"He was interested in churches, in church architecture. The influence of Ruskin had stimulated him to a pleasure in the medieval forms. His talk was fragmentary, he was only half articulate ...".
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Yesterday, reading August's issue of The Wire, Ken Hollings' article on sound recordist/artist Chris Watson, there's a quotation from Ruskin at the top of the page:
"The whole function of the artist in the world is to be a seeing and feeling creature; to be an instrument of such tenderness and sensitiveness, that no shadow, no hue, no line, no instantaneous and evanescent expression of the visible things around him, or any of the emotions which they are capable of conveying to the spirit which has been given him, shall either be left unrecorded, or fade from the book of record."
Hollings gives no source but I manage to track it down in The Stones of Venice, III, ii, v-xii
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Then this ...
"The railroad is in all its relations a matter of earnest business, to be got through as soon as possible. It transmutes a man from a traveller into a living parcel." (from The Seven Lamps of Architecture)
How strange ... thinking of Wilde and his Importance of Being Earnest. Was this passage in Ruskin the starting point - conscious or otherwise - of Wilde's play?
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Ruskin, Ruskin, Ruskin ... everywhere I look at the moment. Agh! Why not a verb: to ruskin? I ruskin, you ruskin, he/she ruskins, they ruskin, I ruskined, ...
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