Sold out at the Kendall, we headed to the West Newton to see the just-released feature film Mr Turner by Mike Leigh, with Timothy Spall as the 19th C British painter, arguably the greatest British painter, J.M.W.Turner.
With time to kill, we watched the Patriots come back from the their second 14 point deficit in their game with the Ravens. The bar exploded in cheers and claps when Brady made his stunning backward pass to Edelman (!) who passed to Amendola for a 51 yard touchdown. The game was still going on when we settled down to this placid portrait of Turner in his later years. His lop-sided, jowly visage, his grimaces, his indecipherable grunts and deep Cockney, his uncouth (Constable's word) manners, his single-mindedness devotion to drawing and painting make him something like the beast in Beaumont's fairy tale. The film also makes him out to be (true or false) a deadbeat dad and sexual abuser of his female servant.
But as I became used to his rough voice and face, and ready to accept the character's reticence, I became more engaged in the signs of of his visual intelligence in the service of his art. Though born in low-class circumstances in London, his early promise won him great teachers. He also educated himself in the high culture of the day, the quintessential autodidact. The mind of the man is see in his eyes, his references, his ever-busy hands. In the film and in life, he was continually traveling, obsessively sketching (his sketchbooks at the Tate are accessible on-line) and painting in those indistinct, color-infused land and seascapes for which he is best known ('indistinctness is my forte', he said), always thoroughly engaged.
What was I after? Why try so hard to see a very long movies about...a painter, and a not very attractive one at that?
I'm still sorting out the answer. His sketchbooks inspire me, his late-in-life love affair with a Mrs Booth touched me, his rough authenticity in midst of the mannered early Victorian society (vs, say, the young John Ruskin, his insufferable champion (and, by-the-by, inspiration to much of Boston's Back Bay architecture)) encourages me. His quirkiness and flashes of strong feeling are what I want to be ever capable of. But there's more. He said once
'It is necessary to mark the greater from the lesser truth: namely the larger and more liberal idea of nature from the comparatively narrow and confined; namely that which addresses itself to the imagination from that which is solely addressed to the eye.' Yet he also said, 'I did not paint...to be understood. I wish to show what such a scene was like.' That loyalty to both what was being represented as well to his apprehension of it, and thereby to the transcendent significance of light itself (His last words, 'Color is God') are commitments I deeply resonate with.
Whomever you were, Mr Turner, gargoyle genius, you show me a way, and ever more as I study your work. You intended your works to be given to the British nation, and, look, here am I, beneficiary.
As soon as we hit the lobby, the word was everywhere: the Pats had won.
With time to kill, we watched the Patriots come back from the their second 14 point deficit in their game with the Ravens. The bar exploded in cheers and claps when Brady made his stunning backward pass to Edelman (!) who passed to Amendola for a 51 yard touchdown. The game was still going on when we settled down to this placid portrait of Turner in his later years. His lop-sided, jowly visage, his grimaces, his indecipherable grunts and deep Cockney, his uncouth (Constable's word) manners, his single-mindedness devotion to drawing and painting make him something like the beast in Beaumont's fairy tale. The film also makes him out to be (true or false) a deadbeat dad and sexual abuser of his female servant.
But as I became used to his rough voice and face, and ready to accept the character's reticence, I became more engaged in the signs of of his visual intelligence in the service of his art. Though born in low-class circumstances in London, his early promise won him great teachers. He also educated himself in the high culture of the day, the quintessential autodidact. The mind of the man is see in his eyes, his references, his ever-busy hands. In the film and in life, he was continually traveling, obsessively sketching (his sketchbooks at the Tate are accessible on-line) and painting in those indistinct, color-infused land and seascapes for which he is best known ('indistinctness is my forte', he said), always thoroughly engaged.
What was I after? Why try so hard to see a very long movies about...a painter, and a not very attractive one at that?
I'm still sorting out the answer. His sketchbooks inspire me, his late-in-life love affair with a Mrs Booth touched me, his rough authenticity in midst of the mannered early Victorian society (vs, say, the young John Ruskin, his insufferable champion (and, by-the-by, inspiration to much of Boston's Back Bay architecture)) encourages me. His quirkiness and flashes of strong feeling are what I want to be ever capable of. But there's more. He said once
'It is necessary to mark the greater from the lesser truth: namely the larger and more liberal idea of nature from the comparatively narrow and confined; namely that which addresses itself to the imagination from that which is solely addressed to the eye.' Yet he also said, 'I did not paint...to be understood. I wish to show what such a scene was like.' That loyalty to both what was being represented as well to his apprehension of it, and thereby to the transcendent significance of light itself (His last words, 'Color is God') are commitments I deeply resonate with.
Whomever you were, Mr Turner, gargoyle genius, you show me a way, and ever more as I study your work. You intended your works to be given to the British nation, and, look, here am I, beneficiary.
As soon as we hit the lobby, the word was everywhere: the Pats had won.
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