I really enjoyed the excellent exhibition ‘Turner e l’Italia’ at Il Palazzo dei Diamanti, Ferrara curated by James Hamilton of the National Gallery of Scotland .
I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that Turner’s travels and studies in Italy changed the way he saw the world. You can tell as much from his 1820 painting of Minehead which makes the coast of South West England look like the Bay of Naples.
91 works on display show how J.M.W Turner borrowed from the conventions of tradition, following the manner in which painters like Titian and Claude Lorrain combined the antique world with the present. Turner took this to the next level in his iconoclastic treatment of narrative and his experimentation which colour and light. This would later prove a major inspiration for Impressionists such as Monet.
The audio guide rightly gushes over the “shimmering opalescent mists” and “effervescent dreamlike quality” of the paintings. Initially, his works show the puniness of humans when set against the vastness of mountains, lakes and glaciers but gradually any allegoric or narrative content becomes redundant.
The later paintings show only the barest details using thin scrubbed washes of paint. One is called ‘Landscape with a river and a bay in the distance’ (pictured right) yet the features of the painting’s title are hard to pick out clearly.
This move from realism to abstraction got me thinking of the way these ideas are also present in music. Traditional songs which try to convey bliss, desire or despair can at best only approximate the emotional intensity of these powerful feelings. Frequently, they have to fall back on the default option of tired platitudes.
I think this is why I am more and more drawn to music which is less song based and/or has less predictable structures.
The late, great Jack Rose
There’s a half hour long track on the Virginia trio Pelt’s 2005 album (significantly neither the album nor tracks have titles) that was a kind of epiphany for me in this respect. The track begins with Jack Rose playing rustic 12 string acoustic phrases but these ornate, pleasing notes gradually become swamped and ultimately obliterated by cruder drone based sounds until the track end with a fragments of abstract noise with no identifiable pattern. It’s a fascinating piece and works because I feel less sedated as a listener. It leaves me with no familiar imagery and tonal patterns to identify with.
The parallel with Turner is that , in his move towards impressionistic works, any reassuring resemblance to nature is replaced by a less distinct, but more ambiguous and dynamic perception of the world around us.
