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Alberti

Time Takes Another Bow. What do we get when we look at a painting; an old painting?

September 28, 2012
Alberti, Art about Waiting, Art Seen, Encounters with Art, Looking at Art, National Gallery, Time Based Art
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Jan van de Cappelle: ‘A River Scene with a Large Ferry and Numerous Dutch Vessels at Anchor’, 1665. Oil on canvas. 122 x 154.5 cm. National Gallery, London.

“Everyone knows that envy is usually aroused by the possession of goods which would be of no use to the person who is envious of them, and about the true nature of which he does not have the least idea.

Such is true envy – the envy that makes the subject pale before the image of a completeness closed upon itself … It is to this register of the eye as made desperate by the gaze that we must go if we are to grasp the taming, civilising and fascinating power of the function of the picture”

Jacques Lacan, from ‘The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis’ ed. Macey,D. Penguin Books, London, 1994, page 116

For example Jan Van der Capelle’s: ‘A River Scene with a Large Ferry and Numerous Dutch Vessels at Anchor’, 1665. which I have mentioned before, another old friend in the National Gallery, London. I know nothing about boats, or water, or 17th century Holland and am not that keen to know more, so why can I happily sit in front of a painting of such things? Are we envious of these complete worlds that function quite well without us? In front of this painting recently I drew up a list of other possible reasons for sitting there:

· The pleasures of melancholy: it is a painting about boredom – ships becalmed waiting for wind – the only thing that moves are two birds to the right. Why is an image of boredom, not boring? It is carefully composed, low horizon, close tones, strong verticals and horizontals create an image of stasis.

· My feet hurt, there is a convenient bench in front of the painting.

· The illusion of depth is intrinsically pleasing? Although not mathematically derived there are clues to Albertian methodology, the left foreground boat lies on the diagonal that would check the tiles of a Renaissance pavement,

Leon Battista Alberti: ‘De Pictura and Elementa’ 1518, from 1435

the distance from top mast to horizon is similar to that of the bottom of the canvas to that same distant boundary; ie a symmetrical recession of ground plane below and boats above. As James Ellkins points out in his highly recommended book, ‘The Poetics of Perspective’ the creation of most fictive spaces owe little to true perspective, but van der Capelle has made a convincingly ordered static world, is that what makes it ‘lookable’?

· Do we have an instinctive appreciation of harmony? All paintings have to be balanced and we enjoy that harmony or balance in the arrangement of forms and colour. Are these harmonics permanent though, as in the Golden Section and Pythagorean harmonics, or are they culturally conditioned? Colour and tone very possibly, is the balance of form in a later Dutch artist (Mondrian) equivalent?

Piet Mondrian: ‘Composition C (no.III), with Red, Yellow and Blue’, 1935

· I have an hour to wait before my train home; one way or another paintings conquer time.

· We like stories, all paintings contain possibilities, what has happened, what is happening, what will happen next? (time again)

· Enjoying the skill of the maker must be part, but that skill also builds intellectual content. The curvature of the earth as seen on that painted horizon, the careful positioning of each object on a constructed surface, but a surface that equally and disquietingly, has it’s own sense of depth. Depth and distance in a crowded world, images of quietude, map making, exploration, colonisation, trade and narrative combine in an object about luxury, the past and the future (time again)

Jan van de Cappelle: ‘A River Scene with a Large Ferry and Numerous Dutch Vessels at Anchor’, 1665. Oil on canvas. 122 x 154.5 cm. National Gallery, London

· An image of quiet for an unquiet world.

· This room itself is quiet though, perhaps that is why I choose it. Few others bother with a room full of static, Dutch landscapes, the rest of the gallery is frantic with pleasure seekers.

· As those other rooms prove, looking at art is a communal activity, do we derive satisfaction from such a joint process? Perhaps we receive sustenance from those accumulated gazes, like the notion of a church as a prayer repository.

· This is a modern spiritual space, art as worship? Icons? Great God Culture? A thing that takes us from the dull here to the transcendent there? To the blue horizon in a satisfyingly complex manner?

· Historical interest and identification across the centuries. After a twenty minute wait on my train into London and ten minutes stuck on a tube station this afternoon, earlier problems with transport seem easy to appreciate. (time again)

· I see an old thing therefore, as Antiques Roadshow tells me, a thing of financial value so worthy of respect.

· Is there a parallel with fishing, another very popular activity that often involves no actual activity? Is looking at a painting an opportunity to:

“Turn off your mind relax and float down stream

It is not dying, it is not dying

Lay down all thoughts, surrender to the void,

It is shining, it is shining.”

As Lennon wrote in “Tomorrow Never Knows”

· Maybe it’s just showing off, demonstrating high status cultural knowledge. Is that sort of knowledge still high status? Wouldn’t it be better to know all about financial derivatives or the offside rule in football? (something I know  even less about than boats).

the-offside-rule

The key here is I think the term multi-layered, multiple layers of fictive space, multiple layers of narrative, multiple layers of paint in an image that is apparently undemanding. An image that slowly draws you into its depths. (time gentlemen please)

Railing Against It: Art about Waiting

March 27, 2012
Alberti, Art Seen, Landscape Art, Looking at Art, National Gallery, Pictorial Space, Poussin: Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake, Railing Against It, the Picture Plane
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On the Platform

An empty station, Friday afternoon. I am on the platform alone. A man walks purposefully down the long empty space, it is hot, the sun very bright. He stops less than one pace in front of me. He is middle aged and red faced with a shiny suitcase on wheels, resting over the handle is a vividly crimson, highly decorated Chinese silk suit. He does not acknowledge me, although I could probably breathe down his neck if I wanted to, I do not, so I don’t.

Art about Waiting

Paintings are busy spaces, and the people depicted are busier still. They are always doing something, about to do something, having something done to them.

Conversely, travelling on public transport is all about waiting, long periods not going anywhere, not having anything done to you etc. There are few works of art that fit this state.

A Large Ferry

There is a painting in the National Gallery, London that shows stasis: Jan van der Capelle’s: ‘A River Scene with a Large Ferry and Numerous Dutch Vessels at Anchor’, 1665.

Jan van de Cappelle: ‘A River Scene with a Large Ferry and Numerous Dutch Vessels at Anchor’, 1665. Oil on canvas. 122 x 154.5 cm. National Gallery, London.

It is calm, still, waiting for the tide, or a wind; the ferry by the way is the boat in front, lying diagonally. Apart from the gentle tonality, I have always been fascinated by van der Capelle’s treatment of the ground plane.

“This is the guard speaking with a message for the customer who just got on with a large plain (plane?) cross; you left half of it behind on the platform. I’ve got it here with me now. I’m in the fourth carriage from the front waiting for you”

Albertian Space

Leon Battista Alberti: ‘De Pictura and Elementa’ 1518, from 1435

Traditionally in Albertian space, the ground plane, the Renaissance pavement, is an opaque, unyielding surface, where figures can stand, buildings can be constructed with no fear of falling through that solid ground. Even in marine paintings, the sea is usually fairly solid and boats sit/ float on top of it like a ruffled carpet on a hard floor. The power of a painted storm is the obvious departure from the comforting horizontal format.

For Albertian space to be convincing, we must feel we can traverse it, usually on foot. In this van der Capelle image the ‘pavement’, the skin of the world is the thickness and transparency of a soap bubble; we would fall through. But fall through to where? The reflected world is equally real, as though, in fact, it is us that is upside down and the reflection is reality. The boundaries between one world and the next are confused. In a very calm world there is unease. To some extent this is the familiar artist game with mirrors, playing with spaces within pictorial spaces (think of The Arnolfini portrait, or Manet’s ‘Bar at the Folies Bergeres). These mirror reflections are in planes parallel to the picture plane, parallel to us looking at them. The game relates to the role of pictorial space in the first place; the function of illusion. Can we say the same with a horizontal plane?

Outside the British Car Auctions, in front of an enormous queue of waiting cars, two young men are playing football with a very white ping pong ball.

The Reflective Ground Plane

To get closer to what is happening in ‘Large Ferry’ try comparing it with another familiar image of reflections in calm water, Poussin’s ‘Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake’,

Poussin: 'Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake', 1648. oil on canvas. 118 x 198 cm. National Gallery, London

look at the lake in the mid ground, the reflections of the buildings do not, surprisingly perhaps, destroy the flatness of the surface, the watery ground plane still happily continues on its journey to the infinite horizon. Or, any of Turner’s reflections in calm waters:

J M W Turner: 'The Fighting Temeraire Tugged to her Last Berth to be Broken Up', 1839. oil on canvas. 91 x 122 cm. National Gallery, London

‘The Fighting Temeraire’, or

J M W Turner: 'Norham Castle Sunrise', 1845. oil on canvas, 90 x 121 cm. Tate Britain.

‘Norham Castle Sunrise’, you could traverse these flat, reflective ground planes without once thinking of falling through. Their function is to create space, to reflect the sky, to promote the narrative; but they are always an unyielding surface. Depth in these paintings goes horizontally, into the space not, as it were, down through it, as we can see in ‘Large Ferry’. Down into another world? Where does that other world lead to, do they do things differently there? This is the familiar trope from children’s fiction: the land behind the wardrobe; the rabbit hole; the looking glass. As Auden wrote in ‘As I walked out one evening’

‘The glacier knocks in the cupboard,

The desert sighs in the bed,

And the crack in the tea-cup opens

A lane to the land of the dead’

 

The Viewing Experience

Maybe this sense of unease is why this room of unassuming Dutch landscape paintings is always empty. Or, it might reflect my thesis that our behaviour this side of the picture plane is, to some extent, governed by the organisation of the space on the far side of the picture plane. This painting is hung in one of the quietest and calmest areas of the National Gallery, I have rarely seen anyone in this room, the few viewers rarely stay for more than a minute or two. Numberless hordes pass nearby, yet, like this painting, all in Room Twenty Two is still: waiting.

Twenty Third Approach to Het Steen: 1636

February 21, 2012
Alberti, Art Seen, Courtauld Institute Galleries, Het Steen, Landscape Art, Light in Art, Looking at Art, National Gallery, Pictorial Space, Rubens, Tate Britain, the Picture Plane
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Peter Paul Rubens: 'A View of Het Steen in the Early Morning', 1636. Oil on Oak. Oil on oak.131 x 229.cm. National Gallery, London

It is half term; the National Gallery is full of enthusiastic parents with reluctant children, occasionally vice versa. I have just come from the Courtauld Gallery, partly to see the Ben Nicholson/ Piet Mondrian exhibition, also to visit old favourites: Manet’s ‘Bar at the Folies Bergeres’; Rubens ‘Deposition’ etc.

In front of Rubens landscape: Het Steen, it occurs to me that you could make a strong case to say that Mondrian, even late Mondrian, is also about landscape, certainly about ‘Nature’. As Mondrian wrote:

“It took me a long time to discover that particularities of form and natural colour evoke subjective states of feeling which obscure pure reality. The appearance of natural forms changes, but reality remains. To create pure reality plastically, it is necessary to reduce natural forms to constant elements of form, and natural colour to primary colour. The aim is not to create other particular forms and colours, with all their limitations, but to work toward abolishing them in the interest of a larger unity.”

Much of De Stijl’s philosophy came from splendidly esoteric stuff, like this from Dr. Schoenmaeker:

‘The two fundamental, complete contraries which shape our earth and all that is of the earth, are: the horizontal line of power, that is the course of the earth around the sun and the vertical, profoundly spatial movement of rays that originates in the centre of the sun.’

(‘Principles of Plastic Mathematics’, 1916)

Or from Theosophy, another search for deeper realities largely inspired by the engagingly dubious Madame Blavatsky. Before discovering the lucrative forces of the mind, she is supposed to have been a trick rider in a circus, a piano teacher, and manager of an artificial flower factory. An exposed ex-Spiritualist, apparently descended from Russian nobility, she mixed Western and Eastern mysticism by claiming direct contact with the Goddess Isis. Her writings and teachings were hugely successful and influential, although largely plagiarised. Mondrian later played down the importance of such fakery, but at the time it provided a philosophical underpinning to early De Stijl.

Moving from Cezanne’s ‘Monte Sainte Victoire’ of 1887,

Paul Cezanne: 'Monte Sainte Victoire', 1887

to Mondrian’s pre-American abstractions, e.g. ‘Composition C (no.III), with Red, Yellow and Blue’, 1935

Piet Mondrian: 'Composition C (no.III), with Red, Yellow and Blue’, 1935

and then back to my bench in front of a Flemish autumn landscape, it seems logical to ask if there any obvious similarities, apart from the fundamental theme: man and nature. I would suggest that that ‘Monte Sainte Victoire’ is closer to Mondrian, or the other way round, than it is to Het Steen. The clue to that closeness, to developing Modernism as a whole I suppose, is in their relationship to the picture plane.

Rubens, like all artists before…before when? Manet and the theatrical flatness of ‘Dejeuner sur l’Herbe’, or more likely, Cezanne’s posthumous retrospective at the Salon d’Automne, Paris in 1907. This was where artists like Picasso and Braque picked up the threads that would lead to a pictorial form (Cubism) that was entirely about relationship to the picture plane.

Incidentally, after seeing the ‘Picasso and Modern British Art’ show at Tate Britain, one would have to agree with Wyndham Lewis that Picasso was entirely studio bound. I still think Lewis was little more than an illustrator, a maker of posters to illustrate the importance of Wyndham Lewis in fact, but in that observation he points his finger exactly at Picasso’s limits.

“So, what are we meant to be looking at Mum?”

I think, we need to think about what we want to see next. Right, are we ready? Shall we move on?”

Back to Cezanne and Rubens. Both paintings involve receding planes, framing trees, natural forms at specific angles under light. The earlier artist as you might expect, apparently ignores the picture plane; like all those brought up on the mathematical construction of pictorial space.

Leon Battista Alberti: ‘De Pictura and Elementa’ 1518, from 1435

This world is designed to physically position the viewer, the agency (as it were) happens on both side of the vertical non existency. Whereas Cezanne’s pictorial space is composed of horizontals and verticals that work in exact parallels with the picture plane. That parallel format means that nothing is projected beyond it, the space stops dead at the plane. We can view it from any position, but that is all we are doing: viewing.

“The new vision… …does not proceed from a fixed point. Its viewpoint is everywhere, and not limited to any one position. Nor is it bound by space or time”

Piet Mondrian.

Peter Paul Rubens: 'A View of Het Steen in the Early Morning', 1636. Oil on Oak. Oil on oak.131 x 229.cm. National Gallery, London

In Het Steen, the verticals (the trees, the house) and horizontals (lines of the ditches, shadows) operate in relation to the space and the presumed viewer enclosed within that space. They curve according to the depicted topography, the painted world, it seems, precedes our viewing of it. Whereas in ‘Monte Sainte Victoire’ the artist is imposing a method of viewing upon the subject, and that method becomes the subject.

Paul Cezanne: 'Monte Sainte Victoire', 1887. 67 x 92 cm, oil on canvas. Detail

Look at Cezanne’s famous ‘passage’, the repeated, parallel, hatched brushstrokes, strokes that refer us to process, to flatness, to the art work. In Het Steen, brushstrokes (where they are visible) are mimetic, they curve around forms; the curve varying according to what is seen, not how it is seen. Rubens does use parallel brushstrokes, for example blue transparent lines in the willows in the mid-ground, but then, that is how willows grow. Look at the sky above the mountain, Cezanne’s ‘passage’ tells us about the visual tension between two painted horizons/ edges (of the tree and the mountain) and their relationship to the top and sides of the painted canvas. We might also think that this relates to climactic conditions, heat haze for example, but after carefully looking I would suggest structure of the painting comes first.

“O que bello!

“Mamma, Andiamo?”

“Bello”

“Mamma, Andiamo!”

“Uno, Duo, Tre, Hup”

Rubens methods are of course, equally stylised, the intention of his stylisation is to make an apparently neutral world, a world in which each painted space operates to rules we can easily understand. Whereas Cezanne is measuring the distance from each part of the view to…? I used to think it was from each part of the view to the artist’s eye, but after a while in front of this particular Monte Sainte Victoire, I rather think it is from the view to the picture plane.

Next to me, a young Asian boy of impressive width is playing a game on his phone. The game appears to involve building towers, or perhaps cranes. He builds them in a series of different settings, buildings grow as he taps the screen, swiping from right to left with his little finger. Every now and then he does something to collapse the whole scene and start a new one. Sometimes it is at sea, sometimes on land, sometimes mountains.

He changes to a cyclist pouring down narrow bridges across torrential rivers and mountain chasms. The bridges run directly into the picture plane exactly in the centre of the phone screen. The bridges have breaks in them and with his little finger he must make the cyclist jump, or plunge into the abyss. It is all very exciting and he has not looked up once.

I look upward and notice that we are surrounded by small beings with names like Giles and Charlotte and Harriet. Giles is, oddly, given that is about 1 degree outside and drizzling, wearing a light straw hat, large bushes of blond hair push out beneath it, enough I think rather grumpily to spare for those of us of a slightly older vintage; time to go.

Twentieth Approach to Het Steen, 1636: Het Steen and George Shaw and Bin Enclosures: the ‘Objectness’ of Art.

December 14, 2011
Alberti, Art Seen, Het Steen, Landscape Art, National Gallery, Pictorial Space, Rubens, The Baltic, the Picture Plane
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Peter Paul Rubens: ‘A View of Het Steen in the Early Morning’, 1636. Oil on Oak. Oil on oak.131 x 229.cm. National Gallery, London

Four girls are sitting on the bench in front of Het Steen (part of a school group, Year 11 at a guess). One is sketching in an A6 book with a big red ribbon on it. They debate whether it is really annoying, or not, that different galleries have different policies for taking photographs. They fall to looking at Google Maps on their phones.

“No, look, we are here right”

“No but like, what’s that bit there?”

In ‘The Art of Describing’, Svetlana Alpers describes Northern landscape paintings as a mapping of terrain rather than the (Italian) representation of an idealised scene. She usually holds Rubens up as an example of Italianate influence and in Het Steen the foreground, with its stock figures and grand, illuminated house fits this description well. In the mid/ background though, the raised mound on the horizon acts more as destination than vanishing point. In that sense, you feel you could walk or ride in your cart along one of a series of well-established routes to the central church tower that just pierces the sky (the Cathedral of St Rombout in the town of Malines). Like the Google Map directions, you half expect a hovering blue arrow to point to an area of trees and then, disconcertingly, relocate the whole image through 90 degrees when you tilt the phone too much.

“I actually like the curves in it; I could really imagine rolling down that hill”

“It reminds me of that time we had to go on a cross country run and we got lost and had to ring up your mum”

“Shall we go now?”

“I can’t, my legs are stuck to the seat”

Alpers further characterises the fundamental differences between ‘Italian’ and ‘Northern’ pictorial space. As we know, Italian art after Alberti/ Brunelleschi  works with a mathematically defined, illusory box existing behind a transparent picture plane. It is the relationship of forms to the vanishing point and to the static, monocular viewer whose visual cone that plane bisects, which brings all this art into play. The fundamental intention is to create a unified, harmonious space between the viewer’s eye and the centrally defined infinity.

Whereas, she says, in Northern art forms are arranged in aggregation, the eye rests in a series of discrete movements around the pictorial space, movement defined by each composition, not by mathematical convention. We see each aggregation sequentially, not in one whole look. Italian represents something already known, usually known in words, Northern art is the act of describing existing objects and places through making images.

The Turner Prize at the Baltic

I have recently been to Newcastle to see the Turner Prize exhibition at the Baltic. Karla Black was the outstanding artist for me, although it was clear that the insider, with his modish re-working of early Modernism would win. This theme was all over The Venice Biennale this year; a clever bit of positioning by Martin Boyce. I had been looking forward to seeing George Shaw’s work, to seeing his paintings as real objects, rather than digital images or print.  I was surprised to find them disappointing, perhaps a comparison with Het Steen will begin to describe why.

Shaw does not, strictly speaking, make landscape paintings of a Coventry housing estate. He makes paintings of his photographs of a Coventry housing estate. That distinction is important. Look at his images and you see a visually sophisticated eye at work; an eye that is clearly well trained in photographic technique: framing; cropping balancing, depth of field; viewpoint. So that when he comes to make; ‘Resurface’ for example, a lot of the decisions have already been made. There is a formal cohesion to them, a unity that denies the tentative snapshot nature of the subject.

George Shaw: ‘The Resurface’, 2010, enamel on board

If we take one key image to stand in for the whole of his display: ‘Resurface’. Like all the others, it tends to symmetricality, look at the orthogonal created by the ‘On/ No’ device on the tarmac. This is not the sudden, deliberately non picturesque, glance of Pissarro for example. It is not, despite the advance publicity, the aggregated contents of a described landscape. If you base your pictorial space so firmly on Albertian principles, your audience will make certain assumptions; we are all familiar with these traditions, there are no real surprises anymore.

The Bin Enclosure and Art

Arranging bin sheds/ garages in this way cannot be called transgressive; we are not being challenged by the composition, rather, we are being reassured. ‘Resurface’ is a great topic, what should the housing association that owns this area of Tile Hill North do with these old sheds? Knock them down and build something useful? Wicker bin enclosures seem very a la mode these days, and the bin enclosure is a real problem for contemporary social housing design. George Shaw shows an institution not getting to grips with issues; slap on new coat of paint, put new tarmac down and ignore it.

Shaw’s paintings speak to something very appealing to the large crowds visiting the Baltic. These images seem to place themselves on a continuum that runs from the Haywain at one end, to ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ at the other. We can recognise ourselves and our lives in these small familiar scenes, as far as this audience is concerned there is a substantial, and affirmative process at work. The Lords of High Culture have recognised us and thought us worthy; “God has seen everything that he had made and behold, it was very good”. But note that the hymn (Words: Cecil Alexander: ‘Hymns for Little Children’ 1848. Melody: 17th Century English folk tune arranged by Martin Shaw, 1915)  continues:

‘The rich man in his castle, 

The poor man at his gate, 

 He made them, high or lowly, 

And ordered their estate.’

Look at ‘Resurface’ and the receding planes, directly parallel to the picture plane: the sheds/ a fence at the left on a scrubby grass verge/ leafless trees/ a house and in the far background more trees. These trees indicate Tile Hill Wood, one of the last remnants of the Forest of Arden, a nature reserve since the 1930’s, now rather overgrown with holly. The setting for Shakespeare’s ‘As You Like It’, pastoral romance and courtly love, all ending happily amongst the rich and powerful: Orlando carves poems to Rosalind on trees, Coventry youth paint their names on brick walls. Apart from the neatness of the interconnections that you would expect from a successful contemporary fine artist, there is an underlying nostalgia: warm and softening. We feel comforted, we accept our lot and go home thinking of British sitcoms.

The Raleigh Chopper Mk 1

In this cosy glow, we wonder whether the internal spectator for this work could perhaps be the proverbial man out walking his dog, a man who had once who been a 1970’s youth on a Raleigh Chopper bike (first released in the UK in Christmas 1969, made in Nottingham) when these sheds were in their prime. Tile Hill North was a post war estate, a new utopian future, open plan with views and walks to the surrounding woods. Employment from the new Massey Ferguson factory turning out tractors: new forms of housing and new forms of agriculture and new ways of treating nature for new futures. What we see now is entropy and ennui, decay has been unsuccessfully resurfaced, the structures themselves have not been re-worked, just given new double yellow lines to keep them in their place.

Peter Paul Rubens: ‘A View of Het Steen in the Early Morning’, 1636. Oil on Oak. Oil on oak.131 x 229.cm. National Gallery, London

Back to Het Steen

By and large Het Steen is descriptive, a specific place at a specific time of day and year: although it is redolent of ownership. We can see that through viewpoint, a raised position familiar from Patinir and earlier Flemish landscape painting. In this later work we are either an all-seeing God, or possibly a presumed absolute Stuart monarch, or perhaps we are seeing the landscape from the square crenelated tower you can just see to the right of the house: a reworking of the exact topography to emphasise the notion of ownership. Such a reworking displays the extent, the scale of the land that comes with the manor of Het Steen.

Shaw also re-presents and describes a particular landscape with a strong underlying narrative, why was seeing Shaw’s actual paintings unfulfilling? After all, in reproduction his works look very fine indeed. But the real things seem diminished, they were either too small, lacking the power that scale should bring in this context. Or, they were too large and could perhaps been bright jewels; elegant and perfect. Each approach in direct and telling visual contrast to the actuality. In fact the paintings lie very flat to the wall, dull of surface and demanding very little for the eye.

‘Resurface’ and the painted surface

It is the painting as object that matters in this context, and the surface quality in particular. In Het Steen we see a grand statement, as an object it is a glorious thing, of a piece with what it represents. The paint surface is layered and, despite the best efforts of the National Gallery lighting scheme, lively, vital, light catching on the foreground trees and the vertical fold of the hunters sleeve for example.

In common with the lack of clarity between their pictorial space and their subject, Shaw’s paintings have a muddy, unclear set of tonal values, based in ‘Resurface’ on a sharp Viridian green. Every single mention of George Shaw must, by legal decree I assume, talk at length about the medium he uses. Again a brilliant USP: Humbrol enamel. The reader immediately thinks of craft practice; obsessive hobbyists in adolescent bedrooms; that soft nostalgia again. Enamel lacks the apparent depth of oil paint, there are no evident layers of varnish in Resurface and the shine sits on top of the surface. Oil paint appears to contain tangible highlights as well as reflect light through different textures; those layers of glaze/ varnish and consistency present forms of depth to the viewer. Enamel can’t really contain texture, it just provides a uniform shine, again thematically suitable, but as interesting as looking for a long time at the surface of an Airfix model or perhaps the gleam on a slightly muddy Mark 2 Raleigh Chopper. It is interesting how much the digital version provides the depth that is missing in the object.

The four GCSE artists have gone, I now realise that during the twenty minutes, at least, I heard them on the bench, not one of the girls said ‘Oh My God’, or it’s diminutive ‘OMG’. These things ought to be noted.

Beside me in bulky tweed called, I think, a covert coat, and balancing a rather fine Brown Derby hat on his knee, a man keeps consulting first one mobile phone from the left pocket, then the right. After a while he calls from one of them.

“Hello, Hello, I’m trying to get hold of Gerrard…I came in just after one to meet him…it’s now after 3…it’s all very interesting, but I don’t know what happened to our rendezvous”

I leave him surrounded by huge numbers of French children with clipboards. Our tweed clad gent is talking about ordering a meal from M and S, he places his hat on his head to protect him from youthful Gallic indifference.

Nineteenth Approach to Het Steen 1636

November 19, 2011
Alberti, Art Seen, Het Steen, Landscape Art, Light in Art, National Gallery, Pictorial Space, Rubens, the Picture Plane
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Peter Paul Rubens: 'A View of Het Steen in the Early Morning', 1636. Oil on Oak. Oil on oak.131 x 229.cm. National Gallery, London

Alberti defined seeing a painting as looking through a window but, you can look out of or into a window. Looking at pictorial space is a reciprocal process. Norman Bryson (‘Vision and Painting’, page 96) points out that the viewer’s space, on this side of the picture plane, has differed over time. The dramatic liturgical theatre of Byzantine Christendom; you approached the image in a full architectural setting with aural context. You moved from devotional icon to icon in a set pattern, at a particular time of the year, according to prescribed physical ritual accompanied by prescribed sounds and of course smells, incense etc. The contested piazza of the Renaissance self; always measuring, always calculating proportion, always negotiating a better deal with God. The pure white cube of the fiercely convinced, Protestant communicant. The contingent world of the modern being, a fluid range of virtual selves, constantly subject to a vast choice of undifferentiated stimuli.

Perhaps I was aware of this as I took my usual place in the National Gallery, on the bench before Het Steen on a Friday evening. Perhaps it was because, on leaving the Leonardo exhibition, I had seen Professor Martin Kemp (the international authority on da Vinci) in the Gents, prepping himself for his evening talk. He was dressed in a blinding white, collarless linen frock coat, buttoned to the neck. The neckline was giving him problems and took time to adjust – much fiddling and staring into the mirror. I last saw him, in the flesh, at a talk some 8-10 years ago. He seems curiously ageless, although his hair, then a dazzling black, now has shades of deeper red; we know he’s worth it. Outside, he is greeted by attendant young women in flowing dark tailoring, they whisk him away to bathe his brow in perfumed oils; aah the life of the eminent art historian.

Perhaps it was because the Leonardo show was so crowded (only a three hour queue to buy a day ticket, time quickly lost in explaining the processes of Christianity to a puzzled Malaysian Economics student struggling with terminology in the exhibition hand-out). An exhibition crowded with a certain class of person, fragrant is the term I think, modulated voices and modulated décolletage on show as well; parties to go to I suppose.

Perhaps this was why I was more than usually aware of others as I sat in front of Rubens’ joyful autumn.

A Study of Hand Gestures in Front Of Het Steen

Older hands are often clasped behind the back, male tending to one hand holding the clenched other. Female hands seem to be relatively open. Younger hands tend to hold digital devices in front or to the side, or carry bags, handbags or labelled shopping bags.

A couple walk past, constantly changing their hand grasp with each other, sometimes fully entwined fingers, sometimes laid palm in palm, sometimes holding little fingers as though they are about to pull a wishbone. They read the label, ignore the painting.

 

“It’s very nice, this landscape, quite a size, but just a bit big for our lounge”

Two women, middle aged, one in a pale pink cardigan, the other all in black. They are clearly absorbed by the painting and keep making paired movements, each pushes her hands together from a height about nose level and moves them down to about the waist, mostly whilst pointing to the carter and the house.

Three very small Japanese women/ girls (difficult to tell) make small dabbing movements as they point upwards to the painted sky; dab, then circular movement, dab, then circular movement. They stop, hold up their phones, standing like the three graces (two facing the work, one away from it) they each consult their mobiles, this uplights their faces with a delicate blue glow. Whatever they find, it returns them to the painted sky, more very careful anti clockwise gestures, this time with thumb and forefinger; precise and in a single plane.

The digital light from the three graces glowed briefly across the silver birches in the paintings foreground. The painted highlight on those top branches is frontally lit, as though a film crew had rigged up towers and put full spots –no coloured gels – onto the upper parts, prior to some swooping camera shots across the plain. But the sun, pale straw yellow, but yellow nonetheless, comes from the right hand horizon behind the trees. That the sun is low is clear from the sight and intensity of the shadows cast by trees in the midground; surely the trees should be in silhouette and dark at the top?

Young couple in matching anoraks stand with an arm around each other’s back. With her other hand, she takes out her chewing gum, examines it, rolls it between her fingers and pops it back in her mouth.

White haired, large middle aged man to equivalent companion, pointing with fleece clad arm whilst sat on the bench.

“Frank, what’s that building”

Frank gets up, looks at the label, waves his arm slowly in front of the painting in a horizontal manner

“It’s Birmingham”

A very large class of students appears, to draw the right hand Judgement of Paris, all hats and boots and tights. They carry A3 black sketchbooks, Seawhite’s finest held in front of them like protective shields, or perhaps devices to declare their allegiance. Time to go.

Rome: Pictorial Space and the Albertian window

August 12, 2011
Alberti, Churches in Rome, Pictorial Space, the Picture Plane
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Thinking about the Albertian notion of the picture plane as a window frame, I have been looking from my window here. I am staying on the 5th floor (100 steps and no lift) of a block in the Centro Storico. It is difficult to tell the age of the building. I would think the façade is probably 18th, might be 17th, Century. But the maze of intersecting buildings it covers could be much, much older.

The point is, that these arrangements, still on a mediaeval street pattern, hold a familiar form and what do I see from my window? I see stories, many other windows randomly arranged with different lives, all autonomous, all operating in their own complex spaces, all with their own ‘agency’.

There is for example, as there always is in these built up ancient centres where people live as they have done for centuries, a child screaming; there is always a child screaming somewhere. In this case, I can see him in a window across a little piazza to my right, about 2 storeys down. I can see bunk beds and a tiny head just reaching up to the window ledge. The screaming has stopped, he, (and it has to be a he) raises his arm above his head so it can clear the open  window frame and throws a toy out into the world- through his own picture plane to land in an unknown, inaccessible world below.

To my left is a church that proclaims strong missionary connections on a board outside the doors. One of the transepts has an altana (roof terrace) I have seen young priests hanging out their washing sometimes. This evening a man in a white T shirt is jogging on a running machine. The machine faces the wall, not the view of the Roman sky line and a striking, setting sun.

There is shouting opposite, the errant boy disappears suddenly and an enormous woman wearing vast black underwear fills the entire open window, her bra bulges ominously as she leans out of the window to look down. She does not pierce her picture plane so much as grow through it, the giant cupolas of her undergarments jostling for space with a small fleshy head. More rapid shouting, down in the piazza old women, sitting on the inevitable white plastic chairs, give helpful advice. This is almost exactly the scene you can see in Canaletto’s ‘The Stonemasons’ Yard’

http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/canaletto-the-stonemasons-yard

On the first floor of a building, left hand side of that painting, you can see an identical, though slightly thinner, woman leaning out a window to shout at children below.

Narratives in windows, seen through an open window frame written on Windows 2010.

If I leave the window and step out onto my altana, (a rather grand term for a scrubby bit of roof with 32 pots of dying shrubs and geraniums) from this rather small and sad space I can see the dome of San Andrea della Valle; the church where Puccinni set the first act of Tosca. Turning the other way, I can just see the top of San Pietro in Montorio, on top of the Janiculum Hill. To see either, you have to look through a thicket of TV aerials and satellite dishes and inventive arrangements of cables to connect them and stop the things blowing down. I suppose they provide our current open windows on the world.