Chasing The Sublime

Artists, poets and musicians chased the feeling of the sublime from the 18th century deep into the 19th century.  Edmund Burke  spelled it out.  It was the evocation of the awesome wonder of nature.  From Goethe to Turner artists and authors tried to rev up the sense of awe in the face of  dynamic and threatening nature.  Turner’s experiments in paint  pushed him toward more gesture, more ambiguity, and greater contrasts of color, texture and scale. He wandered  from England to Italy looking for subjects that could inspire his experiments.  The  Northern Coast of France, Rome, The Alps and Venice were all mined for  their scenic drama.  In Venice Turner discovered the  city , water and sky were a stage set  capable of  electrifying  light shows.  He played down the narrative and descriptive aspects of Venice and  instead,  played with the  expressive  nature of his materials  as in his watercolor sketches and then later in his oils. His designs became increasingly about high contrasts in value, high contrasts in complementary color, and simple dramatic designs with an emphasis on movement.   His influence spread quickly to artists like Thomas Moran as you can see in  examples 1 and 2. The difference between them can be seen in way Moran’s shapes and strokes are more studied, more contrived, and tidier.  Here Turner used a favorite contrast of red/yellow versus dark blue, of light versus dark.  Thomas Moran imitated the palette. Turner allows the movement of the paint to make suggestions. His work feels freer. As a result it is more dynamic.  In experimenting with watercolor  in Venice (and elsewhere) we see  Turner’s increasing reliance upon  unfolding events in the paint to help build his final image. He uses evermore contrast and evermore  design simplicity.  Take a look at his watercolors of the Venice’s Grand Canal in examples 3 and 4 or, look at this oil late oil painting of Venice (Approach To Venice,1844, example 5)  which evokes a mood through  contrasts of  yellow and violet and a reliance on the indistinctness of subjects in the shadows and light.

example 1. Turner’s Slaveship.

example 2. Thomas Moran after Turner.

example 3. Turner watercolor.

example 4. Turner watercolor.

example 5. Turner oil of Venice.

In examples 3 and 4 Turner reversed the contrast positions of light and dark. Each painting uses a simple horizontal wedge design.  In example 3 he has a wall in light framing the left side and in example 4 he has a dark wall framing that side.   Example 3 is the  same essential design he used in the “Slaveship” painting.  Like Moran , when borrowing a Turner design I simply reverse it as you see in my example 6. Turner thought in contrasts of light and dark as much as he thought in contrasting colors. He built his working color circle which he called a weighted color circle because,  the light color yellow was placed on top and the dark on the bottom.  This color circle contains three color triangles ( the top yellow triangle is quite faint)  as another guide for color/value contrast.  Delacroix and Goethe both recommended the use of the color triangle versus the color circle (see example 7).

example 6. My reversal of Turner design.

example 7. Turner’s weighted circle.

By the end of his Career Turner  further simplified design, further amplified contrasts and  further explored  the effects of paint and gesture with their abilities to suggest subjective content.  I thought I might push my experiments  with the effects of the traces of gesture and  wet paint  and allow them to offer  ambiguous content possibilities.  In examples  8, 9, 10 and 11 I follow Turner’s lead of letting the paint guide the imagination.  I let experiments in the paint reveal the picture’s content rather than superimpose a purely descriptive agenda.  I also borrow his “Flying Horizontal Wedge” design, his use of exaggerated color and value contrasts, his  broad vocabulary of strokes ( the loose footprints of a variety of strokes),  his regard for  design  with sense of motion,  his predilection for deep illusory space, and his affection for exaggerated theatrical  effects inspired  by the sublime experience of nature.  As with his late Venetian painting  I paint sea and sky but,  I introduce  a landscape which performs the role of Turner’s turbulent sea.

example 8.   Landscape and Sky in Motion.

example 9. Landscape and Sky in Collision.

example 10. Landscape with Atmosphere.

example 11. Sea and Sky.