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
devoted to the theme. In his search for information about his often
elusive subjects, Kluz has made full use of these sources,
presenting in this book a wide range of materials - engravings,
paintings, plans, maps, written accounts and his own preparatory
sketches - before the final spread in each chapter unveils the
finished collage. Ten English houses are featured in depth, among
them the Tudor palace of Holdenby House in Northamptonshire, the
magnificent mansion of Hamstead Marshall in Berkshire, Vanbrugh's
Claremont in Surrey, and the grandiosely Gothic Fonthill Abbey in
Wiltshire. Each house is introduced by the architectural historian
Olivia Horsfall Turner, who details its history and fate. As Knox
concludes, one yearns to have all the houses back, 'But in a sense
we have, in Kluz's scenographic visions.'
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