Project Overview

2019 was the 200th anniversary of John Ruskin’s birth. An art critic, artist, writer, educator, social thinker and philanthropist, he was one of the most influential voices in Victorian England and beyond. As a Japanese artist based in the Lake District, where Ruskin chose to live for 28 years prior to his death, I have been intrigued by his legacy in art and sustainability, which provided an ideological foundation for the Pre-Raphaelites, the Arts and Crafts movement and the National Trust. Ruskin was also the first Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Oxford, where he established the Ruskin School of Art.

In preparing for this project, I aimed at delving into the spirituality of John Ruskin. His message about the importance of art, nature and human spirituality resounds ever louder in our advanced technological society. I believe that it is appropriate to reexamine these aspects considering the fact that we live in an age of Artificial Intelligence (AI), where the human mind/ soul/ spirit is in danger of being interpreted as merely chemical and electronic processes

based on materialism. We humans are facing a grave crisis of identity as we ask, “What does it mean to be human?” in the era of advanced AI.

Bearing the above in mind, I produced a portrait of John Ruskin as the main work in this exhibition. I portrayed the Victorian thinker in a horizontal double-vision image, comprising two identical portraits overlapping each other. By carefully determining the distance between two images, I attempted to promote a visual illusion so that the portrait can be seen as a single image in another dimension, emerging from the surface of the support. It is a paradoxical approach, achieved by stimulating a visual illusion. However, it is designed to amplify the mystery of human existence by raising questions about the distance between the visible and invisible, physical and spiritual; the abstract concepts that only belong to humanity. In this way, I attempted to create a platform of conversation regarding whether our mind, soul and spirit exist, or they are nothing but multicomplex electric and chemical processes in our brain. It may also reflect Ruskin’s spiritual conflict with regard to his own faith. I planned to depict him as a foreseer (in a way, like one of the ancient prophets), and as the spiritual guardian of Lakeland and beyond in a period of ecological and existential crisis. Hence the title, "Conversation with Ruskin (Ecce Homo)". The Latin phrase “Ecce Homo” means “Behold the man!”, and was the statement of Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea in the 1st century, when he presented

a scourged Jesus Christ to accusers shortly before his Crucifixion. I didn’t mean to identify Ruskin with Christ but rather attempted to present him as a man of sorrow, who could foresee the negative legacies of modernization, the world to come that we are now facing. With a teardrop in his right eye, I emphasized his emotional state, and moreover, symbolized the dignity of humanity for which Ruskin strived. Among all animals, only humans shed emotional tears. For this reason, “Ecce Homo” seemed to me to be the most appropriate title for this portrait.

Alongside this portrait, I produced a series of works on the theme of nature, which John Ruskin stressed to learn from for his art practice. He wrote in “Pre-Raphaelitism”, advising young English artists, "They should go to nature in all singleness of heart, and walk with her laboriously and trustingly, having no other thought but how best to penetrate her meaning; rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing." When I looked into Ruskin’s original drawings during my research at The Ruskin (Lancaster University), I found myself extremely interested in his penetrating gaze when studying objects, scenes, and his natural surroundings. It was a profound experience of discovery that his drawings are not only the evidence

of his excellent draughtsmanship as an artist but also a glimpse of the broad scope of his academic studies. I was fascinated by Ruskin’s focus on objects, which reminds me in style of Japanese traditional painting. Moreover, his way of seeing, manifested by his drawing, seems uniquely similar to Japanese traditional art on the theme of nature, which reveals a holistic ideology through depicting things as minimally as possible. I also found myself intrigued to note that there are similarities between Ruskin’s drawings and my works on nature. He often produced drawings of natural objects such as stones, wildflowers, leaves, clouds, etc. for his scientific approach to understanding the holistic natural environment. When Ruskin drew clouds, for instance, it reflected his insight on air pollution. I also often produced and still love to produce works on the same subjects; however, my approach is rather the exploration of the meaning of human condition by means of the

human fundamental tool of creativity, namely drawing and painting through the metaphor, symbol, and referentiality of visual language. For example, when I portray fallen leaves, insignificant wildflowers, pebbles or stones, they are the metaphors of the anonymous majority of people across the globe. When I paint small insects, I refer to the symbolic meanings in art history. When I draw sheep, cattle or other domestic animals, I look at the relationship between human and livestock along the line of the idyllic landscape throughout history.

Bearing this in mind, I have produced a series of works focusing on observations of nature, each portraying the essence of what I have personally experienced in the Lake District, looking into the history and life of this unique landscape. They are not a mere collection of nature-themed works but I attempted to assemble a semiotic series of natural subjects focusing on Ruskin's love for nature and his passion for conservation, sensing the passage of time up to now and into the future. In this series, I produced a couple of works that demonstrate the ambiguity of the

image. Visual images are deemed to be far more ambiguous than text, and are inevitably open to free interpretation by viewers. “Round Stone”, on one hand, seemingly depicts a stone such as those I found in my daily life. However, I drew it as round as possible deliberately so that it looks like the moon. As you know, 2019 was the 50th anniversary of the first Moon landing by Apollo 11. In the other work, “Storm Cloud”, I attempted to suggest the giant cloud of a devastating explosion. Our civilization is threatened by weapons of mass destruction such as nuclear bombs, which Ruskin could never have imagined. In this way, I wanted to show the passage of time since Ruskin was alive. After all, it is humans who embrace and treasure all living things, and at the same time destroy them by their own hands. This overwhelming contradiction corresponds to Ruskin's tormented state of mind when he resisted the torrent of the first industrial revolution. Now we are facing the fourth industrial revolution.

This project, apart from drawing, was completed employing

my unique brush hatching method using Japanese sumi ink and acrylic, which I created and have developed over the past 15 years. It is inspired by the concept of designo, which was established in the Florentine School during the Renaissance, combined with neurological studies, which reveal that the human visual brain perceives objects predominantly by oriented lines. This series of paintings features gold backgrounds, created using acrylic gold paint inspired by the Japanese traditional painting style, which can be seen in fusuma-e (sliding door paintings) and byobu-e (folding-screen paintings). In this way, I attempted to embody a quest for the spirit and legacy of John Ruskin.

7 Painted, sculpted or photographed in his lifetime and since by many artists, none I know of has approached the challenge of portraying Ruskin quite like Hideyuki. In a single image he manages to bring forth Ruskin’s power, intensity, suffering and sensitivity with extraordinary clarity. Nor is Ruskin an object of contemplation. This is the face of a soul that urgently wishes to communicate with us. He inhabits the room and reaches out to us. Howard Hull Director of the Brantwood Trust “

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