On atmosphere, expressive color, and composition alone, JMW Turner (1775-1851) rocks the house. But the next time you get to stand in front of a painting by the greatest landscape painter of the 19th century, take a good look at the brushwork. It’s insane! There’s hardly anything like it in painting until the mid-twentieth century!
The painting we’re looking at is “Rockets and Blue Lights (Close at Hand) to Warn Steamboats of Shoal Water” of 1840, considered to be in Turner’s late period (he died in 1851). It’s on permanent exhibition at the Clark Museum in western Mass. In many of his late paintings, Turner used vigorous brush- and palette-knife work, impasto, glazing, scumbling and loosely defined forms – not only to explore but nearly to embody – dramatic struggles between human beings and the elements.
Close up of the surface of Turner’s painting, “Rockets and Blue Lights.”
Here’s a closeup (above) of a section of “Rockets and Blue Lights” taken from the middle ground on the righthand side. Crazy right? Is it palette knife? Scraping? Scratching-in with the blunt end of the brush handle? Answer: Yes, and you can see that he used glazing (a thin wash of diluted paint, probably umber) over the top of the white impasto. This was NOT the polite technique of the classical academy.
Such stormy mark-making matches the painting’s subject: a storm raging in an English harbor town. Black steam swirls while flares explode in the sky to alert the ships to the location of shallow (shoal) water. On the shore, huddled spectators stare out to sea or, with heads bowed and shoulders slumped, apparently lose hope of seeing their loved ones safely returning home.
Spectators of the disaster, from the lower lefthand side of the foreground.
What we’re seeing is humanity’s place in what Herman Melville described as “the unnatural combat of the four primal elements.” Turner barely differentiates the figures from the roiling elements – chiefly fire, water, and earth – which merge and churn violently all throughout the painting amidst a strangely architectural sky. This is in keeping with the painting’s overall intention to serve as a metaphor for humanity’s entanglement with a chaotic, ultimately unmasterable universe.
Zooming out to the long view, Turner in his late work pushed the limits of representation until his paintings became not just descriptions of things seen but evocations of profoundly felt ideas. Chief among them is a vision of humanity in our “fallen” state, after our original expulsion from the “garden.”
Turner uses extreme situations to illustrate the most universal conditions of being human, visualizing our fate as a species: to be our own masters yet suffer profound and perhaps fatal estrangement from nature.
He painted what it feels like to be a dumbstruck spectator of our own incomprehensible existence. That’s how Turner’s genius elevated landscape and seascape painting to greatness.
Something of that Turnerian vision of a dramatic near chaotic world comes through in the paintings of contemporary artist Chien Chung-Wei.
Chien Chung-Wei, 21st century watercolor.
Chien Chung-Wei, 21st century watercolor.
Chien Chung-Wei, 21st century watercolor.
If you’d like to see exactly how Chien Chung-Wei achieves the effects he does and incorporate your own version of his technique into your own paintings, check out the video “Spontaneous Watercolors.”
