"La
Passerelle des Arts, French Institute and distant Eiffel
Tower" by Benjamin Warner
The
painting I have chosen to start this off is Benjamin Warner's
'La Passerelle des Arts, French Institute and distant Eiffel
Tower', which is pictured above. As it happens this painting
is from our current exhibition and hangs on the wall as
I write. Not only am I a big fan of Benjamin's work and
his approach to painting, I am also very sentimentally attached
to Paris. As a student I studied for a few months at an
art school in France and spent quite a bit of my time in
Paris, drinking coffee, falling in love and looking at art.
The Paris of my mind is a city of romance and culture but
as with all memories, if I try to look at them directly
I find little more than vague, fluid formless clouds of
sensation. There is something of this same quality, this
uncertainty, ambiguity in the vision of the world Benjamin
offers us. For me, it is this association with memory, with
our internal system of notation which gives his paintings
their atmospheric power and places them so tantalising on
the line between the familiar and the strange, between the
places of the world and the spaces of the mind. But this
ambiguity serves another function beyond the atmospheric.
It allows space within the image for our own projection.
The brain, which is not fond of uncertainty, will fill in
any gaps it finds with its own knowledge or memory. This
process of involvement was termed by Gombrich 'the beholder's
share'. The picture we therefore contemplate is in some
way a collaboration between our selves and the artist and
the act of viewing becomes something active not passive.
Not only do we contribute knowledge about the behaviour
of water, the movement of clouds, the form of trees we also
infuse the picture with specific little personal details.
The optimism we saw in the vastness and ambition of the
Tour Eiffel or the sound of the crunch of the grave in the
gardens of the Louvre (just off to the right of the picture,
if my memory of Paris serves me correctly). Photographs,
or more intricate finished paintings, in offering us more
information often leave less space for the imagination.
There is a refinement, an understatement to the application
and handling of paint here that I really admire. Look for
a minute at the sky and the river. They are essentially
the same colour, a sort of lively non colour made from laying
cool colours over warm, but they read so differently. The
smears and strokes that build up the water have an undulation
to them, they give the water a soft lapping movement and
the contrast left between the light and dark layers of paint
reads as depth, the river's sinister mystery. The sky in
contrast is almost without form. On closer inspection you
can see in places the channels where, like water through
sand, dilute paint has been allowed to run and disperse
over thicker. In other places you can see the board has
been scrubbed and worked back to allow darker layers of
paint to break through the lighter. But the effect is so
discreet as to be evasive, a little like trying to watch
smoke. The city's skyline is particularly beautifully seen.
Again it is a complexly built up surface, little smears
of greens and blues, colours that for me are evocative of
so many painters, Corot, Whistler, Lorrain even. The paint
here is suggestive of much but specific about little. This
beautiful uncertainty is then played off against the detail,
so nicely seen, of the city's lights. The tiny balls of
artificial light that hint at human presence, at the many
thousands of private lives and concerns that make up the
city we are observing, are caught so simply as tiny strokes
of yellow. Not only do these little touches of yellow evoke
so much, they also form a pattern, which gives focus to
the picture and lights a path for the eye across its surface.
We are led by them in a gentle sweep along the river, off
into the distant city, rich as we remember it in beauty,
art and history.
Richard
Dinnis
February '09
Gombrich,
E.H Art and Illusion (UK, Phaidon, 1977)
