a study

John Ruskin

dirtying the paper delicately

Attending a meeting at work yesterday where staff were assembled to talk about drawing, I heard the wonderful phrase "dirtying the paper gently" used in describing the act of drawing. Stephen Farthing, our guest who had the previous day given a lecture on drawing (which I missed, sadly), borrowed the phrase from Ruskin. In fact, Ruskin said that "all art is but dirtying the paper delicately" in The Elements of Drawing. It seems to be such a wonderfully poetic description for the activity that forms the majority of my creative practice, particularly the recent works using powdered graphite such as Gravesend and Grindelwald. 


Here too, is another work by Ruskin, one of many pieces he created in Chamonix in the French Alps, and another which shows his interest in geology. Indeed, in Modern Painters, Ruskin displays an obsessive attention to classifying every detail and permutation of rock formation and landscape feature, all dirtying the paper delicately.

John Ruskin, Cascade de la Folie, Chamonix, 1849
pen & ink, watercolour and bodycolour on paper

John Ruskin, Aguille structure, 1856
(engraved by JC Armytage)

christmas present

A christmas gift. Volume IV is a surprisingly extensive meditation on the structures and formations of mountains and mountain beauty. 

Ruskin and photography

Some years back, I found this image by Ruskin of the 'Mer de glace, Chamonix'. It's one of the earliest photographs ever taken in the Alps. Ruskin made many historic early daguerreotype photographs in the 1840's and 1850's. However, in his Lectures on Art (1870) Ruskin expressed warnings for the use of photography and argued that it had a negative impact on art:

Let me assure you, once and for all, that photographs supersede no single quality nor use of fine art, and have so much in common with nature, that they even share her temper of parsimony, and will themselves give you nothing valuable that you do not work for. They
supersede no good art, for the definition of art is ‘Human labour regulated by human design’.

His original enthusiasm for photography arose out of it's mechanical aspect, however, and the media’s ability to deliver images with minimal involvement of human labour seems to be the very quality that impressed Ruskin deeply in his first contacts with daguerreotypes.