Te Papa have a Constable exhibition on at the moment; we went last weekend, and it was generally an excellent experience.
Constable occupies the same space in my head as Elgar; my exposure to English literature of a certain generation has left me with the recieved wisdom that Elgar is the only English composer who stacks up alongside the great Continental composers, and Constable is likewise the premier English painter. True or not (and in the case of painting, it isn’t), it’s what appeared to be a popular line of thinking in England, and it left me curious to see the “great English painter.”
First, the most irritating thing about the exhibition: no sketching. How do artists learn? By looking at other artists’ work and understanding it; sketching is a part of that process, and Constable himself used it—indeed a number of the paintings in the exhibition are his copies of works by artists he admired. Heaven forbid modern artists be given the same opportunities to learn as Constable himself! Utterly obnoxious.
As to the art itself, one of the things I liked best about many of the paintings was their multi-focal nature. Standing back produces the kind of grand overview I expect from an impressionistic artist; but unlike other work I’ve seen in that mode I can stand up close and find more detail that emerges; a stand of trees will, on closer inspection, have a woman on a Sunday stroll; people a playing or resting in fields.
Birds are a particular strength; they are never more than a few daubs of paint, but are easily distinguished: gull, swallow, and so on.
Something else that impressed me about Constable’s approach: a combination of meticulous craftsmanship with a determination to capture the passion and emotion of a scene. The exhibition notes detailed, and, with the help of sketchbooks, showed how Constable would meticulously record details of the weather, clouds, light levels, temperatures, visiting the same locations again and again to understand what conditions created the scenes he cared about, so he could paint, as he put it, the “feeling.” This runs counter to idea that aritists, especially artists working with feeling, should be spontaneous and unaffected by a solid work ethic.
A few things that struck me particularly, and would probably strike a viewer more familiar with modern-day England even more forcefully: his many paintings of a still-rural Hamstead Heath, many looking across broad fields to St Paul’s Cathedral; a few paintings of the areas of the West Midlands where Tolkien grew up before they became industrialised gave me a view of why Tolkien so hated the advance of industrial society—I lived in the area a few years back, and the idyllic rural landscapes of Constable are endless red brick and tarseal.
All-in-all a thoroughly worthwhile and (for me) educational exhibit.
