ABP thinks Buddhism alleviates suffering. He spoke with me about my impending enlightenment. He would like to make me aware and open to a religion finding me (it doesn't matter which one). He spoke with a couple of us about this. Some people choose altruism. Some people choose self-castigation.
Last night I went to see Mike Leigh's Mr. Turner. I went alone, in the middle of the evening, at 7:25pm. The theater wasn't crowded. Those of us who were there laughed at the appropriate times. I laughed too frequently. I shaded my eyes when Mr. Turner touched his brush to the canvas. His little tricks - rubbing away the paint to reveal a little red buoy. Poor Constable dabbing his bits of red on the canvas next-door. That spitting and flustering.
J. M. W. Turner is my father's favorite painter. He loves his depiction of light. I think he sees God in those paintings - the ones at the Frick. He brought me when I was 10. He brought ABP when ABP was 10, and also LLP (now LW).
My father's name is David, like David and Goliath.
I wore a pretty red woven coat to the theater. I needed to do something special. LW gave it to me on condition that I wear it a couple times a year, but a whole two years have passed since then. It had been our mother's.
Our mother is Catholic, although more in her rearing than anything else. When JFK Jr. died, she gave to the church. LW is an atheist. ABP used to be an atheist. LW and I got confirmed. ABP, I remember, refused. He said he had gone, recently, to a Catholic service. Maybe it's because of the new Pope (Francis). I would go back, too, but I shan't.
I didn't decide to go to the movie until quite late, and took to the freeway at mad speed. When I got to the theater, an anxious man, also alone, hurried me along so he might get his ticket. He was slim, maybe 50, and bought popcorn. We sat on opposite sides. I wondered at the urgency.
A swirling motion took place on the screen in the opening credits (you could see a Turner revealing itself behind the swirl). I focused on the font. How had Leigh chosen it? Did the same attention go into choosing a font as choosing the swirl as choosing the color-scheme? You can see I get lost in the details. The whole time I was thinking of Naked. This is Leigh's first biopic. The opening scene is in the Dutch (?) countryside, although for the rest of the film he is in his native England. We see him get home; his housekeeper follows him and waits for him to fondle her. Much later on, he pulls her skirts up indecorously and pushes her up against a bureau for an impromptu fuck. Yet she seems to love him. We recognize her as a wretch and he doesn't recognize her at all. I thought of that Bruegel painting - Icarus. Although it's difficult to provide her with much sympathy. Over the course of the film, she grows corse and ill.
Turner drew and painted from his earliest days. I wondered, while watching, whether one could think of him as a commercial artist.
At one point he sings a Henry Purcell while a lady sits playing the piano forte. He stumbles through - he can't quite remember. The lady gently helps him.
Mike Liegh used the camera to depict light the same way Turner depicts it in his paintings. I thought for a moment of what camera manipulations would be put into play for van Gogh or Monet in-order to help us see through their eyes.
The argument seems that his eye is turned outward as opposed to inward. He straps himself to a mast so he can experience a storm. His father mixes his paint for him, deep yellow, moving his arm with heavy exertion (a labor of love and necessity) to merge the pigment with oil. Some way into the film, he dies, leaving his son heavy with loss. At the end of his life Turner's mistress (a docile pleasant elder woman well-fulfilled with the duties of the house) tends to his brushes.
He has a daguerrotype taken: first just himself, and then with his mistress. It's posited he is worried about this new technology (was this Leigh's license?), that a picture can happen in a matter of minutes. The camera has access to Niagara Falls. He has access to what happens out his door.
I really don't know much about Turner. This morning I read an article in the Guardian and something from the Tate website describing his personal life: John Constable was a handsome man and married the love of his life and had many children with her. Turner was the son of a barber and never married and had a couple of illegitimate children and went around, an ugly, short, rotund man, maniacally feeding the appetite of his eye.
At the end of the film, they have all the Neo-raphaelite paintings up in the Royal Academy. Turner starts coughing. Is he laughing or is he coughing? These pictures rely little on one's experience with the elements, one's eye and body and senses as they absorb the outside.