Variations on Beauty

Art Mastered is a simple, straightforward and unpretentious blog about art, on the Tumblr site.  It’s run by Helen Turner, herself a recent  M.A. History of Art graduate.

Every couple of days she posts photographic reproductions of a some paintings, sculptures, photography;  something new, something old – alongside comments or explanatories of the item.  Sometimes she might write about the art related things she’s noticed on her travels.  Lately she’s added reviews of exhibitions and a newsletter.

Over the last four years, this site has become a part of my day.

You might ask ‘why’?

What I love about Art Mastered is that I can usually find something beautiful and fascinating, very often something  I’ve never seen before and introduced to painters who are new to me.

This has allowed me to explore and find good stuff elsewhere.

Above all, I love Art Mastered because it’s beautiful.

My affair with the site started, so far as I can tell, four years ago.  I was looking for some pictures of poppies when I spotted Emile Nolde’s ‘Red Poppies’ in the Google Images search results.  When I followed the link to Art Mastered  there was so much to see I was hooked straight away.

The blogger, Miss Turner, has put much effort into varying her output.  To start with she had a ‘Nude of the Week’ and introduced a couple of themed weeks when time allowed.  The ‘Nude of the Week’ varied from the sensual to the primitive.  My favourite of her themed weeks was ‘The Renaissance’.  It was a great showcase of the vitality and vision of people working at the edge of art; a legacy so rich it has been mined for centuries.

Strangely similar

I’ve noticed that viewing an online gallery-cum-art blog is strangely similar to going to a real gallery.  There are loads of pictures to trawl through, many different areas devoted to different movements, styles and forms.  Some will specialize in one thing; others will be more varied.

Overpowered

After my first visit to the National Gallery, I said to an old friend ‘there’s a lot of dross on those walls’.  He replied ‘that’s how you tell the good stuff from the bad’.  Which put an experience at the Victoria and Albert Museum into perspective.

I went to the V&A’s Islamic Gallery on my birthday.  I hadn’t seen it in 12 years.   I was overpowered by the beauty of the objects on show, the skill of the craftsmen who made them, the sheer quality of each item.  I got to the point where I thought ‘oh no, not another piece of outstanding quality and beauty’.  I was emotionally exhausted, just by seeing all this amazing art in one place.

The secret of Art Mastered

Which brings me to the genius bit about Art Mastered.

Some years into the life of her site, Miss Turner changed its focus.  She started featuring contemporary work, installations, conceptual art and sculpture.  She moved it away from a narrow focus on the Old Masters and pre-1960 20^th Century painters.

A massive chunk of contemporary art is not, how can I say, my cup of tea.  But this is my view.  I read about it because I want to know what’s going on, but I remain to be convinced of its merits.

Why is it good that Art Mastered features stuff that I don’t really like?  For me, it increases my interest when I find something I DO like, that stands out, that grabs me.  I don’t doubt many other followers of the site get a lot of joy from seeing the contemporary featured so heavily.  It’s just that this is not for me.

The problem with uniformity

This contrasts with other Tumblr art blogs I’ve come across just recently.

With few exceptions they concentrate on paintings and sometimes sculpture from the Old Master / early 20^th Century stream.  There is no variation, no relief from being overpowered by the quality of what’s on display.

Seeing these blogs is a strangely exhausting experience.  The paintings blend into a solid miasma of emotional strain.  Each work becomes indissoluble from its companions.  Reading, working through  hundreds of pages of this is hard work because there is no end in sight.  At least with a traditional gallery  you can see a selection, go to the café for a coffee, come back and then go home at the end of several hours.

Strangely samey

A side issue with this is that it’s surprising how ‘same-y’ everything gets.  200 paintings by minor Impressionists (many remarkable little gems), with a few Monets, Renoirs and Pissaros thrown in for good measure, can get a viewer believing they really are all the same; that there is no standard.

Seeing something without variation and nuance can lead to visual and aesthetic antennae being clogged with the sheer volume of material there is to see.

Art Mastered doesn’t do this.  Its very variation is what keeps it vital and nimble.  The stodge is kept to a bare minimum.  In a new turn,  Turner has recently begun reviewing major and minor exhibitions, so her users get a good flavour of what art was, is and can be.  What’s more, the site now has a presence on Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest.  She’s exploring the full potential of the web and creating something of a ‘brand’.

This is why I think Art Mastered will last as long as Helen Turner wants it to last and will be successful in the future.   I certainly hope so because I have really taken to it in a big way.

Pictures, all courtesy Art Mastered.

My very first post…

I’m brand new to blogging. So what do I write about? Hmmm…errr…yes…good question.

When I was a kid (this will tell you how old I am) an American comic called Kelly Monteith had a show on the BBC. I wasn’t allowed to stay up to see this very often (my folks were rather strict with my bedtimes) but I did see some of it. KM was an ‘observational comic’. The set up was that he was at home musing about life, the universe and everything whilst trying to write.

He was faced with the tyranny of the blank page. It sat, untouched in his typewriter (clue, this was the early 80s). He sat in front of it wondering what to do next…cut to Kelly as an Egyptian pharaoh behind his typewriter with the blank page. “What do I write? How can I start?…I know what would look good over there…a pyramid!”

Anything to distract himself from the looming threat of the blank page.

So what is this about? Hmmm….no idea. Here’s what, I will write about life here in Pakistan; what it’s like to be a migrant in a radically different culture; some of my observations of life here; the politics and everyday culture perhaps.

I’m passionate about politics and international relations so I’ll write something about that; I’m a lover of art and culture, so I’ll write about that too.

In short I’ll write about anything that comes to mind. My interests are very wide ranging – from the obsessively irrelevant to the profoundly important. Sometimes I can be An Intellectual, sometimes I can be pretty bloody thick. It’s all grist for the mill.

I’ll try and keep my stuff short and to the point, though I have a habit of rambling. And interesting. Yes…interesting too.

There you go, this is my very first blog post on the web. Ho, hum…is that it? Sort of anti-climactic now. Let’s see what happens.