December Suite III: Cloud Dancer

And the train drove on, plunging headfirst into more evening. I had the compartment to myself, took off my shoes and stretched my legs. With the book on Constable open on my lap, I looked out the window, thought back to Josip in the ristorante – was he sitting in front of a second helping of Bollito misto right now? – and then let my mind wander as I studied the intensely dark blue sky, wander back to when I studied painting in London and when among us students, the choice between Constable and Turner had been a minor point of contestation. Minor, because they were old, canonical – the frontlines had moved, laid elsewhere.

But a point of contestation nevertheless, because it was fun to debate, sitting in a kebab shop after hours and hours of life drawing; and because they lent themselves easily to partisanship, being so evidently different characters. I found myself on the side of Constable. Of course, I admired Turner's vertiginous furnaces of color and fog, those typhoons of light; and I thought some of the Constables in the Tate Britain slightly boring. But in turn, I thought some of the Turners boring too, even though in a very different way. Turner was too much of a promethean macho artist even for my standards then, too classically a bombastic romantic genius: mentally troubled, irascible, eccentric, always travelling – I thought of Josip and his theory on crisis and movement – with the painterly style to match. But do we need to aim for the full sublime in every watercolor of a sardine? I had my doubts.

Constable, on the other hand, seemed to me not at all like either his defenders or detractors seemed to see him. Rather than the calm, well-educated documentarian of his 'Constable country', a few patches of green and brown in Essex and Suffolk, praised for his honesty, his precision and his 'realism' (perhaps the most unstable of categories, no?), and therefore often considered by his fanbase like a glass of clean cold water compared to Turner's Dark & Stormy (served with a single massive ice cube and no straw); rather than that, I thought Constable was an intense painter with an uncanny power of abstraction. You would never know where a Constable line went, it could caress a volume for half an inch and then suddenly leap out into a bold dash, connect to a different volume, hint at the shape of that and then simply disappear. Conversely, a blotch of color could suddenly harden into something like a blade and then into the wound that blade would leave.

In a way not completely dissimilar to the Turnado, there were always extreme forces at play, forces that crossed and transgressed the bodies their transgressions depicted – a horse, a tree, a lock, a mill; or in the case of Turner, a skyline, a ship, a bridge – forces that worked on, way beyond the eventual 'fixing' of the paint. But where with Turner, oil faded to light, with Constable, oil simply seemed to never truly dry. Rather, it gave the effect of being rain in various states of aggregation, one of which was almost, but only almost, dry. Turner tended to completely abandon matter in favor of energies, but Constable stopped at an outrageously unstable balance of matter and energy that seemed to me (and seems to me still) much more precarious, more intense and more risky.

Even Constable's dictum, "painting is but another word for feeling", I had thought back in London, and thought again on the Frecciarossa, is only sentimentalist as long as nothing of Constable's work process was taken into account: his scholarship, his careful study of meteorology, his conviction – formulated again and again in his lectures – that painting was a thoroughly scientific endeavor. The identity of painting and feeling does not just mean that one may 'feel' (remember, hope) as an array dashes and blotches, constellations of bright and dark; or that feeling is a manipulation of wet matter slowly drying. It also means that feeling, like painting, is scientific – and does not deserve the name if it is not.

Or so I thought, as the train drove on, plunging headwards into more evening, the carriage bathed in the light of the small overhead lamp, the book open on my lap and the light from the overhead lamp refracted a thousand times in the small highlight splinters distributed all over the two-page reproduction of a Constable painting, the terraferma outside diluting into dark clouds and dark earth, Europe a splinter of black in a dirty window frame.