What I'm watching this week
Mr. Turner — directed by Mike Leigh, 2014. Timothy Spall as Turner, barely speaking, sketching constantly. There is a scene where he ties himself to a mast to observe a storm at sea, and you understand immediately that for him there was no gap between the need to see something and the need to record it. They were a single act. Watch it for the visual intelligence. The biography is beside the point. The Britts know how to do movies like this. "Little Dorrit" and "Downton Abbey" live in my brain forever.
There is something about the British face; not always beautiful, but real, puffy, often crooked, redish, alive. Their movies feel more authentic. Less powder, more wrinkles.
The outdoors is God's palette. I try to go out every year and bring a small bottle of vodka to add to my water (to my water, silly!) so that my watercolors don't freeze in the deep, lonely New England winter.
There is something apocalyptic about climbing the hill, knowing you may meet a moose and no human.
What changes when there's no wall to lean the board against?
Almost everything.
The sky changes every ten minutes. The paper is too small for the landscape. Wind is an active participant, and it will decide what dries first. The light you started with is not the light you're painting in twenty minutes later. There is no controlled water source, no flat surface, no ideal distance from the work. Your tripod—shaky.
And the paintings come out with something the studio paintings don't always have: urgency.
Not urgency as a virtue in itself, as I don't think working fast makes better art by default. But working before the light changes, working with what you have and not what you wish you had, working in a body that is cold and slightly awkward, because your fat coat isn't stretchy— this produces a different quality of decision. The self-consciousness burns off. There is no time for it. You make the mark, and the wind moves the wet wash slightly, and you either fight it or you follow it, and following is almost always correct.
It is a different state, and it teaches things the studio cannot.
Turner made over 300 sketchbooks. Many of them became finished paintings; many of them didn't. Some pages are just observation — light on water at a particular hour, the angle of a cliff, weather. He kept the record even when nothing would come of it directly. The sketchbook was not preparatory; it was a practice. I am trying to make mine the same.
