‘It felt like we had stepped into a Turner painting’
One short sharp burst of rain and the English woods feel like we stepped into a Turner painting. The shower has served like a garden hose set to mist. Everything is cleansed but not scoured. The leaves glisten, but don’t quite shine. The air shimmers but doesn’t actually gleam.
Thin waterfalls of light drop into a myriad mini infinity pools.
Take a look at that last frame – man with dog.
It feels like a poor man’s version of a Turner landscape, somewhat akin to the rider looking down on Newnham from his vantage point on Dean Hill. In much of Turner’s work, light is not so much a presence as a haunting, and that too only parts thereof.
The faux Turner scenes from the English woods circa 2024 are easy-come-easy-go items. Composed and despatched for consumption within seconds of focussing the camera phone, they require no special intention, no inner eye.
For Turner it often took years to study the way the light fell and then to portray it so that the darkness still flowed behind it, near it, through it, or off to one side.
American painter Dorothy Koppleman, who believed in the philosophy of Aesthetic Realism, once noted that “Turner had a passion for light and the light he loved was turbulent, churning, always in motion. He studied light and painted it with intensity in relation to floods, storms, fog, steam, snow…” She added that his portrayal of “the luminous and the hidden” showed that in reality, opposites are one.
His was the highest form of artistic truth – the desire and ability to show the whole of something.
Newnham-on-Severn from Dean Hill by William Turner. Copyright Gloucester Museums Service Art Collection / Supplied by The Public Catalogue Foundation
