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Primary Influences?

or How Many Times Can I Say Turner?

Ruthie, who are your primary influences? Can you identify what it is about each one that moved you so?

    Sidney Oliver

Well, certainly not Van Gogh!

As an explanation, a term paper about an artist was assigned during the spring of my Art History class in my senior year of high school. Even though I had an artist mother, I had no preferences, hence I think I had Van Gogh, who was unchosen by others. Because my excitement level on this project wasn't high, I put off any research until the Sunday afternoon prior to the Monday due date. I received a D+ on the paper and I've disliked Van Gogh ever since. I've even visited the cloisters in St. Remy where he lived for a while, but my mind is still closed to the poor man who has been much maligned by me all because of a D+.

In this same class in high school, I recall being drawn to Toulouse-Lautrec, but I surmise the fascination had more to do with his bohemian lifestyle. I found his work lively and disregarded the nefarious aspects of prostitutes, syphilis, and absinthe. I still like his work.

My mother loved Corot's gray-greens.

Not affecting me during this time was my mother's love of Corot. Understandably, she loved his greens that alternated between a gray-green and a blue-green. Her paintings sometimes mirrored his more peaceful landscapes.

I have no memory of when I became enamored of J. M. W. Turner, but it's been quite a long time. His earlier works don't interest me, but his later works are wallow-worthy. Many of his skies, which are now thought to be the result of seeing pollution and atmospheric conditions caused by volcanoes, are dramatic and breathtaking.

A couple of years ago I sent around an email to the few of us who were in our Art History class in high school (small school, small class and easy to do). I wanted to know if I had missed out on having Turner for our term paper. No one mentioned having written about him. I went back to our book, the 1963 edition of E. H. Gombrich's The Story of Art, to see how Gombrich treated Turner and to my dismay, I realized that Turner was treated as more of a showman. The rivalry with Constable was discussed, of course, and I sensed Gombrich favored Constable's approach to landscape painting.

Whether or not Turner's later work is a result of poorer eyesight, it is his later work that is favored by most of his admirers. Look at Turner's earlier work where you see a lot going on in its exactness and later look at the movement and flow of his later work. One draws the viewer in and the other is more ho-hum even though it is on a monumental scale.

Even in black and white, one can tell the difference in movement between Turner's 1815 painting to

an 1842 painting by Turner seen below. Both photographs were taken from Gombrich's The Story of Art.

Learn from the masters. I'm not a big one on copying because I'm for expressing one's own creative energy and originality, but you can always become inspired by others. Turner seems to do that for me.

Enjoy the process!

  Ruthie Windsor-Mann

This post is part of a series of Q & As between Ruthie Windsor-Mann and Sidney Oliver. 

We invite the reader to join in with other questions in the comments section. This needs to be interactive in order to work.

All photographs are by Ruthie Windsor-Mann unless otherwise credited.

Copyright 2019 Ruthie Windsor-Mann All Rights Reserved