I was sent this small Turner watercolour recently by a mysterious gentleman, whom I don't know, a certain Peter Shear from Indiana who is a painter. I believe that he stumbled upon this small blog space and understood not only what interested me but also himself too. In any event I thank him for this small gift.
It was a shock to see it for this unpretentious little oeuvre, lacking in any visual presumption, is just so perfect and beguiling that I could weep with envy. Its innocence speaks of a rare and simple vision, one which only a very insightful young child of rare sensibility might be able to pull off on a very lucky and insightful afternoon.
There are, at certain moments, an awkward honesty in Turner's voluminous record-keeping of the sea and sky that reveal such a playful abstraction that one could think (if they knew little or nothing about Art) that indeed it was made by a child. But this would be a fairly cheap value judgement by smug smart-alecks whose sensibilities are but ruled uniquely by the left side of their brains only, for this is a masterpiece of invention.
The perfect brilliance of this tiny and unobtrusive little souvenir is beyond description. This child-like innocence belies a profound vision, one that was not only cultivated by a lifetime of looking at Nature, but also by an enormous talent buried deeply within the structure of its four corners and behind its quiet and simple design.
But hidden within this simplicity are the essentials of picture-making. There is a foreground, middle-ground, and background, which all together, seem to come racing up to the viewer all at once as one plane and replicating in fact, how the visual world operates. In Painting, this is the art of greatness, for it has to be learned through practice, but also through a generously extensive understanding of Art History itself.
This is because normally, our eyes don't allow this to happen due to our incapacity to focus on all planes all at once simultaneously. It is therefore left to the artist to reconfigure this physical impossibility so that we, the viewers, can imagine it. But this sounds way more complicated than I am making it out to be. To put it simply, our eyes generally only reveal to our brain, at nanoseconds at a time, an entire organic view of the world as we look out at it, one moment after the next. It is why some painters will squint their eyes whilst looking at a landscape in order to 'see it' as one whole organic form in their mind. But to paint it as one whole viable form can only be achieved through an abstract process, one which both a gifted child, and a painter like Turner, performs so naturally.
This means that normally, we cannot, without practice, perceive a landscape as painters have learned to make them because they were re-created using a kind of abstraction built by planes that move forward and backward on the two dimensional surface.
There is no doubt that a landscape painter will surely look out at the world quite differently than a gardener whose visual notion of intimacy is at a different scale. Imagine a mouse seeing the view from up above in the claws of a hawk?
The painter must be inventive. For instance, he needs to put into place a kind of visual scaffolding that can fashion a foreground, middle ground and background, which together, is not readily apparent to the rest of us because our eyes don't naturally take them in as one.
Viewer don't realise any of this because they don't have to think about it, it's a given, and it's taken for granted. But a painter like Turner, through his experience, knows how to 'read the room', intuitively. He understands that he needs to reconfigure the visible world through a connivance of both talent and gumption to reconstruct the logic of a landscape and fashion it into a painted image. Alas, for the gifted and clairvoyant child (and a few lucky painters and visionaries) it's always innate, yet for most painters it needs to be learned. I was a painter who had to learn it because I had already lost that creative child much earlier in my life it didn't come naturally to me later on.
Put another way; the 'Academic Painter', of which there are many prestigious adherents, are trained to paint Nature (landscapes and models), as a compilation of separate parts, attaching them through a painting technique alone. I think that an Academic painter appears to only see a picture as separate pieces, to be attached to one another, joined bit by bit. Consequently, the end result resembles a patchwork quilt.
But unlike this process, a painter with a vision like Turner's, sees everything as an organic whole image, and all at once in his mind. The secret of this mind is that it has learned to make sacrifices in order to achieve a whole picture plane, one that we call a painting.
The Turner above, is such a great example of seeing the 'motif' of the picture as a unified visual idea and already formed mysteriously in his mind. Because of either his long experience or his immense talents, he saw everything as one, not unlike a poet who has stripped away the extraneous to expose the bones.
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