Christopher Le Brun and Cecilia Powell
Constructive, Investigative and Truthful. Christopher Le Brun interviewed by Cecilia Powell on J.M.W. Turner and Watercolour. Published in the Turner Society News August 2006.
The winner of last year's Winsor & Newton Turner Watercolour Award, for the most distinguished watercolour in the RA Summer exhibition was Christopher Le Brun RA, who recently talked to the Editor of TSN about Turner and the impact of Turner on his own artistic development. Christopher Le Brun is Professor of Drawing at the Royal Academy and works in many different media, including sculpture: examples can be found in public collections, and public spaces, throughout the world and may also be seen on his website (www.christopherlebrun.co.uk).
CP I wonder when you first discovered Turner? And whether you were already at that age thinking that your future lay in painting and the art world?
CLB It was at school really. I found a copy of Ruskin's Modern Painters actually at home today with a date on it, so it proves I was reading Ruskin aged 18, if not at 17, and I immediately loved everything about Turner. There may be another factor, which is I was brought up in Southsea in Portsmouth, so the sea was ever present and we used to go on board the Victory fairly regularly, so some of the imagery that Turner was using I was already familiar with. I was also studying English Literature for A level and there were endless connections in Turner which supported what I was thinking about.... Yes, and I had been for some time. I'd always been painting and drawing.
CP What other artists were you interested in at the moment you discovered Turner? I know you often discover things by thinking about other things at the same moment and finding they interrelate.
CLB Well, because I was studying Literature, mainly the Romantics - Blake, Wordsworth and Keats, but particularly Wordsworth - it really struck me what of course is very obvious now - but it struck me then as a revelation the easy connection between painting and poetry, and that struck me very deeply and I saw it as a way of connecting many of my interests at the time, and it led on to an interest in Samuel Palmer and modern artists like Paul Nash and Graham Sutherland.
CP That's interesting, because Turner himself was very concerned with poetry and illustrated many of the poets, though, famously he never actually illustrated Wordsworth. He was commissioned to make illustrations for several contemporary poets (Rogers, Byron, Scott, Campbell) but he was never asked to illustrate Wordsworth, though there is, of course, a great affinity between the two.
CLB Curiously I think I understand what you are saying there, because when it came to pictures I found far more images in Keats than I did in Wordsworth somehow that were attached to painting or amenable to pictorial expression. But what I found rather shocking when I went to art school, having immersed myself in this particular area, was that my tutors at the Slade regarded it as dangerous - a very dangerous area to be involved in as a young artist - and it gave me an uncomfortable feeling whether I could manage that sensibility and at the same time learn about contemporary painting. So there was a tricky transition from school to art school.
CP When you discovered Turner through reading Ruskin, do you remember which galleries you visited to look at Turner's works themselves? Did you go to the National Gallery or to the British Museum to look at his sketches?
CLB No, because in Portsmouth there actually weren't any galleries and visits up to London were very rare. When we did I'm not even sure we went to the National Gallery, so I was looking at illustrations in books and thinking about the ideas really, just trying to imagine ... particularly Ruskin which is very conducive to the pictorial imagination obviously ... so somehow Ruskin produced the atmosphere which I'd later encounter by looking at the paintings themselves.
CP So then you went to art school and began by painting in oils. It's only fairly recently that you started working in watercolour, leading up to winning the Winsor & Newton Turner Watercolour Award in 2005. So, after many years - or indeed decades - of working in oils, you moved to watercolour. How did that come about?
CLB Well, there was a very particular reason. I had an operation on my left hand which meant I couldn't paint for a while, and in fact I was disinclined to go back to oil painting while I recovered, so I took to making watercolours, and I hadn't actually made any watercolours for decades - virtually since I was at school - and I found I really enjoyed it and became completely obsessed with it, and I've carried on ever since, so that's been about ... not very long really, probably about two to three years. Not to the exclusion of oil painting, but it's been a time when I've concentrated on watercolour.
CP Do you think in future watercolour will be as important to you as painting in oils has been in the past, or possibly more important? Do you think oils and watercolour will go hand in hand as they did for Turner?
CLB Yes, I think they definitely go hand in hand, and partly for this reason: in a studio set-up, practically, if you're going to paint in oils, you need to prepare yourself. You need to prepare the palette. It's not a spontaneous activity, whereas with watercolour, you can have the paper set up on the easels, you can add a few touches and walk away without any problem; whereas at the end of the day with oil painting you have to clean the brushes and so on. There's a lot of palaver with oil, with its different rates of drying and differing behaviours of the pigments. It's quite a heavy activity to be involved with, whereas watercolour allows endless rethinking, endless retouching and the materials are more straightforward. It's always informal and easy to get at, so I think that's very useful for me in the studio as it adds another dimension.
CP In moving from oils to watercolours, have you been able to develop your own methods or techniques from looking at Turner's work, or from reading about his practices?
CLB One of the most interesting things is the question of the support, the paper, because the watercolours I want to make are worked on over a long period. I'm not so interested in spontaneity in watercolour. I'm more interested in the idea of being able to make something which allows the accumulation of thoughts, and that really comes down to a technical question: will the paper take it? And I have the feeling that the modern papers I've been using, while pretty tough, won't take the sort of revisiting that Turner was able to bring to his watercolours, so there are some technical issues about what I want to do. I couldn't, I wouldn't dream of saying that I could add anything technically at all. I still feel myself a beginner, but what interests me is coming into a different medium and feeling the potential of this medium stretching out in front of me.
CP Does that mean that among Turner's watercolours you prefer the ones which are what we call 'finished' watercolours, ones which are quite heavily worked with many layers of paint and infinite touches, myriad strokes of paint; or do you admire as well the spontaneous ones that he simply dashed off with a few strokes of very wet watercolour?
CLB I think it's rather like playing chess. If you want to improve your game you should play the better player. The trouble is I think I understand how Turner did the later watercolours, but I've no idea how he did the great finished watercolours. They are completely intriguing, so my interest as an artist always gravitates to the more complex work. That's not to say I don't admire the late watercolours, but they are not as technically interesting for me as an artist.
In fact I always feel the bias one has grown up with in favour of Turner's later work does unbalance what he does because it seems to me that one of the reasons I'm drawn to Turner is the richness of the associations in his work. They're highly complex obviously and many-layered; in other words they're fully achieved works of art and the tendency to praise the late work seems to me to be exaggerating something which is more at the periphery of his work. I am interested to know what Turner himself thought as opposed to what I think or what our time thinks about his work. I think it's far more ... I mean, if we believe he was a great genius and one of the greatest painters, surely we should try and find out what he thought rather than risk distorting his achievement.
CP Would you like to say something about your subject-matter, possibly in connection with Turner's subjects, because your work goes far beyond the range that is associated by many people with the art of watercolour, even in Turner, i.e. topography?
CLB That's an extremely difficult question, but in trying to answer it I think one of the differences might be ... you mention topography. Topography is almost completely missing from my work, but it's replaced by my interest in symbolism, and I think symbolism in Turner is always deeply buried within the work. It's not explicit. Whereas I think in my work, in my interests in the potential of imagery, in the surrealist sense, is something that wasn't there in Turner's time, and this gives the work a different feeling, and I think my perception of what is enigmatic in painting probably wouldn't have been shared by Turner, and that leads away into a whole different subject area. I'm particularly aware of how painting itself isn't necessarily a record of the world around us, in other words- its subjectivity, and the implications of that I find intriguing and mysterious, and I think that diverges from what Turner might have thought.
CP One of the things you share with Turner is an interest in associationism, which is after all a kind of symbolism, and I think you also share an interest in classical mythology and the relationship of the classical world to the present day. Is that right?
CLB Yes, that's absolutely right, and in trying to justify those interests to myself as a young painter I always thought one should try and seek out the most central position, rather like dominating the centre of a squash court. From there you could play any ball that came at you. And of course a knowledge of classical mythology does put you in that position, and I think Turner, despite as I understand it, as a reader being to some extent self-taught, had an instinct for the central things within the culture, whether it was pictorial or literary, and that gives his work tremendous strength, and I share it in the sense that I think the implication that artists should search at the frontiers or periphery of culture is misguided. Therefore, the further implication for me is that all the connectivities enabling one's work to be read, enabling things to be transmitted across time, are likely to stem from the main branch and that is likely to be connected through classicism or mythology or other reliably enduring links.
CP Like Turner, you're very interested in print-making and it's an activity that means a lot to you, so would you like to say something about that?
CLB Working in a studio is a solitary activity, and particularly for someone who works from their imagination, so I wonder whether Turner also enjoyed the sociable aspect of working with printers. My printers have become very good friends, and I look forward to my days at the workshop working with their help when I run out of ideas on technical things, and so I should imagine that would be pretty similar, and it does become a large part of your life, partly for practical and financial reasons - it's one of the ways you earn your living. But I hugely enjoy printing; it gives me another view of my painting, and in a way it's like the watercolour - it gives you a chance to look again at what you're doing and to refresh your imagination.
CP The kind of prints that you work on are probably quite different technically from those that Turner himself made and those made after his work by professional engravers. He did his own etching and work in mezzotint (in the Liber Studiorum and its unpublished sequels), while his engravers used etching and line-engraving. You are probably using different or more recent methods?
CLB I'm not making reproductive prints or rather I'm rarely making reproductive prints. I did do one sequence of prints after Wagner where they were closely based on my paintings, but I don't use mezzotint. I tend to use aquatint or to build the plate forwards, in other words to make the plate gradually darker as opposed to working from dark to light, which is the mezzotint method. I think the principal difference is that I'm not using print for recording or reproduction; I'm using it to invent, or I'm bringing imagery from my painting and trying to extend it in print-making, so I think there probably is quite a big difference in that sense and certainly things like engraving technically and manually are skills that are beyond us these days. The bulk of my printing work is etching.
CP The display of Turner's work is constantly under discussion. Do you think he is well served in that respect at the moment and, if not, how would you like to see this improved? How do you feel about the recent introduction of works by other artists into the displays in the Clore Gallery which was, after all, set up nearly twenty years ago to show Turner's work alone?
CLB Can I say something first about the display itself? I saw this recently and in the first room, my initial reaction before I'd even had time to really think about it was that the colour of the walls was too bright and it struck me as an artist the first thing I would have done with that colour was cut it with black, because you can't have a stronger colour coming from the wall than you have from the painting. What you're trying to do is offer up the painting so that in terms of light and dark and in terms of hue it's the most interesting or richest thing on the wall, otherwise effectively it's like being out in the sun and shading your eyes so that you can see what you're looking at.
My own view is that one should be extremely careful not, as it were, to say too much with the display ( if that is possible) because ideally one would like to offer Turner to the public with the least interference with the looking. As far as showing other artists with him, I would just make the simple point that that means fewer Turners on display. Any visit to the Turner Galleries should be overwhelming, shouldn't it? There should be room after room - he can take it - the work is certainly there, and the task is to convey to the public the huge range, the monumental achievement, of Turner. You should be exhausted at the end of it and at the moment it's a decent hang but I think decency is somehow too ordinary for Turner.
CP I gather you have just come back from Venice. I wonder if that sparked off any ideas about Turner and his Venetian work, or about Turner in general?
CLB Yes, I stayed for a few days because artists had been invited to make some work to contribute to the St George's Anglican Church in Venice which is in very poor condition so we are trying to give work to help them with their appeal. But wonderfully I stayed with a gondolier, a retired gondolier and his wife, and spent a long time talking with him about his experience. One thing I realised was the condition of the water because the water's very, very choppy there. I went to the studio of the artist Fortuny, and there were beautiful photographs of Venice in 1907, 1908, and you saw how calm the water was, and I think when Turner was there the water was much, much calmer, and this makes a huge difference. When I went to the Lido, the Adriatic was calm, but the lagoon behind was choppy because of the amount of traffic, and I talked to the gondolier about this, and he said, 'Well, they've dredged a deep channel to get the tankers through; it's making the tide go faster and the water is choppy all the time because of the amount of traffic and motor boats, as we know.' The gondolas don't even venture out into the lagoon very much so I thought that means that actually physically I couldn't see what Turner saw unless I go out at four in the morning or something like that!
CP Do you have particular favourites among Turner's works, or have any of them been of particular help to you in any circumstances ever?
CLB I was asked to choose a painting when I was a first-year student that showed an example of space that particularly interested me and I chose two pictures. One was Turner's The Parting of Hero and Leander and the other, by contrast, was Richard Hamilton's Every Home must have One (you know, the one with the bodybuilder in the room), and the reason was that the Turner does extraordinary things with space and it has different vanishing points and you zoom off to the right and you zoom off to the left and you zoom off straight ahead of you, that is, the speed and varieties of recession and it's a characteristic of many other works such as Crossing the Brook. As for my favourite Turner, obviously Ulysses deriding Polyphemus is such a thumping masterpiece that it's almost inconceivable how he did it, and similarly Dido building Carthage or the beautiful cool morning light of Dido and Aeneas. But recently I'm most touched by Frosty Morning. Partly because of the colour. It's a very sophisticated painting that seems to have personal and family memories that point to something seen and remembered. It's just a very, very extraordinary picture which somehow stands outside of the tradition. It's not properly a Dutch picture; it's not an Italian picture; it just stands alone.
CP That seems an odd picture to have chosen, because - for most people - it doesn't exactly appear to illustrate Turner as the greatest colourist of all time, does it?
CLB Well I think it does, you see, because part of being the greatest colourist is tact and control and observation, and one of the hugely distorting aspects of modernism has been the so-called liberation of colour. Now, I was taught that Turner was the artist who liberated colour as a thing in itself, and if you accept that, the argument flows perfectly seamlessly into the so-called liberation of form and material of Carl Andre and Donald Judd. This is plausible but superficial (and tends to diminish the particular strengths of painting itself ). If you liberate colour from form, you cut it off from its roots- it becomes possibly more spectacular but less emotive. I think the problem, or the issue for painters, is to connect colour with form and that's what you see in Frosty Morning, and of course it initially appears rather down, not very colourful, but in fact it is deeply colourful. Bright reds, yellows and blues are not colourful they're somehow theoretical, with a roughness about them like turning up the volume, and that has an effect on meaning and association and evocation. But when you get colour right and it sits with form and memory, then you reveal all the associations they naturally attend. Red, blue and yellow can kill associations and just present sensation and physical material. That's on the fringes of art, it's not in the centre.
CP It's extremely interesting that you say that, because, after all, Turner himself translated his own colours into black and white engravings with infinite nuances and gradations of tone. He dragooned his engravers into getting it absolutely right, and there is no colour there at all, but there are the associations and the poetry. Do you think since Turner's day people have had the wrong attitude and wrong reactions to colour?
CLB I think there's a tendency to treat colour like medicine. In other words, primary colours are good for you and tertiary colours are positively bad. I think this is wrong. Primary colours are just the theoretical basis of colour - and they are what you find in the tube. But what one tries to do on the basis of that is to explore the subtlety of colour. That is in the subtle warm cool shifts in nature, and that is the issue, to perceive that. There are implications in this for the education of children. Often the colour environment for children, I think, is too bright and busy, it's adults associating bright primary colour with a sort of spiritual or mental health. Turner actually teaches the opposite. The eye is a very sensitive instrument. On the basis of understanding primary colours, he goes into the furthest and lightest nuances of combination which gets us down into secondaries and tertiaries and glazing and endless subtleties, and that's where the heart of it lies. It's too easy to somehow strip-mine colour and take out red, blue, yellow, green, orange and make bright contrasts. That tends to cause terrific damage, in a sense, to our perception of nature. Everything Turner does - and you see this in Ruskin's response to it - is constructive and investigative and truthful somehow about how we are in the world, because we're certainly not primary coloured creatures.
