Turner: an artist whose medum was light
"In the 250 years since the artist was born, the natural world he loved so much has changed. But he still reminds us to look with truth, clarity, and feeling."
"...an artist whose medium was paint, but also light. Light through clouds, light on water, light fiery and golden through skies that blur into a vast field of color, light from flames engulfing the Houses of Parliament, light through rain, steam and speed.*
by Emily LaBarge, The New York Times, 1 August 2025
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/01/arts/design/jmw-turner-anniversary-uk.html
Toward the end of his life, he bought back sold works and assembled an estate to donate to the nation when he died, perhaps with the sense of solidifying a permanent legacy.
That collection is now held by Tate Britain, ….
Now, Turner’s landscapes are filled with pathos … They show what has been lost.
In his lifetime, Turner experienced significant industrial change, but that upheaval pales in comparison to the speed of what we are currently witnessing. “We need to understand what we’re doing and what we lose as a result, part of which is beauty,” Stibbon said. “Turner looks with awe at the spectacular and puts you in the frame with him.”
Turner, he added, “captured the emotional intensity of whatever it was — you know: the sea, the storm, sunset, whatever — because he felt it.”
…it is Turner’s application of paint that makes his work so modern.“He was molding the paint, kneading it onto a flat surface; it was a bodily experience,”
“Turner embodies a radical creative spirit, an attitude, a way of thinking about being in the world and the freedom to do things differently,” said Turner Contemporary’s director, Clarrie Wallis. That spirit, she added, guides its program of exhibitions, which are all free to enter and which bring contemporary art to one of Britain’s most economically deprived areas.
When I walked east along the coast last month to retrace Turner’s footsteps, I did it in record-breaking high temperatures. The wide water and skies continued, exposed and dramatic as the land curved around to the towns of Broadstairs and Ramsgate, whose sea views Turner also captured. It might have been the heat, but the skies, so vast that you feel you’re stretching your eyes to take them in, really did seem, as Turner once said, “the loveliest in all Europe.”
A Turner for everyone seems the most wonderful inheritance from an artist whose work reminds us to look at the world around us with truth, clarity and feeling — to record what we see for posterity, but also to make something new.
