Category Archives: The Arts

Rain, Steam and Speed 1844. J M W Turner 1775-1851.

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This oil painting was first exhibited in the Royal Academy in 1844, it now belongs to the National Gallery, London. Turner was 76 years old when Rain, Steam and Speed was exhibited. As a young man he lived with his father in London, who would prepare his canvasses and varnish the work when completed, he was deeply affected by his father’s death in 1830, his mother had become insane in later life and her illness may have formed Turner’s melancholy nature, the death at 28 of his friend and fellow painter Thomas Girtin also affected him deeply. During his lifetime he had witnessed many changes in society as a result of the Industrial Revolution, I have chosen the steam train as a metaphor for this transformation from a mainly agrarian society to an industrial one. He moved many times, having lived in Harley Street, Queen Anne Street and in Hammersmith, he liked to live near water and moved later to a house in Twickenham. He is famed for his seascapes, he would go out in wild seas on board boats and for his landscapes painted in Britain and Europe. His life was dedicated to painting in oils and watercolours and he left many sketches to the nation, he remained single. Turner began his working life painting wash backgrounds and skies on architectural drawings, once he became well known he became a tutor at the Royal Academy and painted many commissions for wealthy patrons like Lord Egremont who lived in Petworth, some of his paintings still hang in Petworth House.
The train in this painting ran on the Great Western Railway, one of a number of privately owned railways, this line ran from Taplow to Maidenhead, then over the Thames on a bridge built by I K Brunel, heading towards East London. Railways had evolved since the first engines were built in the early 17th century, trains pulled wagons which ran on wooden rails to carry coal from mines to canals, where canal boats were pulled by horses along tow paths to the growing towns. Cast iron rails were replaced by stronger wrought iron tracks. By the 1850s people as well as goods were being transported by trains as they became popular and there was plenty of coal to fuel them.
In this painting the train is crossing a bridge, people are seen sitting in open wagons, steam billows from the funnel, we can see a rowing boat on the river, someone holds up an umbrella, the sky is filled with swirling rain clouds. I cannot see it, the copy is too small, but there is in the lower right hand corner a hare, maybe a comment on the times, trains were ‘destroying the sublime elements of nature’ said one critic. Technology perhaps was feared as progressing too fast.
Turner was a British Romantic painter, his work is full of light ‘to whom a cosmic vision was more significant than a precise observation of reality. The world was merely an alibi for his canvasses where forms all but dissolve.’ Form, definition and photographic truth were abandoned,’ each particle of matter is part of a whole that is in a constant state of change’ I particularly like that phrase! His work would influence future painters, Impressionists such as Pissaro and Monet.
Turner was elderly and sick in 1844, he carried on working, his life had always lacked comfort, he took little interest in his dress and could be miserly at times, at others very generous, especially to young striving painters, he had an affection for birds and animals which softened his grumpy character. He held no religious or supernatural beliefs. He had loyal friends like Ruskin but also many critics, Ruskin admired his work in articles he published.
During his life he constantly travelled in England, Scotland and to Europe, he appreciated the light in Venice, always sketching and painting, he also visited other areas of Italy, France and Switzerland, forever searching for subjects. The Tate Gallery holds a collection of his watercolours. His memories of light, colour and atmosphere were not dimmed by his ill health when this painting was created.

link. en.wickipedia.org/wik/Rain_Steam_and_Speed

Turner_-_Rain,_Steam_and_Speed_-_National_Gallery_file

Los Fusilamientos del Tres de Mayo, 1814. Francisco de Goya Lucientes.

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tresDeMayo

Goya was born in a village in northern Spain in 1746, his family then moved to Saragossa. He went to Italy to study art, returning to Spain when thirty one years old where he married the daughter of a painter. He painted frescoes in the local cathedral and went on to paint designs for royal tapestries in Madrid in the rococo (ornate) style prevalent at the time. This was an important time in his development as an artist. He soon was to become influenced by neoclassicism and studied the paintings of Velasquez, this led him to use a more spontaneous painting technique. Soon he was asked to paint portraits of the Spanish aristocracy. Following a serious illness he became deaf when forty-six which had the effect of making him less sociable.
These were turbulent times in Spain, Napolean had invaded Spain, Madrid was occupied by the French and then between 1808 and 1814 there raged the Spanish War of Independence, the population rebelled against their occupiers, which is when this painting was commissioned. Goya was a Spanish liberal who disliked Charles IV’s authority and was at first not against the French, he in fact became the court painter for French royalty and took an oath of loyalty to Jospeh Bonaparte. He was forgiven by the French authorities. He expresses his horror of armed conflict in etchings and in a series of paintings, he experienced dark visions. One of his paintings, The Naked Maja landed him before the Spanish Inquisition. He went into voluntary exile in France in 1824 and died there in 1828 aged eighty two,
In this painting Goya has portrayed his impression of an historical event which took place in 1808 in Madrid, when the French retaliated against the Spanish rebels. He used oil on canvas to paint this dramatic scene that is so real and vivid. Kenneth Clark wrote ‘Goya was not simply a high speed camera,’ he drew from memory ‘it took shape in his minds eye as a pattern of lights and darks.’ This is a work of Goya’s imagination. The impression on viewing the scene is one of shock, the action takes place right in front of us, there is little space between us and the men. We see the background colour of the sky, using black, sombre greys and browns are used to paint the cathedral and other buildings, while the foreground is lit by a square lantern placed near the feet of the firing squad, this area is full of colour, light covers the figures on the left, creating a stark contrast. The colours here are glowing whites, gold and blood red. We see the terrified faces of the rebels, onlookers cover their eyes in horror, the faces of the soldiers, on the other hand, are hidden from us. The essence of the brutality of war is embedded in the whole work, Goya does not hold back from expressing his abhorrence. Shot men are sprawled on the ground, the man dressed in white and yellow looks at the firing squad, he is next, his eyes are wide open, arms raised in the air, he has no escape.
Fifty years later Edward Manet , who had seen this painting, painted The Execution of Emperor Maxilmillian in 1867, similar in composition, but perhaps without the same impact on the viewer.

Barry kindly suggested this painting.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia commons

Spring. ( La Primavera ) 1482, Sandro Botticelli.

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In the late spring of 1967 I visited Florence in Italy, it was several months after the devastating flood that had engulfed Florence in November the previous year. I saw stains like plimsoll lines on the walls of buildings and in the churches I visited, huge dehumidifying machines were drying their interior walls. Life was slowly getting back to
normal.
Having greeted a copy of Michaelangelo’s sculpture of David outside of the Uffizzi Gallery, I went in to look at paintings. I came to Botticelli’s ‘ Spring’ it was exciting to see the original that had been painted nearly five hundred years earlier. Botticelli was a painter working in Florence during the era which has become known as the Renaissance; several schools of painting flourished, situated throughout much of Italy, the Northern and Venetian Schools, the Florentine and Central Schools being the most important, each put an emphasis on different aspects of painting.
The painting ‘Spring’ is an allegory. The work was painted with tempera on panel, tempera consists of ground pigments mixed with egg yolk, honey or glue and water, it is permanent and fast drying. I have experimented with egg tempera mixed with gouache paint, it is more suitable for painting on a panel rather than on canvas, because the paint tends to crack if not kept flat.
The setting for Spring is an orange grove, with plants scattered around, five hundred different varieties and one hundred and ninety different flowers, so I read, a botanical dictionary! Six mythological characters are situated across the space. The work is thought to resemble a Flemish tapestry, popular at the time.
The work was probably commissioned by Lorenzo de Medici for one of his cousins. Lorenzo Medici was an important patron of the Arts and left a lasting legacy of work. Much has been written about the Medici dynasty, mostly unfavourable, but the Arts did flourish during their time in power.
In the painting we see on the left hand side, a male pointing a wand towards the sky, three women are dancing in a circle next to him, in the centre is a female, dressed in a diaphanous white dress, around her is draped a red gown, her gaze is towards the viewer, her figure is framed by an archway of trees, a blind-folded putti is seen holding an arrow, hovering above her, next to her stands, almost floats, another female, her dress is decorated with plant designs and she wears a necklace of flowers. The wind we can see is blowing the flowing dresses from left to right. On the right of the painting we see another female character, also dressed in a diaphanous white gown with a garland of flowers flowing from her mouth and looking down intently at her is the second male figure, he has puffed up cheeks, he clasps her waist, the cold wind if March is now blowing in the opposite direction, I’m not sure what the significance of this change of direction signifies, perhaps the warming of the atmosphere as spring approaches?
There have been several interpretations of this painting, we know that Botticelli was interested in portraying Greek and Roman myths in addition to religious scenes and characters. If we think about the Roman myth, the male on the right would be the god Zephyrus, his cheeks full of wind, the god of wind, Zephyrus marries Chloris, she is shown in the painting with the flowers flowing from her mouth, after they marry Choris becomes the goddess Flora, goddess of flowers, she is next to Chloris. Venus the goddess of Love and Beauty is the central figure, an archetype who can be traced as far back as Paleolithic cave paintings and sculptures. In Helen Benigni’s book The Emergence of the Goddess, she writes ‘Venus appears to be part of what Carl Jung calls the transformative character of the primordial archetype where her image is seen as a regenerative force for change connected to the celestial order.’ To quote Robert Ellis in his book The Integration of Meaning he writes ‘the other way that art might relate more effectively to archetypes is in depicting them as symbolic forms rather than as objects in the world. In western art I find this particularly in the religious and mythological art of the Renaissance.’ To return to the painting, above Venus is Cupid who blindly points his arrow at Chastity, one of the three graces we see dancing in a circle, (the dance of time maybe?) the two other graces are Love and Pleasure. On the left hand side we see the god Mercury, he is pointing his wand to the sky, to brush away the wind, while Chastity looks at him.
Botticelli belonged to the Florentine School of painters, for them form and movement were their main objectives. Botticelli used a paint brush like a pen, his line work gave a feeling of movement, a linear rhythm. He was indifferent to representation, but was intent on presentation. Bernard Berenson wrote, ‘Botticelli was almost as if haunted by the idea of communicationg the unembodied values of touch and movement.’ He may have rivals in the East and Japan writes Berenson, but not in Europe, ‘his work possesses qualities that are life-enhancing and life- communicating, with quivering feeling containing values of touch and values of movement.’
Rober Ellis wites in the chapter The Integration of Meaning, when discussing the integration of visual art ‘ The central conflict within art reflects the tension within meaning in general – between representation and expression.’ Representation was not of primary importance to Botticelli, he was preoccupied with expressing the renewal of life and growth in this work, but he reaches a balance between the two. For Botticelli colour is less important than line, unlike the Venetian painters for example where the use of colour was very important. Berenson thinks that he is the greatest artist of linear design that Europe has ever had. His work went out of favour and was not appreciated again for a long time. He didn’t paint during the last ten years of his life, he died in 1510..Botticelli 002

The three christmases

Middle Way Philosophy, Myth, Practice, Religion, The Arts,

There seem to be three ways in which Christmas is meaningful to people. To Christians, Christmas is a celebration of the incarnation – of God coming to earth. To neo-pagans, Christmas is a celebration of the winter solstice. For consumerism, Christmas is an opportunity for self-indulgence, and its meaning lies in the ways that we hope to be made happy by exchanges of gifts and eating rich food. It seems to me that all three of these Christmases offer meaning in experience, but they also offer metaphysical beliefs that tend to hijack them.

The winter solstice is obviously something we all experience: or at least, those living in temperate or arctic regions of the northern hemisphere. There is a certain anxiety and foreboding about the increasing darkness, and a visceral desire for the light to return, that can make celebrating the winter solstice just a way of recognising these fears and hopes. But if it becomes part of a worship of ‘Nature’, or a desire to placate the gods of darkness, pagan beliefs are not really very far removed from theistic ones. The spring does not return because we ritualise our desire for it to do so, nor does ‘Nature’ make it return.

Consumerism, too, hits experience in some ways. We can feel, and renew, a connection with relatives by exchanging gifts with them and eating special food with them. However, an egoistic belief in ourselves and our objects of desire as unchanging can be strengthened by Christmas indulgence. Gifts can merely feed neomania, a cognitive bias that takes no account of how fast technology will change or how little gifts will matter over time. The gifts and sharing can also often just reinforce the projections in our relationships, perhaps because we haven’t resolved the archetypal view we have of parents, partners or children and recognised them fully as individuals beyond that role in our lives.

I can ride those two Christmases – they both mean something to me, but I hope not too much. A Middle Way in relation to them is relatively easy to see. However, it’s the Christian meaning of Christmas that is both more profound and more troubling. I don’t believe that God was incarnated in the form of Jesus – but I don’t deny it either. Such a claim is so obviously beyond experience that it is best left alone and not indulged one way or the other. Nevertheless, the incarnation is meaningful to me. What’s more, as someone from a culturally Christian background, I think that the profundity of its religious meaning is harder to get away from than I have often recognised. For many years I have just avoided Christmas by going away on retreat, but that has been an avoidance strategy that’s often stopped me really asking myself what it means.Mantegna_Magi

How is the incarnation meaningful to me when I don’t believe in it? I find this easiest to articulate in archetypal terms (if you’re unfamiliar with archetypes, see here). If God is a forward projection of the integrated psyche, the appearance of God in human form is a reassertion of the need to integrate the symbolic God into our lives. The incarnation thus represents the unlikely, baffling glimpses of the possibility of integration that we experience from time to time, often in the symbolic form of a wise old man or woman or of a mandala-like structure.

However, it’s one think to offer that explanation in theory and quite another to recognise it in experience. For me, it is the Renaissance painters who help me get to grips with this best. It seems that they really experienced that meaning fully and directly, and yet had a world-view close enough to the modern to represent it in a way we can relate to now. It is almost as though the Renaissance painters offer a moment between sleep and waking when the symbols are still vividly alive, yet we are still capable of considering them with full critical awareness. It is representations of the Annunciation that seem to capture it most often: a bewildered ordinary girl suddenly recognising a mind-boggling potential within herself. Sometimes, too, the Adoration of the Magi can offer something of that sense of awe in the face of the God archetype.Annunciation Simone_Martini

But I still fail to relate to the vast majority of what goes in churches in relation to Christmas. Not only is it still primarily about belief, but it is all still routinely objectified, trivialised, and sentimentalised. Are children in nativity plays, for example, given even the slightest glimpse of the possibility that the baby Jesus in the manger can mean something within themselves? Are the worshippers given any basic integrative practices – grounded in silence rather than endless metaphysical language – to help them cultivate the awe that they will need to recognise the meaning of Christmas? In the vast majority of churches, I think not.

So, here is my recommendation for an integrative reflection on the meaning of Christmas. Go to your nearest art gallery that has a decent collection of Renaissance art. Go when it is quiet, and preferably by yourself. Look at the Annunciations and the Nativities, and forget whatever you may have loved or hated about the story in school or church. Give yourself time to examine the pictures, and give space to allow awe to arise.

Pictures: Adoration of the Magi by Mantegna & Annunciation by Simone Martini (both public domain)