Zen

"The vortex was the expression of Turner's deep pessimism for he thought of humanity as doomed to a senseless round, which ultimately sucked man to his fate..."

When you think of Poussin or Bach you think of a pure, architectural order, or the intellect and proportionality, of a passive kind of beauty.

"Colour appeals to the senses and not to reason or the sense of duty." Colour was the new 'god' (Van Gogh?)

"The marvellous transitions of colour-all the way from blue to gold-which had become Turner's private language...

A hatred of intellectual pretension so strong that he spoke only in simple and often ungrammatical language..."

Tree: an immediate experience. Zen. A moment if illumination after a period of patience, discipline, reticence; like Rothko: the experience of the pre-world, a flash, an afterglow. The painter of white and the painter of black are not too dissimilar. The irruption of the strange into the deeply familiar. Before words or thought come to fuse with the "I", for these stand on the other side of 'oneness'. Pure emotion, that of the desert-soul, clarified, heightened to such an intensity that it opens up even whilst remaining a flat plane, a horizon (Spengler on Russia, the "cavern"). Dimensions are not important (2X2, for Turner). Not abstraction, nor a negation of humanity; rather, a perspective that places human beings at the centre...

Ruskin on Turner: " There is not as much colour in that low amber light upon the hill-side as there is in the palest dead leaf..the lake is not blue but grey in mist, passing into deep shadow...a few dark clusters of leaves, a single white flower, scarcely seen-all the gladness given to the rocks of the shore. One of the ruby spots of the eastern manuscript would give colour enough for all the red that is in turner's entire drawings."

On the borders of dreaming and waking consciousness, the merging of order with sensuousness.

A red poppy, she said. For remembering. For forgetting. Without immediate experience what else was there but time to kill? It seemed to last only a moment but was actually a lifetime. The spontaneous, immediate experience was in reality the accumulation and condensation of so many desires and memories. All that was human was here. The sudden splash of paint was a self-revealing gesture of the soul.

What is red?

She pointed, instinctively. Red is the ideal, an idea of perfection that one only approaches, never reaches; red is a set of tasks undertaken without too much questioning. From then on he saw red everywhere...

---citations: Kenneth Clark.