" My entire delight was in observing without being myself noticed,— if I could have been invisible, all the better. I was absolutely interested in men and their ways, as I was interested in marmots and chamois, in tomtits and trout. If only they would stay still and let me look at them, and not get into their holes and up their heights! The living inhabitation of the world — the grazing and nesting in it, — the spiritual power of the air, the rocks, the waters, to be in the midst of it, and rejoice and wonder at it, and help it if I could, — happier if it needed no help of mine, — this was the essential love of Nature in me, this the root of all that I have usefully become, and the light of all that I have rightly learned."
Ruskin. Praeterita, volume I, chapter IX (1885-1889).
Ruskin is extremely relevant to my current body of work for his love and admiration of nature. Having recently read Peter Fuller's Theoria I have been extremely interested to learn more about Ruskin and nature. Though I initially read this book for religious ideas regarding my dissertation I have again found it very relevant to my practice.
One quotation which particularly stood out for me regarding the problems of art for art's sake types of arts was that; "The crimes of such movements, from his point of view, was that they were lacking in any sort of imaginative response to the natural world, and the spiritual truths which it revealed to the world of nature, and the spiritual truths it revealed to an attentive observer." (Fuller) I found this interesting for the ideas that art has an ability to translate and provide truths of the natural world and human nature.
However it could be suggested that this capacity has become lost in contemporary society through the ignorance of the natural world and a focus instead on the industrial, material and technological. Fuller reaffirms this stating that, "Ruskin recognised that the scientific attitude had involved men and women in a tremendous aesthetic and ethical loss: the quest for the underlying structures and essences of things had not confirmed their Divine origins, but had rather deposited men and women in a bleak and competitive wilderness."( Fuller). It is this situation, which we can consider our existence to be in the midst of. Our aesthetic loss is easy to see as the secularisation removes the ornamentation and grand beauty which churches, cathedrals and places of worship offered or the ornamentation of gothic architecture. The post modern landscape and design consist of largely repetitive and basic shapes and forms.
From modern painters Ruskin advised painters to "go to Nature in all singleness of heart... rejecting nothing, selecting nothing and scorning nothing.". This is another example of the aesthetic loss and ethical loss which the technological age has brought as images which we are exposed to through the media are largely manipulated, only presenting a artificial machine idea of beauty and perfection which could not be more different from Turner's expressive and free painting which Ruskin admired.