John Ruskin (1857): 'The Elements of Drawing'

"I do not think it advisable to engage a child in any but the most voluntary practice of art."

Ruskin's preface to this self-study guide to drawing, exhorts parents and readers on a general approach to art which is as different from a modern Learn to Paint book as Wordsworth's Guide to the Lakes is different from a Lonely Planet Guide.  The modern art book lists essential primary colours of the medium and recommends basic appropriate paper types. Compare to Ruskin in his preface: "If a child has many toys he will merely dawdle and scrawl over them; it is by the limitation of the number of his possessions that his pleasure is perfected and his attention concentrated." He is as insistent on the background preconditions to approaching the practice of art and Wordsworth is that we approach the Lakes along a certain valley at a certain time of the day. No-one but a fool would stand at Innominate Tarn at any time of the day but late afternoon!

David A. Cross (2007): "Cumbrian Brothers" Fell Foot Press

This is the latest slender edition from Fell Foot Press, and the most recent publication from independent art historian David Cross. Like his previous work, A Striking Likeness, which considers George Romney's 18th Century portraiture, the subject of this book is a Cumbrian Artist.  In Cumbrian Brothers, Cross introduces us to the illustrated letters of lakeland artist Percy Kelly to the poet, Norman Nicholson. The introduction is all we need to set the scene for the pictures and letters, beautifully reproduced, which comprise the bulk of this text.

Neither the writer nor the painter would otherwise have been on the tip of my tongue without this book, which provides a sufficiently concise but compelling introduction to encourage me to undertake a little more reading in the area. I'll probably spend a little time in later posts to discuss what I'm learning here about poets and artists in general, and these two specimens in particular.

To my shame, some of the more outrageously self indulgent uttering of the poet in his letters are not beyond the kind of thing I find myself saying (hopefully only in the hearing of the cats, who are above such pettiness.) This was a useful heads-up to the possible nature of my own wanderings in art and literature.  A warning to us all, but also an encouragement to find our own meanings in the medium of expression which we choose for ourselves and take for our own. I shall take this as the starting point for further reading around the subject of art and writing in general.  Next on the list, and not too far down the pile on the study floor, might be another mildly obscure book from the British Museum Press: Kim Sloan's: A Noble Art: Amateur Artists and Drawing Masters c.1600 - 1800.

Something in the Woods - Rosie Fairfax-Cholmeley

As one Luddite to another, I have no idea how to adopt all the features of this online book reading scheme into my otherwise non-web-based daily habits. nonetheless, I'll share authoring of these pages will all and sundry who are interested, and who knows, we may be among the first to actually use the internet for something other than cutting and pasting other peoples' crap into essays or watching images which would not be available in anything published by OUP.