Soft Power of Art
by Ric Kasini Kadour
8”x10”; collage; 2016
The first collage in the series, it combines Ruskin’s painting of Aiguille Blaitiere with a still life by Vienna painter Johann Georg Seitz. The Aiguille Blaitiere was one of Ruskin’s favorite places, a location he returned to on may occassions. He wrote in a letter to his father in 1849, “I had no idea what this place was, until I sat at the window quietly to-day watching the sunset and the vast flow of the ice, welling down the gorge—a dark and billowy river—yet with the mountainous swell and lifted crests that the iron rocks have round it. I have been nearly all day drawing at the Aiguille Blaitière.”