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| Val d'Aosta: Snowstorm, Avalanche and Thunderstorm J.M.W. Turner, 1836-1837 Art Institute of Chicago |
Back when I was a young English Lit major, I fell in love with the Romantics. John Keats was my favorite:
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run...
The poem goes on with a lilting lushness that sounds sappy to modern ears, but when I first read it, it suited my sensibilities.
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| The Fall of an Avalanche in the Grisons J.M.W. Turner, 1810 Tate Modern |
The Romantic era had a visual side, too. J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851) is still one of my favorites from the period. Many of his paintings exhibit the sublime. Today, when we say something is “sublime,” we mean that it exhibits transcendent beauty. But the word had a different meaning back then. A sublime landscape was one that showed Nature in all its terrifying rawness. Think craggy, storm-wracked mountain peaks and dizzying views. (Learn about the three types of Romantic landscape painting here.) Some of Turner's more sublime paintings even verge on the abstract. However, not all of his work is like this; he made many finely-drawn paintings featuring architecture.
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Abbot Hall Gallery
Working in both watercolor and oil, Turner would make pencil sketches on-location and base his studio paintings on these. He was also prone to experimentation, using transparent but unstable washes of oil and fugitive colors. John Ruskin, a near-contemporary of Turner, praised him yet noted that his paintings were already deteriorating; Turner, it seems, didn't care about the longevity of his work and selected any material that looked good when fresh, regardless of its archival quality. Even so, his work changed the course of representational painting. Critic Richard Lacayo in the October 2007 issue of Time, states: “At the turn of the 18th century, history painting was the highest purpose art could serve, and Turner would attempt those heights all his life. But his real achievement would be to make landscape the equal of history painting.”
I don't paint like Turner, and I probably never will. His paintings of Nature, convulsing and writhing and drenched with rainbows, paintings that can barely keep the lid on, energize the viewer—but their virtuosity is difficult to achieve. All that said, here is my one Turnersque painting, with a somber palette that Turner would never have used.
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| Rain Over the River 12x16, oil - Available! Michael Chesley Johnson |
