"Bath & Wessex Fine Art and Photography Gallery"

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About "Bath & Wessex Fine Art and Photography Gallery"

The Bath and Wessex group is centred on maintaining a pool of works of the highest possible quality, rather than assembling the largest number of works relating to, or emanating from, the Bath and Wessex region. As a result the group pool is regularly viewed by the Administrators and work considered of insufficiently high standard, or innocuous are removed. Please take a look at the works in the Group pool and if you do decide to apply to join and are accepted, please reserve your highest quality shots for the group.

SCOPE OF THE GROUP: This group is for works of fine art and serious photography created by those working in, or inspired by, the ancient City of Bath and its surrounding 'Wessex' counties. The group has adopted a modern definition of the historic region of Wessex, comprising Gloucestershire & the Cotswolds, Hampshire, Oxfordshire, Wiltshire, Dorset, Somerset and Devon.

Works by members of this group range from landscapes, cityscapes, portraits and figurative works, through to pure abstracts and conceptual works, the common element being their fine art/photography characteristics and that they were created in Bath/Wessex and/or inspired by the city or locations/events elsewhere in the Wessex region.



Here is a small gallery of the best of some of the recently uploaded works to the group poop, chosen by me. www.flickr.com/photos/david_lewis_baker_arts/galleries/72...

WHY BATH?: Bath is an ancient city acknowledged internationally as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, for its architectural and historic importance and scenic beauty. It has also played a central role in the development of Wessex within English history, since it was in Bath in 973 that Edgar, the first King of England, of crowned by the Archbishop of Cantebury, joining together the kingdoms and Wessex and Mercia. The foundations for this unity had been laid in 886, when king Alfred negotiated a treaty with the Danes, in which northern and eastern England came under the jurisdiction of the Danes - known as 'Danelaw'. In return, Alfred gained West Mercia and Kent formerly outside the boundaries of Wessex. But the crowning of Edgar at Bath was the crucial formalising moment of this English (i.e. Anglo-Saxon) nation.

Bath also attracts talented artists and photographers to live and work here and draws artists, photographers and other creative individuals from all over the UK and the rest of the world to visit it, along with the surrounding counties of Wessex, making it the ideal basis for such a group.

What is 'WESSEX': This group adopts a modern definition of the historic region of Wessex, comprising Gloucestershire & the Cotswolds, Hampshire and the Isle of White, Oxfordshire, Wiltshire, Dorset, Somerset and Devon.

At various times the title 'Wessex' has included Berkshire, Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire, Wiltshire, Hampshire & Isle of White, Dorset, Somerset, Devon and Cornwall. Although briefly, under the Danish Viking king Cnut (post c1016), the Earldom of Wessex comprised all of England south of the Thames.

Thomas Hardy also used a fictionalised south-west as a setting for many of his novels, reviving the term Wessex for southwest England. He gave the counties the following fictionalised names: Berkshire = North Wessex; Devon = Lower Wessex; Dorset = South Wessex; Hampshire = Upper Wessex; Somerset = Outer Wessex; Wiltshire = Mid-Wessex. Neighbouring Cornwall was described as Off-Wessex or Lyonesse.

Please mark any image seen in the group pool with
Seen in:
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/groups/bath_fine_arts_and_photography/
">Bath & Wessex Fine Art and Photography Gallery</a>

THE FOUNDER: David Lewis-Baker is the founder and administrator of the BFAPG and a Bath-based new media artist and photographer and a member of the Bath Area network for Artists 'BANA'. More details on his other Flicker groups below.



SEARCHING FOR SPECIFIC GROUPS OF WORKS WITHIN THE GROUP: If you wish to pull out all the works in the group which are connected to a specific subject - say the Royal Crescent, use the search within the Group box marked (search this group's pool) on the top right and insert suitable words 'Bath' & 'Royal Crescent' and the system will generate a databased of these images on screen.

BATH IN TIME: For an excellent digital archive of historical images of Bath go to www.bathintime.co.uk - Images of Bath Online

BRISTOL: Bristol has a number of flickr groups devoted to it especially www.flickr.com/groups/bristol/ and this is the proper repository for such works, but the BFAPG accepts both images and members from the Bristol area.

There are also general Flickr groups dedicated to the indivudual Wessex counties and cities such as Portsmouth, Exeter, Southampton, Winchester, Oxford etc.

David Lewis-Baker
Bath
6th September 2007

Non-Flickr Art Web Site (for sales of some of my work):

www.yessy.com/DavidBaker/

I also founded and administer these flickr groups:

http://www.flickr.com/groups/bath_fine_arts_and_photography/