Why a blog? Because I am an artist who writes. My visual art takes half-remembered moments from a childhood in an English mining town which I turn into books, prints and installations. I also love art and writing about other people's art, so this blog is an expression of that.
Why the funny blog name?
I chose the title 'Praeterita' in homage to John Ruskin's book. Ruskin was an artist and a writer on art who wrote passionately in defense of J.M.W. Turner, and then the Pre-Raphaelite painters such as John Everett Millais, at moments when none of these painters was fashionable. Ruskin was a complicated man, and 'Praeterita', written towards the end of his life, reflects this: not quite an autobiography, not quite a manifesto, it looks back on his past and tries to document the significant experiences that produced his personality.So this blog documents my own artistic personality through the things that interest me: the past, my own artistic processes, word and image, and the art of my contemporaries, living and dead.
About me
I was born in a mining town in the north of England. My father was a soldier in the British army, who was killed on active duty when I was five. My mother, brother and I then moved into my grandparents' house. He was still a working miner, and we all lived in a house with no bathroom and just one tap. Memories from that world -- miners, coal, birds, buildings, fields, factories -- turn into images from which I have made books, prints, installations, and now paintings.I studied for a BA in English and American literature at Cambridge University, and received my MA in Fine Art from Winchester College of Art, which is about 70 miles south-west of London.
I've lived in Paris, Barcelona, Dusseldorf, Madrid, London, and Chicago. Currently I live in Tucson, Arizona, in the remote southwestern United States. I am also married to a writer, so the entwining of the word and the image continues in and out of the studio. To contact me, send an email to philipanthonyhartigan@gmail.com.