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* * * Turner’s Yellow In “The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons” J.M.W. Turner may as well have dipped his brush in the flames racing across a prairie’s acres, his canvas gives off that much heat, the same sulfurous haze blurring, scumbling my Midwest, his Thames, the blaze that starts, the wind that carries it until everything’s molten on the artist’s brush, the fire runs away from the torch that set it. Turner’s yellow. Is it any wonder the artist tried to rein it in, taming it to gild a river’s surface, then turning it bronze as the sun seen through mist? Bridge, tower, he must have said, as if to keep from disappearing what he could still recognize through the smoke surrounding the boat from which he watched Parliament burn. Witness. As he claimed he was later aboard another ship, in a blizzard so fierce he knew he’d be swept away if not lashed to the mast. Four hours he was bound, he said, not expecting to live, but determined to record it if he did. What? Not wind exactly or waves. Not only the jaundiced light about to be snuffed out, says his brush. Hostage to no form, what rages at gale force held him. But longing to make a home for it in the visible world, Turner called his painting “Snow Storm—Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth making Signals in Shallow Water, and going by the Lead. The Author was in this Storm on the Night the Ariel left Harwich.” Thinking of Goethe’s color wheel, the sun that’s a fireball, I imagine how Turner must have begun a painting—needing like me to burn away what grows up unwanted, weedy, making it harder and harder to see the horizon. With the idea of starting over I begin as if I were lighting a backfire that’s slow to catch, downwind, thinking creek, bluff, road, ditch, careful to contain the burn. At this point wouldn’t Turner still be hearing the carriages outside his studio windows? A theater of vendors, clocks striking the hour, then critics, children he’d prefer not to remember, the racket getting louder, then harsher— who can bear it he thinks— until the wind shifts and the Author’s alone with a canvas, his landscape, nothing to stop the headfire blazing within. * * * |
