2009-12-11
"Organs of Sentiment"
I've decided to post one of the nonfiction essays that I wrote while I was on my study abroad program in London this past January. I miss the feel of being there; this piece reminds me of my wonderment.
I�m tilting forward, my heels hovering above the floor, my calves burning because I�ve been standing so for a long while. My nose is a few spare inches away from the brush strokes, and in the back of my mind I�m silently waiting for a man in an important-looking suit jacket to come chide me for standing too near. The typical visitor to London�s Tate Britain Museum of Art will stroll right on by the canvas, but here I stand, close enough to give it a kiss. I know that others have absent-mindedly dismissed this painting, because I�ve studied it from several varied distances and angles. From across the room, I�ve witnessed several people briefly glance at it on their way to the immense landscape portrait to its right.
In John Constable�s most popular portraits, ones that define Romantic landscape art, he renders sublime and pastoral images of the countryside. The painting I�m staring at is the humble neighbor of one of these most esteemed works: �The Hay Wain.� In this famous painting, a horse-drawn cart trudges through a shallow river bed and the luminous reflections of the water�s placid surface. There are two men in the wagon and a dog overlooking the scene from shore. A quaint cottage and wind-blown reeds and trees line the river�s curves. The stream curves back into the depths of the canvas, creating a sense of distance and proportion, and the attention to detail is matched by the rich pigments in the rusty red cottage rooftop and the earthy green leaves.
But it�s not this impressive pastoral painting that has me on the tips of my toes. Instead, it�s the meek canvas on the left, standing humbly for my admiration but hanging two feet too high. I take a step back from it and let my eyes meander across the picture. In it I spot a rat donning a turban, a clenched fist, a whispy jellyfish, and a head of broccoli. What I see ostensibly, though, is clouds.
Just clouds, just sky, just blue and white fluff, an image daily dismissed. This simple and direct vision is what has everyone else passing by the picture. John Constable�s cloud study, which counts the canvas I�m gaping at as one of its fifty-one surviving paintings, are far less celebrated than his magnificent nature paintings. Unlike all Constable�s other work, the cloud studies distinctively lack any sign of sentience or humanity, or sense of size and scale. Some of his contemporaries didn�t think that clouds could be subject matter in and of themselves. Clouds had always traditionally been merely an outdoor backdrop, and here Constable has them center stage.
I�m looking at �Cloud Study 1822.� A large, grey tuft of thick gas is rising from the center, its edges blurred and blunted on all sides. The layers of fluff merge into one another, forming clouds separated by their subtle shade gradations, yet unified by their familial, echoed formations. The endings of one shape are as unclear as the beginnings of another, and faintly blue peaks out from beneath the billows. The brushwork is a flurry of precise energy, and faint horizontal streaks are ripe with kinetic movement.
The clouds seem shifty, as if they�ve just now taken into their current position, or maybe they�re just about to move to another. The shapes are pressed against each other, an urgency pushing the infinite layers against one another. Curves seem to lean to the upper-right hand corner, but just like when I�m outside, I can�t see the wind. But I can feel its effect upon the painting, I can see the consequences of it in every gaseous swell.
This sky is, upon my scrutiny, not the uniform blue and white which I surmise it as when I dreamily gaze upward on sweet summer days. Constable has adeptly included periwinkle, peach, pearl, and countless shades of silver, icy grey and blue. Sunlight pulses and beams through the ethereal layers, the illumination warming and lightening the heaviness of the hues. The sun is never seen, but selective snatches of the air are drenched in it. The sky is bathing in the illumination. I�m struck by the beauty and complexity I see, but I�m never lost from the familiarity of the image. Even when I�m nose-deep in it or think I see a purple dolphin in the canvas� corner, the painting always still looks distinctively like the plain old sky.
Constable would be satisfied that I thought so. Although a Romantic painter, he wasn�t out to embellish these clouds as some divine, superhuman image. Constable�s cloud study, which he composed over a couple years starting in 1820, is comprised of paintings which portray nothing other than the natural, commonplace sky. To make his work as truthful as possible, Constable sought insight from an unlikely source for a Romantic painter: empirical science. �There is room enough for a natural painter,� Constable wrote to a friend. �The great vice of the present day is bravura, an attempt to do something beyond the truth.� With a dog-eared and heavily annotated edition of Forster�s Researches About Atmospheric Phaenomena by his side, Constable set out to capture scientifically accurate renderings of atmospheric precipitation. Worn copies of innovative works by contemporary meteorologists Howard and Covens were never far from his grasp.
Without typical reference points and space-gauging objects, the sky represented a considerable challenge, one that would be difficult to overcome without his dedication to atmospheric conditions and precise documentation of the weather. I am told by the caption next to this painting that on the reverse, the date is inscribed, along with the following details: �looking S.E. noon. Wind very brisk. & effect bright & fresh. Clouds. Moving very fast. With occasional very bright openings to blue.� I�ve read that most of Constable�s cloud studies include notes like these, as if he�s keeping tabs on different conditions and varieties. By the end of his fifty studies, he must have had quite the collection of clouds.
And the thought of how he�s collected them has me impressed when I imagine his methods. Constable would arrange his easel near the summit of Hampstead Heath, his atmospheric laboratory. Hampstead gave him elevated views of the horizon and brought him nearer to his subject matter. His developed background knowledge of meteorology coupled with the heights of Hampstead, Constable submerged himself in nothing but the sky above.
In the crisp and fresh summer noons of August 1821, Constable might have climbed to the hilltop many times a day. His wrist cocked with intense concentration to seize the scene above him, Constable must have had only about ten minutes before the frame of clouds he selected for the study would pass out of view. He would capture a snapshot image, an instantaneous moment always on the verge of erasure. To speedily snatch the transitory frame he wanted, Constable couldn�t whip out a Polaroid, so he used paintbrushes. He caught the clouds, and not with the click of a camera, but by an oil painting. A sluggish, detailed, laborious, cumbersome, obstinate oil painting. Loose blades of grass and debris probably stuck to the paste, the sky cried smatterings of rain that slid down the canvas, and the wind flickered Constable�s daily, detailed weather journal off of today�s page.
Artists speculate that a typical oil-painted cloud study took Constable around an hour to complete. The complicated amalgamation of puffs and swirls remained pressed in his mind for a whole fifty minutes after its collapse. �Cloud Study 1822� is composed on a canvas about the size of my laptop screen. Any bigger a scale and it would have been nearly impossible for Constable to capture the attention to detail that he wanted to convey, since the fine points would blur in his memory almost as swiftly as the shapes would fade from the heavens.
After all, nothing is so impermanent as the clouds in the sky. Of all the changes that occur in the natural world, the clouds most rapidly and incessantly flutter to a new and different face. A glimpse of the sky provides a scene just as action-packed as ocean waves churning as they meet the shore, or a tree branch�s worth of tumbling leaves. Constable was heedful and patient; the skies were capricious. His technique was steadfast and unflinching, but the clouds were airy and tenuous. The sky�s insouciance is unforgiving, and its fragility infuriatingly yet awe-inspiringly ephemeral. �I have done a good deal of skying� I am determined to conquer all difficulties and that most arduous one among the rest.�
Constable could not exclude or ignore clouds. He was determined to capture the transient movement and fleeting collection comprised in the heavens, because even a momentary grasp of the reverent and ever-changing nature of vitality can fully illustrate and empower a portrait. �It will be difficult to name a class of Landscape- in which the sky is not the �key note�- the �standard of scale�- and the chief �Organ of sentiment.��
Constable had sought out to study, and then employ, the forecasts in his paintings in order to make his skies dynamic and encapsulate the diverse and forceful moods that weather can emanate. While silently looming or floating up high, the clouds have an unmistakable yet mysterious interaction with the moods of the earth which they hover above. The clouds churn, and the emotion of the world below is projected onto them, and they onto it, in tranquil cycles of influence. They feel weighty and ominous, or light and fresh. Their constantly destabilizing and fleeting forms mirror the flickering changes we sense in our own thoughts and feelings. Constable believed that the ��Landscape painter who does not make his skies a very material part of his composition � neglects to avail himself of one of his greatest aids.�
Constable has taken both the banality and peculiarity of clouds and rendered them in a captivating depiction. In his work, the sky is enigmatic and complex, but not by sacrificing how it appears in the everyday, natural world. His vision, while dramatic and subtle, is still faithful to reality. Constable�s clouds are truthful; they are the forgettable yet poetic objects that drift in the ether overhead.
I look at the clouds, with deep care and reverence, contemplating Constable�s words. I forget all my old interpretations of this painting and try again for a fresh, original first reaction. And I plainly note that it really is just sky, just blue and white with some other colors, just fluff. But in his faithfulness to their nature, he�s reminded me how amazing the mere simplicity of clouds can be. I usually only surrender myself to the skies with a Constable-like appreciation when I�m feeling wistful and nostalgic, when I want the orange and red decrescendos of a sunset to melt me with their beauty. I don�t delve into the sky at two o�clock on the way to the post office. I don�t write inspired lines and whim about it; I leave that to the poets. But Constable is vividly reminding me of the power and glory that even the most commonplace cumulus can possess. Yes, it really is just fluff. Just amazing, evanescent, textured, multi-colored, divinely illuminated fluff.
While Constable has not defamiliarized the heavens in this empirical and accurate painting, he has officially removed the sky from its usual context. It�s not above me, inaccessible and unnoticeable. I�m face-to-face with it. I�m directly confronted by the sky, and with newly achieved wonder. Constable took a piece of the earth�s ceiling, trimmed the edges into a quaint rectangle, framed it, and hung it on a wall. And he renamed it: they are not �clouds,� but �organs of sentiment.� I myself may be no Romantic artist or amateur meteorologist, but my eyes enthusiastically approve of his brilliant vision. �My skies,� Constable once wrote in earnest, �have not been neglected.� Indeed, I think, taking in a final look. They have been celebrated.
leesah-likes at 12:06 a.m.