No. 29 Bus 1934

Eric Ravilious made this watercolour, ‘No. 29 Bus’, sometime in the 1930s. He’s got this wonderful dry brush technique going on that feels so natural. He lets the texture of the paper do a lot of the work. Look at the scene he’s set. It's like a theatre set! We've got this abandoned bus, missing its wheels, sitting forlornly in a field. It's propped up on barrels, like it’s waiting for something, or maybe it’s just been forgotten. The whole thing’s rendered in these muted, earthy tones, which give it a kind of melancholic charm. The number ‘29’ is painted on the side of the bus, it's so direct it brings it down to earth again. It contrasts the slightly absurd scenario Ravilious has created. There’s something about the oddness of Ravilious’s work that makes me think of Edward Bawden, another British artist with a knack for finding the strange in the everyday. It's like they're both in on some secret joke, a shared understanding of the absurd.