Today we went to the National Gallery right by Trafalgar Square, a massive museum full of art from pretty much every era except for modern art. There were several pieces in the museum that caught my eye, ranging from immersive projections exhibits to classic works like Van Gogh’s sunflowers or Money’s water lilies (the sunflowers were obviously very cool to see, but beat i liked more was the painting next to it, aptly called Two Crabs which was a colorful Van Gogh I had never seen before). However, there were two main pieces that really piqued my interest, those being George Stubbs’s “Whistlejacket” and Joseph Mallord William Turner’s “Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway”. The two paintings aren’t that similar at all, but I think it is the stark contrast between the two combined with my appreciation of both that I find interesting.
Stubbs’s work is a life sized portrait of a racehorse that shares the painting’s name, and in the piece the horse stands without a rider and with a solid olive colored background. The horse is painted very realistically with an attention to detail that made me question if it was a taxidermists horse when I first saw the work from across the museum. There is a beauty evident in Stubbs’s depiction of the horse, and it’s accentuated by the blank background, which forces your eye to only focus on the subject. There is no atmosphere to the piece, and that’s he point, it’s only about Whistlejacket and nothing else.
Turner’s work on the other hand is all about atmosphere. Hanging next to “Rain, Steam and Speed” was another Turner painting depicting a ship at sea, and that was painted again in a very realistic style, however the one I gravitated towards was not. Instead it is a far more abstract depiction of the subject (that subject being a train crossing a bridge over the Thames), one in which the rain and steam takes up more of the composition than the train itself. The brushstrokes are more hectic and the train and bridge are largely obscured, giving the piece a sense of movement and a strong atmosphere, setting it apart from the paintings around it. Turner could have painted a realistic and dynamic steam engine, but he didn’t, he painted a dynamic world that the steam engine happened to be a part of, and I find that far more compelling.
Theatre in London U of A 