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.

Boredom And Bile Green

On my last painting holiday in Tuscany, I managed to produce this:

I painted it after one of Dermot and Kathryn's wine-fuelled lunches, on a gloriously sunny afternoon in front of about a dozen people. I'm sure the experience was an edifying one for my students as they watched their so-called teacher getting into more and more of a muddle with his colours and the entire painting went from bad to worse.

I did the same thing in the Loire Valley ten or twelve years earlier, the incident, unlike the many decent demo's I've done, forever etched onto my mind. Then, a student and dear friend told me that my appalling demo' was the most helpful he'd ever seen. Learning from my mistakes was far more salutary, he said, than watching me slickly execute a masterpiece that he felt, in those early days, he would never be able to emulate.

There was some comfort in his remarks as I ruefully went over the events that led to this most recent disaster. It was an unpleasant and cringeworthy experience for me, but if the point of a painting holiday is instruction, then why not acknowledge and accept that one's students can learn just as much from your bad art as your good?

This is a worthwhile idea, but only if we can bear to face up to our mistakes and without any unnecessary breast-beating, dwell on them a little, learn from them and move on.

In one of my local classes, at a quarter to four every thursday afternoon, I would hear the sound of tearing. The perpetrator was Patricia, for whom part of the packing-up procedure was the ripping up of whatever she'd spent the last one and three quarter hours painting. She never liked what she produced and didn't see the point in taking it home, so into the waste bin it would go, in a dozen tiny pieces. She looked blissful while she was doing it, too.

I was never able to convince Patricia that she should hold on to these 'ghastly' creations of hers and attempt to glean something of their merits as well as their de-merits. In this way, she might have learned what she needed to do in order to produce work that pleased her. But no, no work of art could be more pleasing to her than the sound of tearing. In the end, with nothing to show for all the days she spent labouring at her watercolours but a full waste bin, she gave up.

So what are the particular merits and de-merits of my own watercolour disaster?

Well, now that I look at it with a degree more objectivity than I possessed after three glasses of vermentino, I can see that it might have worked. At the time, however, it wasn't the picture that I wanted to paint.

But what did I want to paint?

That it seems, is the crux of the matter. I don't think I really knew. Apart from the fact that I wanted it to be terribly impressive, the rest is a little vague. I just started flinging paint around and hoping for the best. It works sometimes, but not necessarily in front of a dozen people on a hot hillside. On that particular day, I did not get lucky and I couldn't see any potential in the marks I was making. There were no serendipitous insights and then I committed the greatest of all cardinal sins: I got bored.

The purpose of painting is not to show that you are good at it, rather it is to engage with your subject on an intimate level and communicate that engagement.

“In painting," said Matthew Smith, "the gravest immorality is to try to finish what isn’t well begun. But a picture that is well begun may be left off at any point.”

Salient words, but dipping your paint brush in bile green doesn't help either.

And here's an excellent RSA video on making mistakes by Kathryn Schulz:

http://www.thersa.org/events/video/archive/kathryn-schulz

A Few Portraits

Two paintings of footwear. One by by contemporary artist, Michael Taylor, the other by Vincent Van Gogh.

What is the difference between them?

$ 8,970,000,  you might say as both were sold at auction a year ago and the Van Gogh realised $ 9,000,000. But then, Taylor hasn't initiated a major art movement and changed the course of painting to boot (forgive the pun).

So what is the difference?

I show both images to my students and the Taylor instantly appeals. Alongside it, the Van Gogh appears dour and colourless. The Taylor, on the other hand is beautifully rendered and there are lots of little details to beguile the eye. In his careful treatment of the girl's shoes, the fabric of the chair, the carnations on the armrests, he shows us just how well he can paint - and there it ends; a contrived, yet nevertheless superb demonstration of the artist's skill.

Van Gogh, on the other hand, in painting less seems to reveal more of himself. His shoes constitute not such much a still-life as yet another portrait of the artist who regarded portraiture as the chief genre for modern painters. We feel as if we can deduce the personality who discarded them; we sense the labouring that has been done in them and the landscapes they have traversed. The person here is inferred, painted as it were, from the bottom up. Like all great works, the painting hints at something beyond the mere depiction of the objects concerned.

I bring a few old pairs of shoes to the art class and everyone is instantly gripped. They are such sad things; empty shells.  No props; I try to place them as if they've only just been discarded and it is strangely like having the ghost of the wearer in the room with us.

process cyan, magenta, yellow & black acrylic

neutral tint, sepia & burnt sienna watercolour

phthalo green, neutral tint & quinacridone violet watercolour

Dogs and Cats and Chemistry

It's a relief, on occasion, to turn away from the business of trying to make art and focus instead on simply recording what's in front of you.

When Van Gogh was painting with Gaugin in Arles, he attempted to use the latter's method of painting from memory and imagination. In the end, he had to concede that his best work was done when the subject was slap-bang in front of him.  More than anything, though, Van Gogh wanted sitters to paint from and frustratingly for him, all but a few of the good people of Arles avoided him like the plague. To the great benefit of the rest of us, the isolation forced upon him by his apparent craziness gave rise to the most powerful paintings of objects the world has seen; those iconic, yellow-on yellow sunflowers, for example, that have become universally synonymous with artistic struggle.

So what to paint turns out not to be the issue for most artists. If you love to paint, then you'll paint anything; sunflowers, chairs, boots, even the bedroom furniture. The real issue for most of us is how. Ten years of monkish devotion to art  and Vincent had that down pat, but it's something I've been struggling with for decades.

Thank providence then for the limitations of watercolour. Compared with oils and acrylic, there's so much that they won't do and so much that they do quite readily that is irksome. They stain, they run, they bloom and most vexing of all, they won't let you hide your mistakes. And the Bistre ink that I like to use, flocculates when heavily diluted and leaves texture where you don't want it.

Why use it?

I suppose because some us are dog-owners, while others prefer cats.

Oil and acrylic are dogs. They follow you faithfully, sit down and roll over when they're told and won't do anything without your say-so. Watercolours on the other hand, are cats. Whatever you have in mind, they are on their own agenda; winding themselves around your shins one minute and off through the cat-flap the next.

Van Gogh was a fan of watercolour, although he didn't exploit the medium much, declaring that you needed twenty-seven heads to paint a single picture.

It's Dorothy's birthday. I always paint daisies for her birthday card. Almost overnight, they've perked up all over the lawn and with their bright faces, they match her sunny, uncomplicated disposition. Pinching them out of the soil, however and laying them on the table in front of me, I feel as if I'm performing a botanical autopsy. But right now, rather than any new meaning I've conferred upon them, I'm more interested in the shapes they're making on my paper.

Call it artistic detachment.

After the sketch done in soft pencil, the bistre goes on, speckling, quite predictably in unpredictable places. I'm squinting at my daisies now, cutting down the colour information that's hitting my retina and concentrating on light and shade. Colour, tone, form, texture - Nature delivers them all at once and we separate them out like charity shop workers going through a bin bag. More bistre goes on once the first glaze is dry and then I get to work with thin phthalo green watercolour. Odd names. One ancient; one modern. The bistre, originally derived from boiling soot; the phthalocyanine, a petro-chemical by-product.

It's all chemistry.

Brushing aside any concerns about my carbon footprint, I finish the job with a little Translucent Yellow.

The Bistre, besides texturing the picture has tamed the watercolour; harmonised my colours, modified their tones and given the whole thing structure. The watercolour, you see, didn't have it all it's own way. But then again, neither did I and that's where the real chemistry is.

A Christmas Card

Something provocative and challenging for Christmas, I thought, instead of the usual snowmen, Santas, cribs and candles. At some point or other, in just about every household, someone has to negotiate one of these things, put one hand on that cold, clammy breast while the other, charged with herby breadcrumbs, ventures up its vent. What could be more redolent of Christmases past, present and to come? In my mind, it was to be plump, appetising, innocuous; humorous even. The reality was a bleak and cheerless memento mori; a Goya under a fluorescent light; a Freud of the kitchen counter top. Not really Christmas card material at all.

And so, I retreated to the safety of something more traditionally iconic. Mistletoe is culturally replete; pagan, Christian and parasitic, all at the same time, but it only looks right when its hanging upside down.

I've also become overfond of phthalo green mixed with white and a little red. The result is antiseptic rather than festive.

Out came the watercolours, a soft, fat nylon brush and a determination to finish the whole thing in as few strokes as possible.

At last, something neither coldly clever nor vapidly original. I find its green grin uplifting. Or are those arms outstretched? A child could have done it in a few minutes but it took me the entire day.

The Green Lane

                                     watercolour on hand-made paper

'Let two persons go out for a walk; the one a good sketcher, the other having no taste of the kind. Let them go down a green lane. There will be a great difference in the scene as perceived by the two individuals. The one will see a lane and trees; he will perceive the trees to be green; though he will think nothing about it; he will see that the sun shines, and that it has a cheerful effect; and that's all! But what will the sketcher see? His eye is accustomed to search into the causes of beauty, and penetrate the minutest loveliness. He looks up, and observes how the showery and sub-divided sunshine comes sprinkled down among the gleaming, leaves overhead, till the air is filled with the emerald light. He will see, here and there, a bough emerging from the veil of leaves, he will see the jewel brightness of the emerald moss and the variegated and fantastic lichens, white and blue, purple and red, all mellowed and mingled into a single garment of beauty. Then come the cavernous trunks and the twisted roots that grasp with their snake-like coils at the steep bank, whose turfy slope is inlaid with flowers of a thousand dyes. Is not this worth seeing? Yet if you are not a sketcher you will pass along the green lane, and when you come home again, have nothing to say or to think about it, but that you went down such and such a lane.'

John Ruskin (1819 - 1900) 

quoted in The Art of Travel by Alain de Botton

The Fruit of All Knowledge - Part 2

Paul Klee said, 'To paint well is simply this: to put the right colour in the right place.'

That's something I've never found easy. To me, composition has always been a hit-and-miss affair. If a painting niggles me and I can't seem to get the colours or the brushstrokes right, it's usually because I haven't paid enough attention to the composition. This summer, I turned to Cezanne. I was curious about why these slightly strange, cropped and distorted paintings work. Look at the picture, bottom left. What's happening with that knife? And then that mark to the right of the tin doesn't seem to go anywhere. And the bottle in the painting, bottom right, is smack-bang in the centre, isn't it? Time and again, Cezanne puts something in the middle of his painting (the apple's core, the stem of the goblet) which acts as the pivot around which the picture revolves. He avoids symmetry by placing stronger, more eye-catching elements to one side, like the red apple to the left of the goblet, or the red tin, or the metal pan.

In Italy, I try it myself. The copper pot is way too big and the apple way too small, but by cropping the pot and placing the persimmons on the diagonal, it seems to work.

Back home, I rummage through the kitchen drawers at the village hall where I teach and find this magnificent kettle. The spout makes my picture too complicated, so I turn it around until it can't be seen. That night, just by drawing two diagonals on their paper before they begin, everyone in the class gets a decent result. And they finish their pictures in fewer strokes than usual, too.