Ed Kluz: The Lost House Revisited - Hardcover

Tim Knox; Olivia Horsfall Turner; Ed Kluz; John Harris

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 185894662X ISBN 13: 9781858946627

Publisher: Merrell Publishers Ltd, 2017

Synopsis

The artist Ed Kluz has a fascination for the sites of lost buildings. Kluz grew up in the wilds of the Yorkshire Dales, surrounded by the landscape of the past, and the sense of remoteness he felt there sparked an interest in forgotten places, such as country houses and follies. Once-celebrated houses that were abandoned to ruin, burned or deliberately destroyed have now become the haunting subject matter of his distinctive collages.Kluz is meticulous in his research., He spends hours at a site, sketching, taking photographs and generally 'getting to the heart of a place'. Then, in a process in which he likens himself to a collector of fragments or relics, he gathers all the material he can find before adding a little invention of his own to revive or reimagine the house. His highly original works are a combination of watercolour and layer upon layer of delicate painted collage elements, the tension between colour and texture achieving a sense of depth and light., Kluz's lost houses conjure up the vanished buildings in all their pomp, perched on stark, treeless plains under threatening skies, as if briefly illuminated in the glare of lightening or the beam of an arc light. In his introduction to the book, the art and architectural historian Tim Knox describes Kluz's views of houses, with their concentration on the filigree architecture and silhouette of building itself, as heirs to the highly finished perspective drawings produced by professional architectural artists in the early nineteenth century, but he also draws parallels with the bold graphic tradition of Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden. Kluz himself, too, explains that his aim is to evolve the long tradition of country-house painting - a tradition that began in Britain in the sixteenth century and continued into the 1800s, only declining with the advent of photography., Over recent decades, public interest in lost country houses has been growing; there are an increasing number of books and websites devote

About this title

About the Author:

Ed Kluz is an artist, illustrator and printmaker whose work reimagines historic landscapes, buildings and objects. His approach to image-making is inspired by his interest in English Romanticism, the Picturesque movement and antiquarian representations of architecture and topography. He has received commissions from, among others, the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and such publishers as Faber, the Folio Society and John Murray. He grew up in North Yorkshire, studied fine art at Winchester School of Art and now lives in East Sussex. Tim Knox is Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. From 2005 to 2013 he was Director of Sir John Soane s Museum in London, where he oversaw a major campaign of restoration. He was previously Head Curator of the National Trust. He regularly writes and lectures on art, architecture and the history of collecting. Olivia Horsfall Turner is an architectural historian, author and broadcaster. In 2013 she wrote and presented the BBC television series Dreaming the Impossible: Unbuilt Britain. The following year she joined the Victoria and Albert Museum in London as Curator, Designs and Lead Curator for the V&A + RIBA Architecture Partnership. John Harris is Curator Emeritus of the Drawings Collection of the RIBA and a founding trustee of SAVE Britain's Heritage

About this edition

• Publisher: Merrell Publishers Ltd
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 185894662X
• ISBN 13: 9781858946627
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 192