The genesis for this project was born out of the bicentenary celebrations of the birth of the great Victorian art critic, John Ruskin, 8 February 1819 – 20 January 1900.
Ruskin gave two lectures in London, The “Storm Clouds” in 1884, in which he expressed his concerns and reservations about the sky and the land being polluted by the Satanic Mills of Manchester, Lancashire and such like.
Ruskin bought Brentwood house on Coniston when he was in his early 50s and moved up to the Lakes.
As a photographer, Tim was looking for an entry into how to best articulate this perception of the land and the sky being polluted, indeed Ruskin is often seen as the grandfather of the environmental movement. Each of these mixed media images began life as a photograph taken from the top of this gallery, from a fourth floor dormer window in the roofline. Rendered as a black and white, then a photograph is taken of a Mark McMurdie painting also from the gallery. Now we have two images, in layers, in Photoshop.
The base layer is b&w, Tim’s photograph from the top of the gallery. The Mark overlay image is on top of Tim’s image, at around 15% opacity. At some point, Tim moves this top / Mark’s layer around, typically enlarging it, shifting it about a bit so that it makes “sense” with the black & white base layer underneath, a tweak or two of colour levels, and then sandwich them together.
The failure rate is about 90%, there are photographs of Mark’s paintings from the gallery and photographs of Tim’s from the 4th floor which clearly will never work together.
Furthermore, I would add this ties in and relates very much to the late 1800s, globally there was a movement called Pictorialism, which posited the idea that photography, recently invented in approximately 1835, could be more than a mere mechanical recording device, better still, it could be viewed as a fine art.
The resultant images are printed on Giclée paper, card mounted behind low reflective glass & framed by Sally at Derwent Frames in Keswick. A series of 10 images won Silver in the category: professional / landscape / fine art in the 2019 International Photography Awards, the next time they were submitted they won Bronze in the PX3 (Paris photo awards) in 2022.
They have also picked up a number of Honourable Mentions in various categories in other international awards in both 2019 and 2022. Two framed images were also exhibited (and found new homes) in the June - Sept 2021, “Through the Locking Glass” exhibition at Rheged, Penrith.
Unsurprisingly, local newspapers and Cumbria Life Magazine have run with these images on more than one occasion. Many framed prints had a full showing in December 2022 when Tim Fisher had his solo exhibition here in the Northern Lights Gallery.
