Paint, Old and New

Sept. 16

The National Gallery, like so many of the world’s top museums, has far more than you can see in one day, so I confined myself to the 17th century, and a little bit of the 16th.

I spent close to four hours in the museum.

There is a special exhibition of paintings and drawings by a conemporary artist, George Shaw, who takes inspiration from the Renaissance and later masters. His work focuses on woodland scenes. 

Shaw has been studying the masters in the National gallery since he was a teenager. He’s about 50 now. 

He has some kind of fellowship that lets him work in a studio at the museum.

There are almost never any people in his pictures (though there is one called “Call of Nature” that shows a man, possibly the painter himself, pissing on a tree trunk with his back to the viewer).

The scenes, however, mainly show what people left behind. 

It’s amazing what this man can get out of  tree trunks and trash. The Guardian reviewed the exhibition, “My Back to Nature,” when it opened in May. You can see samples of his work there.

The paintings combine an almost photographic realism with softer touches. For instance, there will be sharply detailed renderings of bark and scattered beer cans on the ground with vague, unreadable labels.

Some compositions show the base of a tree with torn pages from a skin magazine discarded in front of it. 

A short film runs in the exhibit. I watched it twice. 

He talks about Titian’s “Actaeon Surprising Diana.” The hunter has pulled back a veil or curtain that was hanging on a limb and sees Diana and her companions naked in the bath. He pays dearly for it, but that’s a matter for another painting.

As he discusses the Titian, he starts chuckling. “It’s like a ‘Carry On” film,” he says.

Another painting in the museum shows an orgy with drunks and satyrs. All kinds of party debris, masks, clothes, wine jugs, and the like, are lying on the ground.

His paintings, he says, are much like this, but take place only after all the characters leave and only their stuff remains behind. Sort of a ghost presence of a wild time.

Some of the paintings, which I found intriguingly uncanny, include a blue tarp, something a homeless person might use for shelter from rain. It is always rendered in careful detail, its drape and wrinkles clearly defined. 

The effect of most of Shaw’s paintings verges on the dreamlike. He uses a household enamel, which can give the finished surface a touch of glitter.

They wouldn’t let me take photos, and it’s just as well. 

A concession sells professionally done postcards of the exhibition, but they can’t catch the spirit of the real thing. 

I noticed the same thing happens, at least for me, with Van Gogh. 

I was never a Van Gogh fan until I saw the originals in Amsterdam. The paintings reproduced in a book were not the same, not even close. They had lost all their sensuous and spontaneous texture.

As for the title of the show, “My Back to Nature,” Shaw says he does ignore nature. He reads books, looks at paintings. He tells the interviewer in the film, “I find a painting of a tree more exciting than a tree.”

I can’t explain why, but yeah, his trees are pretty engaging.

I only found one Rembrandt, an early painting with a religious theme, “Anna and the Blind Tobit,” which is mostly black.

There were several Van Dycks. There is an attractive presence and personality in the faces rendered by the Dutch Masters. Larry once put it into a nutshell: After you see the paintings in the Rijksmuseum, it’s as if you know those people.

There are all kinds of things going on in those paintings—the antics of the narrative, texture, color, composition—but when I come away, the deepest impression is the faces of the people.

There are several canvases by Rubens, and some of them fooled me. When I first saw them from across the room, I thought they were by Caravaggio.

There are other paintings, too, that show heavy influence of Caravaggio. The labels next to many of the paintings acknwowledge that influence.

Caravaggio went out and got regular people from the street to serve as his models. The faces are often ruddy, rugged, and weathered. The expressions are intense.

You know “The Boy Bitten by the Lizard” has the hell shocked out of him.

Maybe Caravaggio set the direction that was picked up in the faces of the Dutch. 

There was an 18th century painting by Canaletto, “Venice: the Basin of San Marco on Ascension Day.” It shows boats gathering for a ritual in which the Doge goes to sea on a huge golden barge and throws a wedding ring into the Adriatic. It symbolizes Venice’s marriage to the sea.

The work is a few square feet, but the amount of detail is phenomenal. It’s as if each golden ornament on each ship is painted individually. Just drop after drop of gilt paint. 

I stopped at a pub in Bloomsbury called the Plough. It’s on Little Russell Street, right next to the Cartoon Museum.

The menu is identical to the one at the Swan, because they are both owned by a company called Taylor Walker, which apparently runs pubs all over the country.

They had a couple of taps I hadn’t tried before. 

One was a session ale, Dead Pony Club, from a brewer called Brewdog. Session ales are pleasant. I find they share the hint of a flavor that may be due to the malt and to the relatively low alcohol content. Or to my imagination.

The other was Sharp’s Doom Bay, an amber ale that had a touch of sweetness, but not so much that I wouldn’t order it again. 

I also had another Tribute Cornish pale ale.

My order of fish and chips was lost in the kitchen, so everybody apologized and the last two beers were on the house.

Be well, all.

Harry