Painting of the Month – J. M. W. Turner’s “The Falls of the Reichenbach”

J. M. W. Turner “The Falls of the Riechenbach”

Over the holiday we took our children to see the new Sherlock Holmes movie “A Game of Shadows” . The thrilling denouement of this film takes place at the brink of the Riechenbach Falls in Switzerland, a stage-set just as exciting in the film as it was in this 1804 watercolour by JMW Turner. I was happily reminded that this painting was a huge influence on my training as a watercolour painter. I remember seeing the painting in the flesh at ‘The Great Age of British Watercolours’ exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1993. That’s the same Royal Academy which has just appointed Tracy Emin to the post of Professor of Drawing.

At that time I wrote an essay for students at the Prince of Wales’s Institute of Architecture where I was teaching, a piece which explored the development of watercolour – “that great underrated medium”. In that essay I wrote that ‘The Great Falls of the Reichenbach’  “shows more than any other work what Turner was capable of doing at only the age of twenty-nine. This is not just drawing or sketching, this is the highest form of watercolour painting, up there with the best of oil paintings. This waterfall was a popular tourist attraction in the early 19th century, providing a glimpse of towering rocks and thundering water which embodied the whole concept of the sublime, making the viewer feel vulnerable and insignificant” (as movies endeavour to do today). “Turner grasped this subject because it represented everything which excited him: raw, magnificent and overpowering.”

“Turner’s technique had developed to handle this intensity of work, his skills already superior to his contemporaries with their more static and considered views of topography and the picturesque.

December Painting of the Month

‘A Mountain Farm, Slovenia’

Watercolour on paper 11 x 15 inches, 1998
In the collection of HRH The Prince of Wales

A few weeks ago the Dean of Guildford and I gave a joint talk – a colloquium – which explored the subject of ‘Spirit of Place’ in buildings of faith. One of the images which found its way into the slideshow was this little watercolour of a group of humble farm buildings in Slovenia. It seemed rather out of context in a presentation mainly about monumental cathedrals, mosques and temples – the stoney hallelujahs which punctuate the history of civilisation. With the approach of Christmas, though, this image seemed to allude gently to the real origin of the jangling season of goodwill and frantic shopping.

The image of a simple cattle-shed at dusk, a warm light emanating through its open door and the gaps between the weatherboarding suggests the way in which we should consider the Christian nativity; with simple humility for a commonplace occurrence which had been elevated to become the most important event in the Christian faith. This humble birth would of course also be responsible for the creation of many of the great edifices of faith which we had been discussing that evening and which constitutes a large part of my subject matter in painting architecture through the decades.

The painting reminded the Dean of the Adoration of the Shepherds by Rembrandt, an intimate painting in which the holy family is shown in a womblike pool of light within a barn surrounded by massive enveloping darkness and old beams. I understood what he meant, and these farm buildings took on a more elevated feel.

The Birth of a Watercolour

Millenuim Gate, Atlanta

Painted in Great Studio, 2011.

Film produced by Art Below Ltd

www.artbelow.org.uk

Westminster Abbey – Overnight

‘Westminster Abbey – The Quire’, 2011
Watercolour on paper, 22 x 30 inches

They say that no-one has spent a whole night in Westminster Abbey other than the monks of old, but last month I was given the opportunity to do just that having been invited to an all-night event to mark the 400th birthday of the King James Bible. The 66 books of the Bible interpreted by contemporary writers, poets and musicians to be performed over 12 hours in the Abbey, Friday night into Saturday morning. This was to give me the opportunity to sketch through the night, experiencing the Abbey in its hours of rest.

A year ago I had embarked on a long-term project to paint at Westminster Abbey, providing a challenging seriousness, both as the repository for so much of our national history, and as a complicated subject to paint. It also appealed to me because it has been painted by few artists in the past. Refreshing when many of my recent subjects – like Rome and Venice – have been painted by everyone. I would be able to explore the spirit of the Abbey without seeing it through the eyes of others.

It is certainly peculiar, a Royal Peculiar – part church, part royal palace. It’s the final resting place of kings, the place of coronations and state funerals. It is the ancient seat of the church and of parliament. In short it is a massive history lesson. I had a lot to learn. Where to begin?

I had visited on several occasions over the last year, to sketch and paint while the Abbey is quiet between services on Sundays and in great contrast during the celebrations of the Royal Wedding last April. I had completed my first work, a large view of the interior of Henry VII’s Lady Chapel, quite to my satisfaction and had taken great pleasure in recording the Royal Wedding service in sketches and as a large finished painting. I also completed a few smaller paintings of details around the Abbey.

In truth I was uncertain about the overnight session. I felt that Westminster Abbey still wasn’t quite my place. Not yet. We weren’t on first-name terms. I had only prodded the creature with a long stick, so to speak.

We arrived wrapped in warm coats with pockets full of biscuits anticipating a cold hungry night.  In the nave a stage had been placed on the north side, with chairs arranged for the audience, three sides of a square. The lighting was subdued, spotlights on the performers and darkness hanging overhead. The vaults disappeared, night invading the volume of the tall space.  It was too quiet to start sketching, scratchy noises on hard paper. I rather wanted someone to play the organ loudly. I sat and gazed up, unsure how to begin an all night conversation with the great Abbey.

“The Basilica of Maxentius in Rome” – October Painting of the Month

Watercolour on paper 24 x 40 inches – 60cm x 100cm
On show at Watts’s Great Studio 12th – 23rd October

The purpose of my time spent working in Watts’s Great Studio during 2011 has largely been to explore the idea of magnitude in painting. G. F. Watts who painted some of his greatest works in this studio before his death in 1904, had built the space specifically to work on paintings whose magnitude had outgrown his London studio. Watts wasn’t afraid to tackle paintings whose size and intent were massive.  The knowledge that he had carried out such work in this space gave me the idea that working in his shadow, so to speak, would enable me to think on a much bolder scale than before. The confines of my domestic scale working environment at home hadn’t prevented me from painting some very big watercolours in the past, but working in Watts’s studio would give me the opportunity to explore a grander intent in a larger space. Magnitude is the word of the year.

I had various subjects in mind, so as a family we went back to Rome in the early summer for a visit. There are several Roman buildings I had painted before and now wanted to explore again – the Pantheon, the Arch of Constantine and the Basilica of Maxentius. All are monuments to magnitude and I looked at them afresh. Too often we are distracted by superficial questions when appraising a work of art or architecture. How big is it? How long does it take? How much does it cost? Great works of art and architecture are quantified by lifeless facts while their artistic and cultural value are missed. Big and expensive are good, apparently. But magnitude is something else: magnitude is the impact of the idea rather than the scale of its execution. A large painting or building is not good simply because it is big, but maybe its intent or inspiration needs to be big in order to be good?

I tend to measure impact by the experience of the building or place or event.  It’s the experience which first grabs my attention and causes me to sketch.  If the sketch is good it doesn’t represent so much the place as the experience – the light, the movement, the beauty, the sensory thrill of just being there.  That’s the inspiration. A work of art is capturing the experience not just the representation of the place. The character not just the face.

Since Rome I’ve been painting large scale explorations of the experience of the interior of the Pantheon, in the contained volume of light and air, and I’ve worked on these in Great Studio with increasing magnitude. I’ve worked on exteriors of the Arch of Constantine, with its detailed carved panels telling the story-board of the emperor’s conquests, which to me involve delightfully complex passages of light and shadow – cartoons in stone and light – also explored on a growing scale.

Here at the Basilica of Maxentius I’ve explored the dichotomy of interior and exterior in a subject which is actually both. Once a vast interior, these towering ruined vaulted apses are open to the air, like massive theatres of light. These apses are vast and echoing, hard to quantify unless you can see the diminutive archaeologist’s ladder propped up against one wall.  In contemplation of ruins, we contemplates the future, the fragility of the present, and the futility of the past. In painting the Basilica of Maxentius I am contemplating magnitude as an element to inspire and uplift the human spirit. Magnitude, like beauty, can’t be measured but it can be missed. I think I understand what drove G. F. Watts in his time. For our time, I think I’ve realised what – together with beauty – has been missing for the last century. Magnitude.

The Basilica of Maxentius and other new works, together with some important commissions, both completed and in progress, are now on view at Great Studio from 12th – 23rd October. Please do come!

Great Studio, Limnerslease, Down Lane, Compton, Surrey, GU3 1DJ.

RSVP: kate@alexandercreswell.com

September Painting of the Month: “Pendennis Cup, Falmouth – Mariquita & Mariette”

A maquette, watercolour on paper 15 x 20 inches

August is holiday time. Time to get away from it all. Here in England much of the population rushes lemming-like to the coast, enduring serpentine traffic-jams in overloaded cars, greasy egg sandwiches and warm fizzy drinks on the way. The exodus is powered by reverence to a quasi-folkloric tradition and fuelled by an innocent optimism which is capable of turning grey skies blue. On arrival – finally –  the cars disgorge their occupants who, with puppy-like enthusiasm overcoming tiredness, are immediately ready to plunge headlong into a pool of activities never undertaken at home in everyday life. Yipee it’s the holiday!

For our family Cornwall is the grail, the south coast, Helford River near Falmouth. Weeks of waterborne thrills replace the trudge and onus of the rest of the year. On anything which floats we escape from land-based reality and navigate the waters of adventure, doing, well, nothing really; picnics on a beach, exploring rock-pools, fishing and sailing, rowing to the pub, and back again. Boats and I go back a long way. My first boat (a 36-foot motor-sailer) had the foreign-sounding name Gafita. I took this name to be an omen of adventure and sailed her to France and to the Med and back. Much later I discovered Gafita was merely a prosaic acronym for Get Away From It All. I’d done that. For years I ‘d got away from responsibilities like work and earning a living. It didn’t work. I sold her in 1988. Ever since then I’d limited my sailing activities to vacation rather than vocation.

Twenty years on, that all changed. I started painting classic yachts racing alongside my usual subject of architecture, discovering the vigorous similarities between the two and enjoying the challenging differences between them, the static and the active. It had been in Cornwall, on holiday – getting away from it all – that this discovery had presented itself; the first regatta for the Pendennis Cup was in full sail in Falmouth Bay and I’d followed these beautiful yachts – huge over 100 foot in length –  bouncing along in a RIB while trying to sketch. The resulting watercolours were shown in London and New York to great acclaim. Last year the second Pendennis Cup took place and I played a more active role presenting a number of works as prizes to the class winners in the regatta, while also showing paintings at the National Maritime Museum in Falmouth and at the Royal Yacht Squadron in Cowes.

As a result of the Pendennis Cup I was asked to put together a set of paintings of the big classics racing in British waters, a group of large watercolours which would form a narrative of iconic images in the great tradition of British maritime painting. These were commissioned as a group by a family. Like members of the family the paintings would be closely related to one another even if they don’t all live in the same place.

This Painting of the Month is one of the small maquettes made to establish the form of the set. It shows the beautiful Mariquita (who celebrates her centenary this year) being pursued by the schooner Mariette, four years younger but equally sprightly.  They are shown charging downwind in a north-westerly with Pendennis Castle in the background, a wonderful English summer scene, Cornwall at her best. I am looking forward to working this collection of paintings. It’s unusual to create a family of works which will remain together, related, of the same blood.

I love to work with my subject and being in Cornwall is where it’s at; with the smell of the sea in the nostrils, blustery showers rattling the windows, maybe a little sail on the Helford in the evening to feel the tug of the wind.  A fresh crab from my pot for dinner perhaps. Just as fish tastes better when eaten in sight of the sea, so these paintings must be shown in sight of Falmouth Bay. They’ll be an impressive collection. Maybe we’ll show them at the 2012 Pendennis Cup where I will be chasing these beauties again and with them the J Class who will be in Falmouth. We’ll certainly show them on the website. Meanwhile the set of maquettes will be shown in my October exhibition alongside work from my recent Italian adventures to Rome & Venice.

Not to be missed – 8th September

Watts-Gallery 2011, Hanging 'Peace & Goodwill'. copyright Alexander Creswell

On Thursday 8th September I will be in conversation with Mark Bills, Curator of Watts Gallery. The talk will be in the newly restored Watts Gallery surrounded by Watts masterpieces. Mark and I will be considering and discussing G.F. Watts as an artist of today and exploring my work in context. It will be a great opportunity to look at the Watts collection in some detail and it will be fascinating to Mark’s knowledge to hand.

Thursday 8th September. 7pm.

Watts Gallery, Down Lane, Compton, Surrey, GU3 1DQ .  BOOK TICKETS