Good Morning Mr Bewick

A new digital artwork imagines a conversation with famed Northumbrian naturalist Thomas Bewick (1753 – 1828).

Viewers of Good Morning Mr Bewick, by artist Mark Fairnington, navigate the piece as a journey, a walk through a landscape divided into three parts - Place, People and Nature.

In 2018, Fairnington responded to Thomas Bewick’s birthplace at Cherryburn by walking nearby and painting the contemporary landscape and producing an installation including 16 miniature paintings. These works are featured in Good Morning Mr Bewick.

“This new digital work reflects upon some of the ways in which mine and Bewick’s thoughts about the Northumberland countryside overlap and connect,” explains Mark Fairnington. “It was a way of looking back at the commission and developing some of the ideas that influenced my thinking about the paintings.

“Good Morning Mr Bewick was designed to enable the viewer to look beyond the images in the prints and the paintings to focus on magnified details, the individual marks which build to make the final works. I made the paintings with enlarged copies of Bewick’s prints to refer to, reflecting the complexity and versatility of his mark-making in its observation and examination of natural surfaces.”

Good Morning Mr Bewick is one of four commissions generated as part of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded project On-Site/Off-Site which is led by Newcastle University in partnership with the Bewick Society, National Trust and Arts & Heritage.

• https://www.goodmorningmrbewick.com
• https://www.ncl.ac.uk/press/articles/lat...