i.
Did you know that J. M. W. Turner taught perspective drawing to architects? As “Professor of Perspective” at the Royal Academy, his course commenced with a lecture on linear perspective and ended with another on landscape painting. He and his assistants produced a number of seminal diagrams on the mechanics of perspectival composition. [1]
Devices to measure and reproduce perspective are etched into our collective architectural psyche; the experiments by Brunelleschi, Dürer, and so many others offer an image of rigor, and help us understand image construction. These apparatuses bridge math, representation, and aesthetics; their instruction manuals are predictable, practicable, and choreographed. Using them is like learning a new dance from a map taped to the floor, or a recipe that you can fall back on whenever imagination fails you. But Turner was better known for disregarding rules than perpetuating them. Think of Tate Britain’s “Late Turner: Painting Set Free.” [2] As the title implies, abstraction is free because it rejects the rules of classical technique. Or does it?
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[Light and Color (Goethe’s Theory) – the Morning After the Deluge – Moses Writing the Book of Genesis, J. M. W. Turner, 1843], New Affiliates, 2018.
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ii.
We’ve had a long-standing fascination with squinting – that is, in understanding the moment something passes from recognizable to not. It’s a game in three parts: first identify something and break it down into parts celebrated and parts disposable. Next, add here and remove there until you end up with something kind of new and kind of known. Finally, send it out into the world to be interpreted, filled in, or completed as a cultural cipher. It is this process of open-endedness that excites us – the life assigned to objects that are no longer our own.
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[Norham Castle, Sunrise, J. M. W. Turner, c. 1845], New Affiliates, 2018.
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