‘My seed corn over 40 years’ Inside Robert Tavener’s sketchbooks
In 2002, Emma Mason was asked by her friend, the veteran printmaker Robert Tavener, to put his life’s work into some sort of order, a job that she reckoned would take about a year. “He was in his eighties, and the task was beyond him,” she says. The artist died in 2004, and his daughter, Mary, asked Mason to take care of his entire archive, and to oversee the sale of his remaining prints. Twenty years on, there are still limitededition Taveners on sale on the walls of her plush Eastbourne selling gallery, among print works of other (largely British, largely 20th-century) artists. Tavener, originally a Londoner, moved to Sussex in 1953 to teach at Eastbourne Art School, where he was given a day off every week to pursue his career as a printmaker, specialising in linocuts and lithographs. He spent most of his free time at his artwork: either out sketching and plein-air watercolour painting; or cutting the prints; or at his press, producing hundreds of editions for an expanding number of collectors in the ‘art for all’ period in which the medium was booming. He was also successful as a commercial artist, as national companies, such as British Rail and London Transport, were in that era committed to commissioning artists to design posters for their advertising campaigns. He produced magazine covers for Lilliput, Homes & Gardens and The Listener, plus illustrations for the likes of Methuen and Penguin.
All images © The estate of Robert Tavener
But it’s his fine-artwork for which he is best known today. “He was an extremely talented draftsman,” says Mason, “who had a finely tuned sense of place, and the ability to get across the tone and mood of the English landscape and of English architecture. He was also extremely technically adept, an absolute master of the mechanics of his medium.”
PAGES FROM A SKETCHBOOK
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