Category: Art History (Page 4 of 4)

Stanley Kirkby: In the Woodshed.Edison Bell 8″ Radio Shellac Disc (c.1928-31)

Tracking Time: Art, Technology and Modernism in the Thames Valley 1850-1950
This proposed book is the likely outcome of a PhD which I will commence in the next few years – timing depends on how much support I get from my own or other institutions.

The subject is one very close to my heart as I grew up in the small railway town of Didcot Oxfordshire (originally Berkshire).

I hope to trace the myriad threads which informed artistic activity post-railway and how this brought phonographic, kinematic and wireless sounds and images to the Thames Valley area.

I will be drawing on the subject matter explored in my poetry ( Last Farmer : salt Publications 2010) and this in turn will feed back into the artistic research. The area was host to small artistic communities which used the railway as a means of ‘escaping’ from London. The Blewbury Artists and Long Wittenham’s connections to the Cockerel Press and Reading University will be explored.

I will also be looking at amateur examples of early photography and the military dissemination of technology. I also hope to link the spread of early phonograph equipment and recordings based on actual examples of early 19th Century artefacts that I collected from my country step-grandfather.

I have been collecting relevant books for theme ( early cinema/photography and etching in Thames valley 1850-1910) for a few years. Now I have to digest as much as I can before July 🙂

I sent a submission to a Film Philosophy conference in Amsterdam and have been accepted so have three months to write paper detailed below. This will pull together all the research done as first year of M.A. which was put on hold whilst rejigged M.A. to be fine art and cartoon based (this blog). The previous research is specifically archived here https://shaunbelcher.com/rpt and merges into ongoing fine art’Projects’ here https://shaunbelcher.com/fineart/

The proposal which has been accepted is as follows:
BEYOND FILM PROPOSAL

Alexander Mann’s ‘Gnats’: Early film and photography in rural England as traced through an artist’s sequential narrative and sketchbooks.
Alexander Mann (1853-1908) landscape and genre painter was an early adopter, post impressionism, of photography and his sequential narrative in etchings ‘Gnats and other hindrances to the landscape artist’ of 1884 reveals not only an awareness of photography but hints at a wider filmic narrative.
It is the purpose of this paper to explore this folio work of Alexander Mann alongside his sketchbooks and relate this to the wider discourse around early cinematic and photographic technology,  artistic modernism, artistic communities and the railway. This will draw on Benjamin, Kirby, Solnit and Schivelbusch in attempting to uncover information from a neglected area of art history i.e. Artistic Modernism in the Thames Valley (England) and the spread of ‘new’ imaging technology from 1850-1914 through artists to the local community.
The paper will attempt to reveal a correlation between ‘experimentation’ with ‘new’ technology in post-impressionism in the English provinces with present day advances in pervasive mobile and digital imaging and its equivalent widening of participation in the processes of image creation.

Keywords: Early photography and cinema, sequential narrative, mobile technology, imaging, landscape and genre painting, etching, provincial modernism.

EYE
www.eyefilm.nl

www.film-philosophy.com

This blog picks up from July 2013 when I delivered my first paper on illustration and film at the film-philosophy conference Amsterdam.

This could be seen as the beginning of my ‘art-historical’ research for want of a better word.