Joseph Mallord William Turner

A recent artist I have re-discovered in class is Joseph Mallord William Turner. He has captured my attention for his landscape paintings and many layers of oil paint. 

A lot of his paintings revolve around the concept of beauty and danger. The true sublime definition fits this central theme. When Turner was making paintings, he was a very controversial painter. What is interesting, though, is he still painted grand landscaped but portrayed them in a way to include a controversial aspect combined with the harshness of the sea. Turner liked to portray the grandness of God through the brutality of nature and contrast it with glimmers of humanity to better depict hope.

Turner’s style heavily plays into romanticism. His landscapes are not exceptionally realistic but rather the general spirituality in nature and the world as a whole. The fact that spirituality can be represented in a landscape painting is phenomenal but also supports how great Turner was at personifying nature into an individual being. Even though very little humanity is visually represented, his work is classically man vs nature situations. 

When it comes to Turner’s style, his painting involves very washed layers with oil rather than watercolor. The vibrancy of oils and the wash of the style of watercolor makes a very dynamic landscape while also abstracting it as a whole. Blurred boundaries provide and support the uneasiness and beauty nature provides while really supporting how nature is so much larger and more powerful than humans. Later into his career, he uses even more transparent layers to the point where his figures are hardly recognizable but the actual light is more of a central focus. That's another aspect of Turner that I really admire. His personification of light not only supports nature as a being and force but plays into the spirituality that his style basically is. 

Personally, since this class started, I have been struggling with layers of paint and visualizing the color I want as an end product vs the colors I have to put together to achieve that. Seeing Turner’s work has helped me conceptualize that the more transparent the layers are, the more dynamic the colors will be as a well as controllable. In my final project, I really want to work on that concept and marry it with the personification of nature.

In my exploration research for my final project, I came to the conclusion that I wanted my central theme to revolve around choices. I know I want to paint landscapes but possible subtract them in a minimal way. By looking at Turner’s work, I have come to realize that the majority of his work is abstracted nature. As a viewer, I still recognize what he has painted, but the actual strokes and colors, especially up close, are so far from realism. With this coming project I plan to work on a greater scale, better forcing me out of my comfort zone of detailed work and, rather, push me towards having bigger choices and trusting that my message will still come across to the viewer.