The Fighting Temeraire by Joseph Mallord William Turner

Spending time in galleries for me includes a lot of staring at paintings that I’m drawn to and wondering why I like them. Less just enjoying it and more analysing why. I’m sure that’s not just me. Hence why I’m going to share some thoughts about some paintings I’ve stared at before.

I’m no art critic. In fact if I have any regrets, one might be that I didn’t do art history at university. But hey maybe I wasn’t ready. After I got told off for tracing in year eight art, art probably wasn’t destined for my academic agenda. I definitely liked standing and staring at paintings even then though. So I may not discuss the paint-strokes or use of oils, or what year it was painted and how it comments on such and such. I’m more interested in how it makes me feel. And in turn interested in if you agree.

This was the painting where my interest in art started. Before seeing this at the National Gallery, paintings were part of the wallpaper to me I guess. I don’t remember giving them a second thought. They were just something you had on your walls at home.

We went to the gallery on a school trip and stood around this painting while the tour guide talked to us about it; a group of slightly overwhelmed and tired kids from the countryside who had just landed in the Big Smoke. The gallery seemed (and is) vast and intimidating, our shoes echoed as we entered each grand room. But what clicked for me that day as we gathered round this smallish, seemingly unobtrusive piece of art, was that paintings might have a story. They might be part of a wider discussion about a topic and that the artist was using the canvas to tell their side of things in picture form. It also became clear that a painting might not be what it first appears to be, there could be a hidden meanings. And that’s what really intrigued me.

I really do remember the feeling of realisation as the tour guide went into the details of the painting. A moment of eye widening at the sudden understanding that there was a greater metaphor. That perhaps this was not just painted by someone sat on the side of the harbour who was watching two random boats coming in to the port and decided to start sketching them. That perhaps it was created instead to tell a story, to share a point of view. And even if they had happened upon this scene and started sketching, there was a bigger narrative that they wanted to explore too.

Once it hit me that it stood for something more, I started to look beyond just the outline of the boats and the sky above them, I could sense something bigger. I could sense a tone. A tone the artist seemed to have purposefully set, through the specific painting of each boat, through the texture and colour of the sky; the pale yet dramatic atmosphere with clouds moving towards you on the canvas. They were not only conveying a moment in time, they were conveying a movement, a shift in society. They were presenting the hard, steady, dirty chugging of a new way and setting it next to and by all accounts, in charge of, the majestic, ethereal, quiet ghost of methods past. Through the gaze of the unsteady and unpredictable sky, delivering that sense of uncertainty that must have been visceral at the time.

I definitely didn’t have all those words to describe what I was seeing, but with the tour guide’s help, I could see the painting and the story as one thing all of a sudden, as a whole. The painting unfolded in front of me, I could feel the essence of it and I think the feeling of it is what it’s all about.

The Fighting Temeraire by Joseph Mallord William Turner. You can view this painting at the National Gallery in London.