Just as I thought I had finished my visit to the Royal Air Force museum, I found they had an art gallery section as well. The whole arrangement here is some substantial that I’ll have to visit again to try and see everything that I missed when I visited last week.
This artwork is by Sybil Andrews (1898-1992) and she painted ‘Air Sea Rescue Launch’ in around 1942, and it is something of a splendid reminder that wartime art was not always interested in giving us handsome fighter pilots staring nobly into the middle distance. There are bold colours and a sense of urgency to the painting, it feels like quite a punchy artwork.
That, really, is the theme that justifies this riveting blog post, which is that the war depended on rescue, repair and the sort of practical work that rarely gets turned into legend. The museum panel notes that this was one of seven paintings Andrews made about boat building while attached to the Camouflage Development and Training Centre at Farnham Castle under the War Artists Advisory Committee, and that she was working for the Royal Air Force as an official war artist. I like it when infrastructure is at the centre, there are enough artworks of moments of great rescue at sea or of battle scenes.