A bath of vibrant color has flooded the Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA) in the form of work by J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851), an artist who has captivated audiences for years with his characteristic ability to paint the energy of natural and manmade forces converging in space and time. ‘Turner from the Tate: The Making of a Master’ is a comprehensive overview of the artist’s career, offering a unique insight into his working life and creative practice. Demonstrating his experiment with light, scale and texture, Turner produces works that convey artistic, historical, and emotional meanings.
The use of colour and light, the suggested vision through the gradation or juxtaposition of the colours, requires an active spectator to allow the works to help shape new directions, informed by heir own experience. In Turner’s landscapes and seascapes, the seductive luminosity on water and the radiance of sky is ephemeral and hypnotic. Warm colors, like the reds and yellows, push the foreground of the painting, while cooler colors, like the blues, help to create the sense of depth and pull the eye to the background leaving the viewer to dream in the infinite suggestiveness of space and distance. The viewer is encouraged to extract meaning; meaning lying just beyond the obvious. The image itself is dissolved into symbol, and leaves us with a piece of enigma for contemplation and interpretation.
“Turner captures in paint the emotional experience of what it is to stand within nature and watch a storm ravage a seascape, or the late afternoon sun fill the atmosphere with hues of warm oranges and reds, for example, which we have all experienced at one time or another but for which we have no words to describe” says Jane Messenger, Curator of European Art at AGSA of Turner’s works. Empathy with its audiences, Messenger believes, is what gives Turner’s art such lasting endurance; “that is the wonder and universality of his practice which continues to inspire awe”.
Turner maintained a life long fascination with the frailty of man when subjected to the power and immensity of nature. His composition seeks the heightening sense of drama by drawing us into a vortex. The Romantic notion of the sublime became the dominating aesthetic of Turner’s work and was expressed in the dramatic potential of sun, seas, mountains, and waterfalls, as well as cataclysmic events such as storms, avalanches, and fires making explicit his notion of a subjective, experiential world. Snow Storm: Steamboat off a Harbour’s Mouth (1842), one of the paintings which plunges us into the midst of a storm at sea: the whirling vortex of water, sea-mist, and smoke draws us into the scene, makes the viewer look not at the storm but through it. The power, magnificence, obscurity, and awe of the Burkean formulation all present themselves as major components of the experience. But the viewer, like Turner, does not see these qualities as elements of an object or scene but as parts that make up an experience.
Turner conveyed moral or socio-political commentary on society at the time to help connect the viewer to his notion of the sublime. For Turner, nature existed as an emotional force, arousing sensations of trepidation and astonishment of man. The sublime endeavours of man are often overwhelmed by nature’s power and recurrent energies and this notion plays strongly throughout Turner’s oeuvre. His ability to depict natural force of nature within the picturesque resonates with audiences today. An extension of the self, as described by Messenger, Turners paintings reflect not only the natural world but the human psyche.
For those already familiar with Turner’s work, this exhibition is a revelation; for new audiences, it is a fascinating introduction. A visual delight, your sense of perception will be enriched, focused, set on course to consider the mythology of humans’ collective place and time on earth.
Art Gallery of South Australia
8 February to 19 May, 2013
Adelaide
Waves Breaking on a Lee Shore at Margate (Study for ‘Rockets and Blue Lights’), 1840
Peace – Burial at Sea, 1842
Images courtesy Tate Britain, London
