Verging On The Sublime

Klosters' heyday as the winter playground of English royalty is long over but there are no echoes of nostalgia or signs of faded glory about the town's immaculate streets. The whole place is so bright, so spic, span and affluent that it can make an English visitor quite heady. If the altitude doesn't make you swoon, the lack of litter and graffiti will. The sunlight is sharp in the crisp mountain air and everything it touches gleams. The spacious shops are bright with the rainbow colours of hiking gear and pool wear. Mountain bikes, tennis rackets and Norwegian walking poles abound. Winter or summer, Klosters is focussed on the life lived out-of-doors and that is why so many people still take the little red train from Landquart and venturing this far up the Prättigau valley, alight just one stop before Davos. Above the town, the green pastures which swathe the mountain slopes are neater than an English lawn and dotted with old wooden barns that are better kept than any palace. To me, the valley looked so fresh and perky, the entire place could have been a built overnight, just before I arrived.

So here I am, back in Klosters again as a guest of Marianne and Tore Bergengren, rudely awoken by the cart which washes the streets at 7am, peering out of my apartment window at the sun-kissed, verdant slopes that end in those jagged slabs of rock way above my head. And I'm wondering what I'm going to do with them. The trees, the barns, the waterfalls dangling silently from each distant pinnacle like threads of silver, they're all so tiny against the massy rock. Enormous shadows swing about the valley. If you're on the wrong hillside, twilight may reign for hours on end. Unless the sun is directly overhead, it's almost impossible to tell what time of day it is. There's only one kind of majesty in Klosters nowadays; it has ruled the land for centuries and still holds dominion over my mind as I write this, two weeks later.

Just how do you fit a mountain on a sheet of watercolour paper?

The Swiss philosopher, Jean-JacquesRousseau identified the healthy individual as one who was free from the corruption of modern civilised society and (not for the first time) equated the natural world with the idea of innocence. Similarly, the English poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge proclaimed a 'visionary fondness for fields and woods and mountains,' which he believed, kept the 'bad passions' in inaction. In the eighteenth century, thinkers, writers and poets alike, began to look to Nature to define and determine our moral, as well as our mental and emotional states. The time was right therefore, for an art that reflected these preoccupations. That art, was the art of the landscape and the medium that was best-suited to the purpose, was watercolour.

John Robert Cozens: Between Martigny and Chamonix

English watercolourists, in fact, had been articulating these preoccupations for many years previously, but it must be born in mind that their medium was seen as a rather lowly one and worse, the stinging words of Michelangelo must have rung still in the ears of many an art-lover, when he called landscape art 'a vague and deceitful sketch; a game for children and old men.'

JMW Turner South gate of Sargans (after JRC)

Nothing, however, could capture those vast expanses and wide skies quite as effectively as humble water soluble pigment on paper.

Francis Towne: La Chaperieux

By why the pre-occupation with lofty crags and deep ravines?

John Warwick Smith: Alpine Bridge

The English essayist and politician, Joseph Addison, after undertaking the Grand tour through France, Switzerland and Italy in 1699, declared that "The Alps fill the mind with an agreeable kind of horror." 
This is the frisson that Andrew Wilton refers to in his introduction to 'The Great Age Of British Watercolours,' which we may experience when we are confronted by high waterfalls, cliffs, mountains, oceans or storms and our instinct for self-preservation is threatened. This awareness that we are pitted and measured against almighty forces that overshadow and overwhelm us, acquired a moral dimension through the work of philosophers like Kant and Burke and developed into the concept of the Sublime in nature; a concept that was commensurate with, but separate from, that of beauty. In 'A Philosophical Enquiry,' Burke's investigation into the origin of our ideas of beauty and the sublime, the philosopher even went so far as to suggest a quasi-physiological cause for the frisson that is evoked by vast and lofty visual phenomena. The retina, Burke claimed, is so excited by scanning so many successive data points of information that the eye vibrates almost to the point of pain, and consequently 'must produce an idea of the sublime.'

Salvador Dali: Soft Construction With Boiled Beans

The Sublime was finally overwhelmed by the industrialising forces that spawned it and the Great War decimated the ruling class that both sponsored and patronised it. The work of Freud and Jung, meanwhile, suggested a different trajectory for artistic endeavour and the Grand Tour was replaced with an equally hazardous inward journey. After the welter of radical and sensational 'ism's that characterised twentieth century art, John Robert Cousins and the other watercolourists of Britain's Great Age, could  easily be mistaken for mere nostalgists, rather than the plumbers of the human spirit that they were.

The Sublime, courtesy of EasyJet

No one has to risk traversing the Mont Cenis Pass in a wicker basket these days and the alternative coastal journey to Italy is relatively free of Moorish pirates. And thanks to the democratising effect of the camera, the Sublime is within easy reach of anyone with a mobile 'phone and a reservation on a budget flight. A contemporary version of the Sublime would also have to include the routinely breathtaking images captured by the crew of the International Space Station. 

Earth from the ISS

Astronomy raises the bar by light years.

Omega Nebula by NASA, ESA and J. Hester (ASU)

Back on Earth in Klosters, I know that I will never climb the peaks that dominate my every waking moment.

Chandler: Silvretta Alps

Chandler: From Gotschnagrat

Chandler: Muggenwald

I have to find my own way of conquering them.

From Pencil To Paint

Just how do we get from this...

To this?

"I think that painting today is pure intuition and luck."
Francis Bacon (1909-1992) on Matthew Smith

I remember as a child, the excitement of producing a drawing with which I was really pleased; one that was so good, I thought, that it cried out for the addition of colour. Even then, I knew that colour was the ultimate test of my artistic skills. How often had I heard adults say, "That's lovely. Are you going to colour it in?" Eagerly, I would get my crayons and begin. But before long, my art would turn from absorbing pastime to tedious labour. Far from improving my picture, I felt as if I was defacing it and all my lovely lines would disappear under an increasingly frustrating tangle of incoherent scribbling.

For most of us, our relationship with art begins in a disappointingly similar way. We begin with lines. We understand them. Lines describe things. They have definite boundaries. But colours blend and blur. Colour is exotic, complex, and psychological. With colour an artist can make magic; for most of us, all we manage is mud.

If I can draw, I remember asking myself, why can't I paint?

Thinking in blocks is the key. In the same way that we speak in sentences rather than single words and composers write phrases rather than notes, painting requires a leap into a fully integrated way of picture-making where every colour, every stroke describes every other colour and stroke. And that is why it is so difficult. Colour can exist in the mind as a formless quality of light, but when we bring it out into the world, it must possess a shape. Even Rothko, who did his best to create shapeless paintings, was restricted by the rectangular proportions of his canvases. Colour and brushstroke, therefore, are inextricably intertwined and to separate them out leads to the tyranny of the colouring book. When I paint a pot or a pear, I imagine I am loading my brush with that object which I then mould onto the canvas. I am not filling in a pre-ordained shape; instead, I invite the object to manifest itself and work hopefully towards that  magical moment when, as Francis Bacon said, "the image is the paint and vice-versa."

From Pencil To Paint

Dillington House

2 July

10am to 4pm

photo credit: Debbie Hart at Studio Paradiso painting holidays in Tuscany

Briefly In Sicily

The idea was to put David Chandler (art tutor, watercolourist and lover of anything that will fit on a plate or in a wine glass) together with Loredana Waters (unsurpassable Sicilian chef, professional enthusiast and lover of all things Italian) in a villa in Sicily and invite a bunch of people to join them for a week of fine art and fine food. What could be more enticing? Painting under the palms by day and supping under the starry sky by night on a Mediterranean isle, saturated with culture, where Vandals, Ostrogoths, Byzantines, Arabs and Normans had left their antique mark...

That's how I found myself heading out of Palermo through rush hour traffic in a little Lancia; Italian rock pounding from the car stereo and gallons of rain water hammering onto the windscreen.

Our destination that first evening was Messina, where we would be staying with friends of Loredana. The only thing between us and a bed for the night? Two hundred and twenty kilometres, fifty tunnels and raindrops the size of baby birds, plonking onto the car roof.

Two things I learned during the first hour of our trip:  

1. Road-markings are for decorative purposes only and it's okay to reverse on Sicilian motorways if you are in dire need of a coffee, a doughnut and another CD of Italian rock music.

2. Said coffee, obtained over the counter of a late-night service station shop, will probably be the best you've ever tasted. The doughnut will be pretty good too, but the CD is likely to be quite another matter.

Cefalù, where we planned to stop for supper, was strangely difficult to find. After Taormina and Palermo, it's probably Sicily's most visited town and during the summer, owing to its mediaeval charm and sandy beaches, the population triples. But it seemed to me and even to the Sicilian at the wheel, that any connection between the road signs and the destinations they bore was entirely coincidental. Mercifully, after only one U-turn on a fairly quiet stretch of dual carriageway, we stumbled upon it and splashing downhill through pond-sized puddles, we found the ancient port sparkling in the darkness, its streets glossy with rainwater.

Our restaurant was a faintly chilly and cheerless place and would have been improved by the presence of a few more diners besides us. With the whole of Sicily awash, however, it was no surprise that we should be entirely alone. I looked around the room, counting the vacant chairs and tables and feeling embarrassed for the staff whom, I supposed, were feeling equally embarrassed for us. When my companion became embroiled in a long argument with the waitress who then stalked off, I was convinced that I had discovered the real reason for the restaurant's emptiness. But it turned out that Loredana and the waitress had just been discussing the squid. When I tasted it, I knew exactly why this little envelope of rubbery looking-flesh had aroused such passion. It was fabulously, mouth-meltingly fresh and as with the service station coffee, quite surpassed anything I had ever tasted - caught that morning, apparently; the only condition under which the chef would cook it.

After supper, Loredana announced that no visit to Cefalù would be complete without a visit to the old lavatoio, a kind of mediaeval, stone-built washing machine, which utilises the water that runs from the enormous rock which towers over the town and escapes through vents in the sea wall. So we ventured out into the tipping rain again and after losing our way only a couple of times, found the correct gateway. Descending the steps to the lavatoio, with the waves beating heavily against the old walls, we gazed thoughtfully at the ancient stones upon which equally ancient scrubbers got their clothes only slightly less wet than we were then. 

Drying out in the car and back on the road again, we found our way out of Cefalù on our third attempt. We were driving up a mountain in a rain storm, in the wrong direction, but hey, Messina had to be out there somewhere. And we were dry. 

Paccamora, as they say in Sicily.