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At the show with the artist: May Hands visits JMW Turner at the Tate Britain

After visiting the exhibition of Turner’s late works at Tate Britain, I wondered what it is that I find so enthralling and emotional about his work?

On reflection, it’s both the obvious and perhaps less immediately apparent aspects.

Turner’s visual understanding of light and colour through painting is definitely the most apparent reason. His choice and application of paint, mainly oil on canvas or watercolour on paper, communicates his intimate relationship with, and knowledge of, the changing atmospheric conditions and landscapes he surrounded himself with. Expressing marks that are instinctively gestural but carefully controlled, rendering delicate and tranquil passages of colour-space, his colour palette provides a soothing balm, referencing colours and atmospheres derived from a sublime interpretation of ‘nature’. In Turner’s distinctive imagery we can allow ourselves to be seduced by beautifully organized blurs of pastel hues and darker earthy tones, balancing virtually ideal (Claudian) compositions. Turner creates a visual depth on his surfaces that imply layers in a landscape or seascape vista. For sure, it is his signature style, his painterly voice that we all find so captivating and enjoy – unequivocally.

Yet I feel there is something else, less obvious perhaps, but linked to contemporary practice, that I find so fascinating and familiarise with. This might sound abstract, but it is rooted in my own formation as an artist. There is a strong sense that Turner was constantly searching for visual and emotional inspiration in his chosen, sought after, environments. It is said that Turner had an, ‘appetite for history, mythology and sublime nature’, and he mixes these real, illusory and philosophical aspects together seamlessly. Wherever he went, pencil sketch and watercolour studies always had potential to take shape. In addition to the many canvases, the late ‘retrospective’ at Tate Britain exhibits many watercolour works and even sketchbooks that provide a very informed representation of his practice. This helps to make the exhibition so special and personal for me. A group of watercolour sketches of seascapes particularly held my attention. Utterly fantastic hues of blues flow and crash across the paper that enable me to recall my own experiences of the sea. Growing up on the Sussex coast in England, and having many annual holidays to the Cornish region in the south western corner of the country, I know so well the energy of the waves and skies that Turner had experienced for himself.

The keeping of sketchbooks on location is important in my practice too. As Turner sources his compositions, scenes and colour palette, I also do this: collecting my ingredients of colours, textures and compositional shapes and masses. Filling sketchbooks, with collage, drawing and writing, to truly respond to the environment, you have to have raw primary evidence and research material. The root of your subject must be honest and raw. Reflecting later on in the studio, and in preparation and realization for larger works, is as valuable of course – but there is something so purely unique and unadulterated when working in sketchbooks in a stream of immediate moments.

Turner’s practice is his response to his environment, the state of his surroundings, both technological and natural, at the time he painted. For example, the exhibition’s ‘Modern Times’ section presented paintings when new and revolutionary technologies were being introduced. Steam power was one of these technological inventions, and this modern form of transportation pushed civil engineering to new, and demographically engaging, regional contexts. Fast travel, no doubt expensive at first, transformed society’s relationship to the landscape and how people could travel through it, en route to distant places. Turner’s, ‘Rain, Steam and Speed on the Great Western Railway’ (1844), incorporates fire, smoke, steam, industrial structures and smoggy-clouded skies in a state of integration that could be interpreted to preempt the Italian Futurists as much as the Impressionists who were inspired by his work. Standing face to face with this work I could feel an engulfing heaviness and imagine the viscosity of the poisoned atmosphere that must have enclosed around Turner as he saw, and experienced, this sight. Turner’s late works record his personal energies as a pre-eminent, but largely misunderstood painter. But he was totally in tune with his times, which we now expect an artist to be.

In our time, in the ever changing ‘now’, we are presented with revolutionary technological change too. This is essentially electronic (which we may sometimes forget) and, latterly, digital. A virtual, hyperreality/non-reality: what is reality any more? My practice is my reaction to this, using layering and assemblage with the objects that I am attracted to appropriate from the world of commerce and materialism. Painting the subject of the landscape is not enough to encompass the state of the economy, the environment and society – at least I cannot see how for now. Material as technology, synthetically developed over the last few decades, and now so prevalent, are the media that make the artwork. In fact it is the artwork: as well as objects and fragments taken directly from the commercial environment. Typically, these items will have unnaturally shiny surfaces, a glossy sheen and seductive colour branding. The new images that represent our emotional states, our ambitions and dreams, are reduced to reconstructed digital photographs, graphical pictograms, app symbols, fashion wear, sport brands, body adornment accessories, text language, taglines and Emojis.

It is where the artist chooses to live, and be affected by, that is recorded. Turner had what was presented in front of him, as he searched Europe for raw landscape, dynamic weather conditions, supernatural light from his Sun god and, in his latter years, developing industrial technology. My contemporaries have this and much more due to the constant delivery of images, whether it is from the many screens we see: cell-phones, computers, tablets, transportation systems, advertising and TV; or magazines, advertising on bill boards, signs of instruction, leaflets and seductive packaging. With the Internet, mass marketing and mass consumption, we have no escape from being presented with information, consciously selected, or perniciously creating an environment that is unquestioned: it is there, it is here, it is now.

May Hands

http://www.t293.it/artists/may-hands/

November 21, 2022