Blurriness
Tracey Emin, She Lay down Deep Beneath The Sea, 2012, Neon
Hello. I'm sorry I haven't written in a while. I lost focus; now I'm hoping to regain it by writing about blurriness.
Recently I wrote an essay about Tracey Emin (to be published next month) and it led me to thinking about JMW Turner. These two artists may seem to have nothing in common but their work was shown together at Turner Contemporary Museum in Margate UK in 2017. Emin chose to install her 1998 piece "My Bed" surrounded by late-period paintings by Turner. I'm no Turner expert but since first encountering his paintings years ago I was captivated by his use of light. In fact he was known as the painter of light in his day, early to mid-1800s in Britain. For much of his career Turner painted more realistically, but in his later years his style became more impressionistic. Which is to say, blurry.
JMW Turner, Seascape with Storm Coming On, c. 1840, oil on canvas, Tate Gallery
Why is blurriness beautiful?
I'm reading the novel, "The Sun Walks Down" by Fiona McFarlane. Set in 1883 in Australia, the novel tells the story of a family whose young son goes missing and the community search to find him. It's about a lot of things - race and class and gender and history - but it's also about art. The book is painterly, I'd say, where the horizon and land are characters too.
At one point a young man takes a walk in a field with Minna, a married woman he should not be pining for but is. As they walk, she appears to him to be lovelier than ever. "There's something blurred about her, as if a painter has slipped with his brush an found a new effect…The further they walk from the house, the fewer edges Minna seems to have."
Turner's abstracted landscapes pissed some people off in his day. Funny to think about now, given what upsets the art world these days - unmade beds of women, perhaps. His critics were mad at him for painting loosely, fluidly. I wonder if they were afraid of what happens when edges disappear, when the essence of something is revealed. Can essence be perceived when something is rendered with exactitude?