Art in black & white…of all things

I love art. Which is strange, because as a child, right up to the age of 20, I had no interest in it at all. Paintings and sculpture seemed irrelevant and anyway, they all looked the same. Unless it was 20th century art, in which case it looked like my dog could’ve done better.

Since the age of 20, art has become one of the most important things in my life. Paintings particularly; sculpture grabs my attention less so, though I’m unable to explain why this.

I used to enjoy kids art shows on the telly, anything with Tony Hart and Rolf Harris (I’m struggling to get over the fact that Harris was, in real life, an evil creature), but it never inspired a wider love of the subject.

At the age of 18½ I visited Denmark as an exchange student. Everyone who’s done this kind of thing will know that the hosts always bust a gut to show their foreign guests what their city and country have to offer. My Danish hosts were no different.

It says a lot about me that I cringed when I was told we were going to see Roskilde Cathedral the Danish Royal Ballet and the Lousiana Museum of Modern Art (both in Copenhagen); these worthy attempts were so Obviously Boring.

I had no interest in the cathedral; none whatever. Me and my group were given a guided tour around the building. The guide was excellent but, I thought, did he have to point out every single minor point of interest. Just one interesting thing would do it.

He took us into a chapel with paintings of sea battles on the walls. The walls were sculpted in marble, there was a statue of someone and a portrait of Christ. All of which left me unmoved.

Until the guide told us the walls were an optical illusion. The picture frames weren’t sculpted in marble, they were all tromp l’oiel paintings. Then he added that the portrait of Christ only became properly visible when viewed through the legs of the statue.

Chapel of Danish King Christian IV The sculpture around the painting is not real

When I took a closer look at the marble frames of each of the paintings, I could see that they were flat as a pancake, there was no sculpture, no marble. Everything had been painted. The grain of the stone, the shadows…make that the multiple lines of shadow…all of it was made to fool the eye.

And that portrait of Christ really was nearly impossible to see properly. It was mounted between two large windows. The light from the windows flooded the eye to the point where Christ was only a little face and not much more. But, we were told, if you stand behind the statue and look at Christ from between its legs, you see the founder of Christianity in all His glory. And it was true. The legs blocked out the light from the windows, making the portrait visible, making Christ himself visible.

From there on, I took in everything the guide said. Checked over everything he pointed out. Listened to everything he said with newly keen attention. But nothing resonated quite as much as that chapel.

Roskilde Cathedral in Denmark is a beautiful, fascinating building and well worth a visit.

Days later I was at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. It has nothing to do with the United States, but is instead named after the wife of the founder.

The very first picture the guide took us to had a Christian looking cross in black against a white background. The block in the top left corner was completely filled with orange paint. What was it? asked the guide. None of us could work it out. Not one.

It was, she said, a painting of a tree, with the sun in the background, totally stripped down to its barest essentials. All you needed to see, the artist was implying, is the shape of the tree and the colour of the sun.

WOW!!!! Now she had my attention. The problem was that I didn’t like the paintings that followed, couldn’t see their reasoning and so my interest waned and died. But I never forgot that one painting. I was knocked over by it.

Two years later, I had started my Communications Studies degree and was beginning to feel that I had found one of my passions, Cultural Studies (I know, but someone has to like it). Among the books on my reading list was Ernst Gombrich’s The Art of Illusion. Now I know what I’m about to describe sounds cheesy and silly, but here it goes.

I had got the book from the faculty library and started flicking through it, scanning the pages and looking at the pictures (HA! there it is!) when I spotted a black and white reproduction of one of Claude Monet’s views of Rouen Cathedral.

Claude Monet – Rouen Cathedral: The Portal (Sunlight), 1894. The painting that started it…imagine this, but in black & white

I was transfixed. I was stunned. I couldn’t take my eyes from it. I felt a hatch into a completely different world suddenly opening up and I knew I had to follow; that my life would never, ever, be the same again. Black and white for crying out loud.

Suddenly I went mad about paintings. Not ‘merely’ the Impressionists, but everyone-ists. Old Masters, Modernists, you name it, I wanted to see it. Within weeks I was debating the finer points of Cubism, comparing it to the work of the French Realists, contrasting a Picasso ‘Table Lamp and Cup’ to a Fantin-Latour ‘Still Life with Fruit’.

What one of my classmates had dismissed as ‘blob paintings’ suddenly made sense to me. Or if it didn’t, I could have fun wracking my brain, reading up on it to work out what the artist had been trying to say and do.

I have never lost that awe, wonder, excitement of those early days when I discovered Art and Painting.

In the following years I saw each of the Fine Art Department Final Year Shows, gushing profusely over the ideas and work of the students involved.

Going down Memory Lane is not something I like to do: never go back to your past, it’s never as good the second time round. That was my mum’s advice the year after I’d been to Denmark because I wanted to return. Like most mums, she was dead right.

However, there are three things I would love to do again. The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art would be worth a rematch because I barely understood what I was seeing. I was incapable of making a judgement, except for that spectacular first painting, what I now know was a Mondrian.

Roskilde Cathedral too, deserves a second look. Not simply to see that chapel, remember its name and take in the effect of something I can now better understand. But to take in the whole building that I couldn’t appreciate when I first saw it.

Finally, I would revisit the Danish Royal Ballet. Like many of my compatriots in that week, I was horrified to be told we would be seeing a performance of Romeo and Juliet. A…a…ballet!!! Booooorrrrrinnnng!!!!!

I was the only one of them to stay after the interval. Watching the dancers, how they moved in flawless keeping to that music; their athleticism, the beauty of the music and choreography, how the two blended into one sinuous vision…I was moved like never before and barely since.

Jaws: The Revenge or The Flying Teeth of Montevideo

You’d think that witnessing a bite, however well disguised as a fall, would be an open and shut case.  A man falls through a group and his face connects with a shoulder.  The owner of the shoulder removes his shirt to show a bite mark.  It’s captured on camera, seen by thousands in the crowd and millions on TV.

But no.  There’s quite a few people who convince themselves they’ve seen no such thing.  In fact it’s all a conspiracy, they say, by their rivals to make their hero (and by extension themselves and their country) look bad; to diminish them all on the biggest stage of all.

Luis Suarez of Uruguay and Liverpool: they don’t call him the dentist for nothing

The human capacity for denial of the obvious always surprises me.  Never mind what you’ve seen with your own eyes, turn away from it and yell ‘can’t see it, it isn’t there’.

A recent Guardian article looking into Luis Suarez, his history of violence and his standing in Uruguay described an ESPN journalist meeting a wall of silence and denial in Uruguay itself.  Legend has it that at age 15 Suarez head butted a referee in a juniors game.  The journalist found nobody would speak to him, records were ‘lost’ and everyone defended Suarez.

The only reason I can think of for this is that in Uruguay peoples sense of self, of nationhood is small and weak.

Why would this be?

The colony that would later become Uruguay was founded a century or so after what is now Brazil and Argentina were colonized; the natives were too ferocious and there was no gold and silver in the area.  Consequently, there was no motivation for either the Spanish or the Portuguese to roll in.

Since it’s foundation in the first half of the seventeenth century, the main city, Montevideo  and (later) Uruguay have suffered from being a small territory wedged between two giant neighbours.  In their turns the Spanish, Portuguese,  Argentina, Brazil, Britain, France and the US have all fought over or sought to control Uruguay’s destiny; sometimes by manipulating the politics (Portugal, Spain, Brazil, Argentina, the United States)  by sending in ground (Spain, Portugal, Argentina, Brazil, Britain) and naval (France) forces or ‘just’ by using ‘diplomacy’, spying and economic leverage (the United States).

I really want to see this, it looks beautiful

Uruguay’s history is turbulent to say the least.

Then there is this article by Luis Roux, a Uruguayan journalist republished in English by the British ‘Observer’ newspaper and to be found on The Guardian’s site.  It suggests Uruguayans totally lose themselves in football (I simplify of course).

I get the sense that Uruguay gets no sense of itself from its institutions, achievements, economy etc.  The Olympics and cycling notwithstanding, the British have become used to being losers.  Anyone who follows the soccer campaigns of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland; England’s cricket or Wales’s rugby teams has to have become innured to the long years of ‘hurt’ our teams have been subject to over the decades.  There have been moments of glory such as the male middle distance runners of the 80s, the triumphs of the Barcelona Olympics and Kelly Holmes at Athens – but these have been fleeting.  Andy Murray’s success in the US Open and Wimbledon during 2013 was the exception that proved the rule.  Britain (historically) punches below its weight at sport.

Consequently, whilst we love our sportsmen and women to succeed and we can’t shut up about them when they are, we do have other things to fall back on.  Such as the NHS, the BBC, Parliament, our ‘Island History’ and ‘The Empire’.  We even celebrate our emigration to the far flung corners of the world, the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and cities such as Hong Kong and Singapore.  We’re pround of having so many US Presidents having their ancestral home in England, Scotland or (less often) Wales.

Uruguay: Wedged between Brazil to the east and Argentina to the west. A veritable pearl, possibly

Then we like to remind ourselves that we may not be very good at sport, but we invented and / or developed so many of them…especially football.

What does Uruguay have?  Football.

Take that away and the country has…what exactly?

That’s why conspiracy theories loom so large over the response to Luis Suarez and his biting.

By the way his punishment, four months out of the game, seems to me to be perfectly just.