While walking through the Tate
Britain and observing the J.M.W Turner collection within the museum I was lost in
what I could I possibly write about. I then started to really pay attention to
the contrasts between light and dark colors within Turners paintings. The realization
that he preferred to use a lot of darker colors with a lot of earth tones and within
his paintings with night scenes, the use of dominating black scenes. While I saw
this I also noticed that he preferred these darker scenes, but he seemed to always
make a spotlight within his paintings, a focus made with sunlight or some sort
of contrasting light of color. The two most captivating pieces I saw within the
Tate Britain of Turner’s use of contrasting his scenes of light and dark are
the “Peace- Burial at Sea” and the “Buttermere Lake”. The piece, “Peace- Burial
at Sea” is a scene set on the sea with two boats crashing into each other, and the
two ships are the focus of the painting even though they are pitch black. The
edges and background of this painting are white and lighter than the center,
which is a complete contrast to usual shading and shadowing used throughout
Turner’s other paintings. Another interesting thing about this painting and its
use of light within the painting is the fact that in between the two colliding
ships, between the dark charcoal smoke there’s a strip of light, imitating the
fires engulfing the ships, but the light separates and lightens the scene
within the center. The “Buttermere Lake” piece is a beautiful use of these
contrasts, where the lake is engulfed in a black and dark color scheme and the
only light aspect is a half-circle that makes an arch ending in one spot of the
painting that draws your eye to it, drawing your attention to the only lit up
part of the painting which is in the middle of the painting and contrasts the
edges of darkness.
As I walked through Turner’s
collection I honestly forgot about Dabydeen’s preface of in Turner. I found myself focusing more on
Turner’s technique and abilities within his paintings and delve myself into
reading the little plaques of his life, provided by the museum. As I started to
finish up my own tour of Tate’s collection I started to recall Dabydeen’s
preface and what we had talked about during class time and started to wonder
how I felt about this aspect of the artist, how he was portrayed by the museum
and how he was portrayed by Dabydeen. I began to wonder if this was becoming a
question for me of “Can I separate the artist from the person”? “Is this even a
question that needs to be asked regarding Turner”? I am still not certain if
this was what I wanted to take from the reading and the gallery, but it was a
nagging question that I still cannot answer. I felt guilty in a sense that I had
disregarded the idea of Dabydeen’s perspective in praising the dominantly white
experience.
Once I began questioning myself I also
began questioning the gallery and how they were “advertising” the Tuner
experience and how that effected the way that the public saw him as a person,
rather than an artist. I began to go through the collection again and while the
gallery did focus on his techniques and paintings, there were other plaques that
presented personal facts about his life and how praised he was within his time
and how Turner has become a British icon, even announcing that in 2020 the £20 note
will be replaced with a new one with Turner as its main subject. In the gift shop
there were books and other souvenirs that were of Turner and it seemed the gallery
advertised the iconic image that Turner left as a British painter. I do understand
that Dabydeen used the specific painting, “Slave Ship” by Turner in order to
create portray Turner in his poem, but the paintings within the Tate gallery
also provided this sense of who Turner is and was within the British vision. While
observing this I wondered if this advertisement strategy, in a sense
disregarded and or contradicted that perspective that Dabydeen tried to portray
within Turner.
No comments:
Post a Comment