Ruskin - a response.

Pictorialism, a global photography movement from the late 1800s. . Roughly 50 years on from the advent of photography, 1835 (?), and some artists felt that the camera could be more than a simple mechanical recording device, believing instead that the new medium could in fact be a creative tool for the fine arts. . By challenging those barriers, photography began to evolve as we know today, employing techniques including moving the camera during exposure, defocusing lenses, applying filters in front of the lenses, and in my own professional practice, employing multiple images / negatives to produce a single final image. . This ongoing project is a direct response to these bicentennial celebrations in 2019, to the birth of a former resident of the Lake District, and arguably the Victorian age is most famous art critic, John Ruskin. . Embracing a multidisciplinary practice, the genesis of each of these images commences with a black-and-white photograph, taken from a single dormer window, in my Keswick gallery, looking west out to the mountains, the fells. . Each of these black-and-white images is then overlaid with a digital image of a painting either by Mark Mcmurdie or Venus Griffiths, in the style of pictorialism. . With 2x images now loaded into the digital darkroom, 1x black-and-white photograph taken by myself and 1x colour image originating from one of the gallery's represented artists' painting, I can then rearrange the photograph of the painting, at around 20% opacity, to better suit the image below. . The result I believe is in part a landscape of the imagination based on the view from the top of the gallery, which speaks very much about the ideas that John Ruskin promulgated in the mid / late 1800's.