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 this awkward honesty in Turner's voluminous record-keeping of the sea and sky that reveals such a playful abstraction that one could possibly think (if they knew little or nothing about Art) that it was done by a child. But this would be a fairly cheap value judgement by smug smart-alecks whose sensibilities are be 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 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 a background which together, seem to come racing up to the viewer all at once as one plane exactly like the visual world does in fact. In Painting, this is the art of greatness for it has to be learned through practice, but also 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 in order that we, the viewers, can imagine it. But this sounds way more complicated than I am making it out to be. But put simply: generally, our eyes only reveal to us 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 the gifted child does often so naturally.
This means that normally, we cannot, without practice, see 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 look out at the world in a different sort of way just as a botanist will also see a garden differently than the rest of us.
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 are not readily apparent to the rest of us because our eyes do not naturally take them in as one.
A viewer doesn't realise any of this because they don't have to think about it, it's a given and taken for granted. But the painter seems to understand this though in different ways because they know they need to reconfigure a visible world through a sort of connivance of talent and gumption to reconstruct the logic of a landscape in a painted image. Alas, for the gifted and clairvoyant child (and a few lucky painters and visionaries), it's innate but for most painters it needs to be learned. I had to learn it for instance, because it didn't come naturally to me as I had lost that creative child much earlier in my life.
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 painting technique alone. An academic painter sees only a picture as pieces to be attached to one another, he/she consequently attempts to tie them all together a bit like a patchwork quilt. But unlike them, a painter with a vision sees everything as an organic whole image all at once in their mind. The mind of this painter has learned to make sacrifices in order to achieve a whole picture plane that we call a painting.
In the Turner above, is a great example of seeing the 'motif' of the picture as a unified visual idea. Because of either his long experience or his immense talents, he saw everything as a whole and he always made the necessary sacrifices to create a whole form.
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