 September he went out on an air-sea rescue mission in search of an aircraft lost the previous day, and the Hudson plane in which he was flying itself disappeared." http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/apr/30/eric-ravilious-painting-landscape-watercolour undefined

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