Jessica Crabtree

“Light is therefore color” – Turner

April 23, 1775: English painter J.M.W.Turner is born

Joseph Turner, known as the “Painter of Light,” was the pioneer of Romantic landscape painting. His favorite subjects were the sea and sky, storms and powerful dramatic natural elements that minimized the human aspect. Turner’s nature is wild and insurmountable, with a stern sense of justice (as shown in his famous painting of the wrecked slave ship). But his sunlight is always benevolent, shimmering and pulsing with almost tangible warmth – almost as if it were a personality that pervades all his paintings.

Slavers throwing overboard the Dead and Dying — Typhoon coming on (1840)

Joseph Mallord William Turner was born in 1775 in London to a working class family. (The traditional date of his birth is April 23, although this is under debate.) His first pieces of art were sketches, and he was fortunate to receive encouragement in his talent. As a boy, he sold drawings in his father’s barber shop window. He was admitted to the Royal Academy where he first studied architectural drafting, but gradually moved to watercolors and oils that quickly became his medium of choice.

Fishermen at Sea (1796)

His first oil painting, Fishermen at Sea (1796), gives a bold early glimpse of his signature style. Turner’s abilities quickly won him commissions and patronage that enabled his first European tour 1802, where he studied at the Louvre and filled sketchbooks that became templates for later paintings.

“There’s a sketch at every turn.”

His “offbeat” style of luminous, slightly abstract landscape was not always well-received, especially when the vogue was glorified history paintings and portraits of the affluent. Critic John Ruskin was one of his early supporters, helping to popularize his work, including Turner’s paintings of trains.

Rain, Steam, and Speed – The Great Western Railway (1844)

Interestingly, Turner portrayed railroads almost as a force of nature, rather than a human artifice – an uncanny point of view at a time when industrialization was becoming such a socially charged issue. Turner consistently downplayed the human element in his environments, making him a true Romantic in his day, and eventually one of the most beloved of the great masters.

“I don’t paint so that people will understand me, I paint to show what a particular scene looks like.”

Turner’s influence is also strong in the works of Monet and other French painters. But for an artist who is often remembered as “the guy who inspired Impressionism,” it’s unjust to see his art as foggy and imprecise. As his architectural drawings and prints demonstrate, he was clearly obsessed by detail and his landscapes are not just atmospheric mood pieces. It is tempting to see a deeper connection to an earlier artist – William Blake – whose works have a similar transcendent, mystical quality. In both cases, the primeval became the avant-garde, ushering in a new artistic era.

Turner was a good businessman and a disciplined worker, but was known for a reclusive personality that became more withdrawn and eccentric in his later years. When he died in 1851 he had bequeathed his works to the British nation, and left a small fortune intended for a charity to support artists. After a court battle this went to his cousins who were the executors of his estate. Today, the Turner Prize is awarded in his name.

“Painting is a strange business.”

Images: Wikimedia Commons

National Gallery UK: Joseph Turner

Metropolitan Museum – Thematic Essay on Turner’s Work

TIME Magazine: “The Sunshine Boy” by Richard Lacayo

Here’s an interesting site with a good compilation of stories & biography on influential American Indian women (and I’m not talking about Pocahontas and Sacajawea). Lots of great resources and multimedia, courtesy of the University of Nebraska.

Past Present Future: Native Daughters

“The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love colour the most.” (John Ruskin)

A gorgeous shot of a Little Blue Heron in the John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge.
Photo credit: Bill Buchanan of the US Fish & Wildlife Service (Flickr).

This National Geographic news story caught my eye, since it resonates with a subject dear to my heart: modern technology vs. indigenous tradition.

It’s a little known fact that the desert oasis of Phoenix was built on an irrigation center constructed by the “millennial kingdom” of the Hohokam culture. Residents of today’s Phoenix, or San Diego, or Las Vegas can sit it climate-controlled homes and offices supplied with potable water diverted from entire river systems. But does the fact that our modern tech culture thrives on top of the remains of this and other hubs of ancient trade and infrastructure mean that our civilization is more advanced – or less vulnerable – than theirs? It’s a perennial question that is more pressing than ever now that we’re beginning to realize the serious sustainability issues faced by our own modern culture.

Will Modern Phoenix Outlast the Prehistoric Hohokam? by Sandra Postel

See also: Top Archaeological Discoveries of 2009: Ancient Irrigators of Tuscon

I just love this picture. And it’s in the public domain, if anyone else does too.

What do we mean when we say “American”? For some it conjures up patriotic feeling, for others a collage of apple pie, baseball, and pop music. Some may recall the grade school story of the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci whose name was inadvertently tacked onto the “newly discovered” continent.

For tribal or indigenous peoples (as opposed to nationalities with a colonial past) their name is the essence of their being. It’s not just a label – it has a literal meaning that encompasses their collective history and culture. It has a unifying force beyond that of political motives because of its organic roots in a living current of community.

Because of misinterpretations and mistranslations, indigenous peoples in the Americas (and elsewhere) are often referred to in terms completely different from their real identity. For instance, the term “Sioux” is an old Ojibwe word meaning “snakes” used to refer to their traditional enemies. This expression was picked up by early explorers and traders and is still used interchangeably with “Lakota,” the national name of the Teton people. Lakota in their own language means “allies.”

Similarly, “Apache” was used by the Spanish to refer to the Dine (popularly known as the Apache and Navajo) based on the Zuni Pueblo word for “enemy.” The Navajo and Apache peoples have a shared history that is reflected in their common name, in much the same way as the names of the Nishnabe’k (Potowatomi) and Anishinaabe (Chippewa/Ojibwa/Cree) betray their common language and heritage. The Spanish word for village, or “Pueblo,” has come to apply to the many sovereign and distinct communities of the Southwest which include the Zuni (Ashiwi, “the people”) and the Acoma (Haaku, “the place that always was”).

In another interesting example, the Crow people have always known themselves as the “Eagle People” (or, in their language, Absaroke, “people of the great bird”). Europeans misconstrued this when they saw the huge crows feeding on carrion near the hunting camps. Since then, the real meaning of their national name has been obscured to most outsiders.

Here is a list of many well-known tribal and place names. Test your knowledge of which names are original, and which are not – and learn the meanings behind them.

AAA Native Arts: Original meanings of fifty tribal names

Born on this day in 1822, Rosa Bonheur was probably the most successful and widely recognized woman painter of the 1800s.

Belonging to an artistic family with unusual social and political views gave Rosa a huge advantage in pursuing her talents. Her father, an accomplished artist himself, quickly recognized the independent streak in the tempestuous young student that brought her formal education to an impasse. He used art as an outlet for her creative energy and curiosity, and trained her at home, since women were not admitted to formal art training.

Raymond Bonheur supervised the art training of all four of his children as each developed their own interests and careers. Eventually their home studio developed into a family business, with several members cooperating at once on a commission.

Rosa honed her artistic skills by copying the great paintings of the Louvre, and studying animal anatomy at farmyards, slaughterhouses and veterinary schools – in short hair and men’s clothes, to boot. This was unthinkable for a girl of that time. But the knowledge acquired by first-hand observation resulted in the fine detail and realistic accuracy of her animal portraits, and also led to her noted accomplishments in the field of sculpture.

In 1841, at the age of 19, Rosa had the first of many exhibitions at the Paris Salon, winning numerous awards that led to her first state commission, the well-known Plowing in the Nivernais.

The Horse Fair, which she exhibited at the Salon in 1853, is considered her career masterpiece. Measuring 8 feet by 16 feet, the huge work is more a mural than a painting.

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