The New York Times came out with this wonderful article a few days ago that invited their readers to spend ten minutes looking at a painting without any distractions. They even had a digital timer planted within the article at 10 minutes for an easy experience.
Naturally I did it, and I marvelled at the experience. My biggest take away was that paintings, (as in, all figurative landscapes), are conceived and painted through the most obvious sensory portal, the artist's eyes. Consequently, paintings can only be accessed through the use of a viewer's eyes. This is the whole point of Painting though it would be easy to overlook this because so much Painting has turned conceptual.
But here the NYT have given us an opportunity to let go of ourselves by taking a pause from politics and wars, TikTok and Youtube, Trump and Harris, and everyone should have a go at the NYT web site. It offers a rich window out of ourselves and into the world of Painting.
Just looking at a picture sounds so simple because indeed it really is, but it also takes time and a disciplined mindset. Most of us don't know how to do it in fact, but all we need is a set of eyes and an uncluttered mind.
It after all, an adventure, a sensory one using just our eyes. After spending ten minutes looking at this small painting I was able to settle into the calm nature of the image as a whole. Suddenly all the of tiniest, seemingly inconsequential details began to hum together in silent choir. The whole picture came together more coherently and in my imagination, it seemed to throb in sync with my own heartbeat to became a single thing of visual unity like in a symphony orchestra. All my smallest perceptions melded into one sensuous entity.
And this fact reminded me of something my teacher Leo Marchutz used to always say.
"The more the relationships in a work of art, the greater the work"
My experience at looking at this Whistler entitled 'Nocturne in Blue and Silver', London, 1871, also allowed me to appreciate the surface
plane of the picture.
In a strange way, it reminded me of looking at an intricate old Turkish rug from the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul when I was there many years ago. It took several years for these craftsmen, women, and children, to complete a large rug, while Whistler painted this (I imagine) in a few hours at the most.
It's the unity of light that creates a good painting or any rug design because it's the light that fashions the form of any design. And the better one understands this, the better the artist.
I also became aware of the ghostly nuances of warmth and cool tones that permeate all that broken blue colour everywhere. Indeed, one sees in all that blue just how broken a colour it really is.
Because I imagine it was done with oil paints gently washed over a coloured board, maybe a red sepia hue that was in vogue in the 19th century. Whistler used it to gently peek through the river water and offer a variation to break the surface plane.
I came aware of the tiny lights, the more I looked at them the brighter they seemed to shine.
Then one pulls back slightly to see it from a distance and One realises what a great picture it really is. Whistler was way ahead of his time, and this series done around the river Thames show us where his real interests lay.
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