Cambridge Ramblings

I had a trip to Cambridge yesterday, primarily to visit the newly opened Italian Drawings: Highlights from the Collection exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum. This turned out to be a great exhibition, with more than enough interesting drawings, and more than enough time and space to appreciate them properly.

There seems to be a resurgence of interest in drawings. I think that perhaps drawings can communicate with us more directly than old master oil paintings. Most of these works were done as studies or preparations for paintings, and were never thought of as finished or intended for display. These drawings therefore often capture the first thoughts, or primi pensieri, of the artist. From the point of view of today's viewer this allows us to recreate in our minds the artist's thoughts and the act of creation - and we can literally see the marks as they were made, as well as mistakes, corrections and reworkings. Often the works are built up with different materials - metalpoint, chalks, inks, gouache etc - and some take on a complex, multilayer character that transcends the idea of a 'simple' drawing. Drawings therefore convey an immediacy that is more atuned to our interests and attention span. This also means that many of the the works could easily be regared as 'modern' - and could have been drawn yesterday.

One example that was a highlight of the exhibition for me is Titian's drawing below, charmingly entitled 'Couple in an embrace'. The entwined bodies emerge from Titian's almost frantic search to find them through a morass of convex marks. This action in the process of drawing reflects the action of the subject.

When transferred to oil paint and finished paintings, these expressive drawing effects can be lost. However Titian wielded his brush with almost the same bravura. The Fitzwilliam Museum also holds a Titian masterpiece, The Rape of Lucretia, reproduced below.

The looseness of the brushwork cannot be appreciated in the reproduction, however when viewing close up the economy of work that has gone into producing the folds in the material is obvious. This is not simply laziness (although it suits the busy artist well!). Artists like Titian, Hals, Velasquez and Rembrandt deliberately sought 'rough' effects using long brushes and 'daubs' of paint. It was remarked by contemporaries that, close up, these pictures seemed incomprehensible and unfinished, however standing at a distance the pictures 'miraculously' snapped into realistic life. Today we can explain this 'miracle' through advances in understanding of the human visual system, which 'fills in' images in our brain based on a few well-placed visual clues. The fewer the clues, the easier it is for them to work together, and hence produce the 'major chord' in our minds. Striving to put in more detail we can start to diminish the effect. Rembrandt is reported to have warned 'Don't poke yor nose into my pictures, the smell of paint will poison you'. I remember the surprise I had when looking closely at Vermeer's paintings in Amsterdam that these too were composed of almost pointillistic colour daubs, and not at all the highly detailed smooth finish that I had expected.

Trying to recreate these effects in my work is a challenge. E.H. Gombrich in the classic "Art & Illusion" suggests that "Such sublime simplification is only possible on the basis of earlier complexities", and points to the fact that both Rembrandt's and Titian's 'loose' style gradually emerged towards the end of their careers. Certainly it helps to work partly or fully from life rather than photographs.

A gallery has re-opened since my last visit to the Fitzwilliam. Gallery 1 presents paintings, sculpture, manuscripts and decorative arts produced in Europe between 1890 and 1940. There is some unusual work here from well known artists. A small painting which attracted my attention was called "The studio under the eaves", reproduced below:

In the gallery the interior seemed darker than the reproduction, and the window more luminous, so that on first approach it almost appeared to be an abstract image. To my surprise the artist here is Matisse. I found later that it is one of relatively few works that the artist completed during what has been referred to as his ‘dark period.’ The studio depicted here was on the top floor of 24 Rue Fagard in Bohain, the small, northern town in which Matisse had grown up and where in 1903 he had returned, the exhausted and depressed head of a young family.

On the table is a vase of Daliahs, which clearly Matisse has been painting as a still life. To me it feels as though he has been bored or depressed by this (his work was not well received at the time and he was considering giving up painting), so he has decided to have a break and paint something else. Commentators point to the sombre palette and melancholy of the scene as representative of his mood, but with the hope of (literally) a brighter future framed in the attic window. As an artist it reminds me to use my everyday surroundings to try different things and perhaps find a new way of seeing and expressing things. I'm tempted to paint a copy of this to keep.