Where to put my influences?

I have seen many other artists put their influences or more specifically the people who influenced them directly onto their ‘about page’. I have though, after some consideration, decided to put this information in the form of a blog entry. This is because; I regard it as slightly transient information. True there seem to be some people who always influence you, but if I think back the people influencing me, say 10 years ago, are not the same as the people who influence me today, nor are they likely to be the same in 10 years time. Putting this in a blog allows me to easily update it and if necessary I can create a later influences entry.

The other reason for not putting this on the about page of the website is that I think there is a tendency for readers to see some well known artists names at the bottom of the page and then to pigeonhole that artists work into a particular category of art, to say ‘ah this person is influenced by such an artist so they must be x’.

Finally, putting information about artists on the about page does somewhat limit you in what you can write, more than half a dozen would look strange, and I wanted to say that bit more about a much wider range of people so here seemed to be the right place to do it.

Broadly speaking I am heavily influenced by inventers, pioneers and explorers more than I am by artists, although artists can be some or all of these things too. Many of those who I like have multiple disciplines and they often sit on the edge of art and science. It is also true that I seem mostly to be influenced by people who are dead and at least a hundred years old; I find history fascinating and perhaps that is the reason why this occurs, although I think that time is very good at sorting out those people who are excellent at what they do from those who are perhaps good publicists in their own time.

The Naturalists:

I am going to start my list though with people who are not artists at all but rather some of the great naturalist’s of the 19th century: Charles Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace and Alexander von Humboldt. Darwin perhaps does not need any introduction, although Wallace and Humboldt might, but what these individuals have in common, what I find inspiring about them is the way that they could see the world differently from the other people of their time, they were fascinated by the natural world around them and the way in which they could draw upon many disciplines to make their groundbreaking theories. Darwin for example could be said to be a theologian, philosopher, zoologist, botanist, geologist, meteorologist, explorer and writer and without all of these different disciplines he would have never had written about natural selection. This was positively artistic of them, in a Renaissance kind of a way, although they were probably too constrained by Victorian values to realise this.

To this list I would like to add some one from the 20th century: Jacques-Yves Cousteau, whose multidisciplinary skills and enthusiasm for the natural world I always find exciting.

These naturalists and explorers were often accompanied by painters and later photographers, some of which were very special in their own way: Sydney Parkinson was a young botanical illustrator who was employed by Joseph Banks to travel on Captain James Cook’s first voyage of the Pacific and who completed some amazing paintings and drawings in the bottom of a boat in conditions which eventually killed him. Photographer Frank Hurley who participated in Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Endurance Expedition and who perhaps went to greater lengths to take, store, develop and return his photographs than any photographer before or since?

Photographic Pioneers:

There is whole raft of photographic pioneers who I find inspirational:

Hércules Florence, one of the lesser known inventors of photography, who seemed to invent his process without outside influence in the depths of Brazil.

John Herschel a scientist and artist and inventor of the Cyanotype method of photography; whose techniques were employed by Anna Atkins to photograph botanical subjects and who was herself female photographic pioneer when virtually no other women were using photography.

Edward S. Curtis who took on the task of recording the story of the Native Americans through photography (and other methods).

Peter Henry Emerson for taking such beautiful photographs of rural life and challenging the photographic institutions of the day.

Wilson Alwyn ‘Snowflake’ Bentley for just being the best snowflake photographer ever.

James Nasmyth and James Carpenter were and engineer and astronomer but they worked together to produce an amazing body of work ‘The Moon, Considered as a Planet, a World, and a Satellite’ (1874); for whose photographic illustrations they made plaster models of the moon’s surface before photographing them . I discovered this after I started my landscape generator project but it is possible to see how it might now act as an influence for this work.

Roman Vishniac seemed to teach himself photography as a child in 19th century rural Russia, before going on to be a pioneer of macro photography and an important photographer of the Jewish people and history.

Finally here, Percy Smith was not a photographer (although he has a strong influence in photography) but rather a pioneering natural history film maker. One of the first people to film microscopic life and time lapsed sequences of plants.

All of the photographs above are copyright free.