New aspects of one of our most admired Old Timers eloquently expressed & nicely illustrated by the knowledgeable George Shackelford. Thank you. I see new things & make new connections after watching this introductory lecture to the Kimball Art Museum exhibition.

One doesn’t simply get tired of Turner… I could spend my whole life looking at his watercolors really, so beautiful, full of emotions and thoughts, and within each of them you can see so many carefully crafted details that if you don’t spend a good enough time studying each painting you wouldn’t see, and given how loose and difficult the medium is needing drying up and how if you mess up just a tiny bit you would loose the effect of the light or the effect of a shadow, it’s just amazing. How terrible it is to die for such a gifted man, being a master of picture making like he was. Now, God spoke that making a picture of the things in heaven, earth or of the deep is sin, but not when it comes to Turner, and damn God if I have to be damned for liking such a thing but after all He is my maker and so He put the love for beauty into me, and Turner truly made beauty all his life. Beautiful presentation by the way, I enjoyed it quite a bit, I just don’t get tired of presentations and documentaries or movies about Turner. I think Turner is probably the painter who achieved his life to near perfection. He just kept improving as opposed to many artists setting in one place doing the same thing over and over again. He was a master of optical illusion, a master of visual poetry, he was wealthy, famous, traveled throughout Europe, painted tens of thousands of pictures for us to marvel at, gave everything to his nation making sure everything would be preserved and everything would be accessible for the world to see… he accomplished his life to the fullest. I wish that from his 200 years being departed from this earth he knows we are talking about him still today and of his work and that he feels joyful about it as much as one like me feels so joyful to marvel at his brush strokes. I’m not even a painter, I’m not good enough for it, nor any arts really but man does JMW Turner inspires. I should feel jealous but I can’t, the feeling of appreciation overwhelms the grief I have to wish I was such a person with so much to create masterfully and being interesting and relevant. His works are eternal, they live within me anyways, not as much as they lived with the artist himself but they live in my mind for sure. The picture of the angel and the sword is definitely the judgment of Christ. Don’t know the date of the picture but perhaps seeing Michelangelos paintings in Rome inspired him with creating a piece for himself, I would bet a good dollar on that one. I think Turner was pretty close to his Bible, he knew he was creating idols and that he would have to die for it, it was his destiny to be a special folk, totally worth it for the rest of humanity, for me at least anyways, his death wasn’t in vain when you see the works his hands made. Nothing but love for the man. No doubt many felt what I feel about Turner and how people ended up pissing him off with praises and solicitations, forcing him to withdraw in solace, I feel him hard.

37:22 - Smokestack. Howlin' Wolf, 'Smokestack lightning' is the perfect soundtrack for studying that painting closely. That song, as a whole, echoes a huge amount of what this lecture suggests both as image and as social context. As Central Londoner, familiar with walking, cycling, and river trips along Thames, I know the area, its light, and moods, very well. One fact rarely acknowledged: East and Southeast London had more manufacturing industry and heavy commerce than all of the so-called industrial heartlands of UK put together

Wonderful presentation! Thank you!

Fantastic, fantastic lecture.

Thankyou for a very interesting and informative video!

38:30 - I see that, or almost exactly that image almost every morning from 6am in many different light and weather conditions when I do my daily 80 minute walk. Now, from Shooters Hill or Greenwich Park, we have a surreal vista like the cover of a paperback science fiction book. Canary Wharf area tower blocks for global banks, The Shard, Gherkin, Cheese grater, further away the old Post Office Tower. Dawn, noon, evening light and weather, especially when fog reveals just tops of skyscrapers. Temperature inversions wher you get a layer of cloud so you see both the ground levels and the tops but a strip of low cloud as a smear across the 'picture'. Turner nailed it and prefigured it as the changes began. We don't have the ships. The Docks, both Pool of London and Royal Docks are for waterside residential blocks and cafés, maybe the odd triathlon. Docks are containerized and downriver at Tilbury

40 - Compare and contrast Turner's excitement with the new, steam-powered world of heavy industry dominating nature versus Tolkein, barely 60 years later, wistful about rural rim of industrial Birmingham before he moved further into town and his rural idyll (Shire) was enveloped by the city. For Tolkein, what excited Turner became the stuff of Saruman and Sauron, Orthanc and Mordor

Vanishing on a verticle surface, sounds hard!

Enjoyed the listen, Cheers !

great

36 min: cartoonist almost certainly hinting at the lady enjoying the shaking of the steam packet

Is there any evidence for the cockney accent claim? He spent around ten years with his broad Devonian accented father before being sent (from Covent Garden) out of London to live. It is recorded that he never adopted cosmopolitan manners or speech, but the standard speech of the lower classes nationaly in the late 1700s would have been closer to rural/provincial of the South West or East Anglia than the accent than Cockney as we know it today.

Where is the Kimball Art Museum?

too many paintings can't take it all in