Art like oxygen
A deep intake of breath
Dear friends
Last weekend we took a rare and very brief visit to London, to see some of the big exhibitions and museums that this great city can offer: Joseph Wright of Derby at The National Gallery, Tracey Emin at Tate Modern and Turner and Constable at Tate Britain.
With a short time in the city and a long wish list, we had to be selective, opting to give ourselves time to absorb fewer things properly rather than rush around. We spent two days immersed in art and evenings catching up with a few old friends, eating the kind of international cuisine we simply don’t have access to at home.
I’m home again now, and feeling stuffed in every way.
Just like Joseph Wright’s poor fluttering bird, artists don’t thrive in a vacuum. We need to breathe the oxygen of other artists’ work, artists who make us want to raise our game, tackle new challenges, or whose work helps crystallise something in us.
I’m still absorbing it all. I won’t attempt full reviews here. There’s plenty in the press about all these exhibitions.
Turner and Constable: Rivals and Originals at Tate Britain is the most epic of the shows we saw, in-depth, deeply researched and well worth spending time with. Placing these two titans of landscape art together allows a deeper understanding of both. I found an unexpected new fascination with Constable, who hasn’t had quite the coverage that Turner’s had lately. I was glad to have my attention drawn back to paintings I thought I already knew all about, and delight in the specific details of fenceposts, grass stalks, cumulus clouds in a real, peopled, working landscape that was already rapidly changing in Constable’s day.
Turner’s mythological landscapes left me a little unconvinced, but when he too gets specific and turns his attention to the real world around him, there’s no-one handles the dance of light and atmosphere quite like him.
But I often find that while the more cerebral part of me appreciates the overview, the in depth learning, the fuller appreciation of context, there’s also a magpie eye that just grabs onto the one or two things that serve what I’m thinking about now in the studio and what I want to do next in my own practice.
I found I spent a lot of time with this painting by Turner, “Norham Castle, Sunrise” c1845. It’s a late painting and some suggest it’s unfinished, but I’m not so sure. Painted from memory and earlier sketches of the same subject, it seems to me there is a falling away of everything incidental here, a clarity that must surely come towards the end of a long life of total devotion to painting light.
I was crafty. I had brought one of those folding stools in with me, handy in crowded exhibitions like this if you want to settle and take your time without blocking everyone else’s view. I unfolded my little stool and parked myself in front of this painting, zoning out the hubbub that passed behind and above me, and let that cool, opalescent morning mistlight seep right into me, absorbing its oxygen into my bloodstream.
The painting is luminous, still, serene, but never saccharine. The pastel lavender, baby blue and yellow are offset by earthier hues of ochre, brown and olive that remind us of the ground. The humble cow in the foreground reminds us of a solidity behind the haze of light and water, and perhaps some other cows suggested in the mist, coming down to the river to drink.
Seen close up, the materiality of paint itself is present as thin glazes, swift brushwork, faint drips, and the cracks of time that so many of Turner’s paintings have acquired.
But all that analysing comes later. This first response is pure emotion.
The first response is a silent YES!, an intake of breath, a lift of the heart, a prick at the eyes, and then a quiet flowering of delight that deepens the longer you spend looking.
Filled up with all this art-oxygen and back in my own studio now, I am at the same time daunted and inspired by all that a painting can do.
Join the Life Raft Co-Working Session
Join me while I try and digest all of this and bring it to bear on my own work. Join our co-working session every Wednesday from 3 pm to 4.30 pm UK time. It’s very simple. We say hello, say what we’ll be working on, then leave our cameras on and work together in quiet companionship for an hour, then sign off at 4.30 with a quick check-in chat. That’s it! If you miss a session or can’t make it live, a recording will be made available to paid subscribers for two weeks after the session. You can find it in the subscriber chat HERE.
until next week
Sam
"Just like Joseph Wright’s poor fluttering bird, artists don’t thrive in a vacuum. We need to breathe the oxygen of other artists’ work, artists who make us want to raise our game, tackle new challenges, or whose work helps crystallise something in us."
This paragraph resounds, namely because it is almost verbatim at parts what my artist mother said for the past 35ish years. She would also use the phrase "iron sharpens iron".
Thank you, Sam, for reminding me of an overwhelming emotional response I had to a Turner in London waaaay back I 2003.
I was an art student in England, feeling lost, because I knew I wanted to paint "the sublime" as expressed through landscape, but at the same time I was, as the only Scot at my art school, reluctant to appear a cliché, yearning for the heathery hills and glens of home (insert shortbread tin here).
It was Hannibal Crossing the Alps which hit me like a wave of emotion and I sat (thankful for the bench) in front of it and wept.
Not because of Hannibal, or for his poor elephants, but for the impact the mountain scene this master of light had created. The power of a painting, indeed.
I started making trips 500 miles "up the road" to walk and make studies in the hills, returning to middle Englandshire to carry the drama and emotion of those places with me.
Thanks for the reminder.