My Little Monster

The artist Joseph Mallord William Turner (1755-1851) was a gifted badass. Painter, printmaker, water-colourist, sketcher—he became a student at the prestigious Royal Academy in London when he was just fourteen. He got famous as an artist while he was still a young man, made tons of art and lots of money (with his art, yes, but also by investing in real estate and other schemes). He pissed off his rivals, had a couple of scandalous love affairs, traveled, and sketched, and painted, and traveled, and sketched, and painted some more, then died peacefully, asleep in his own bed. 

Turner was dubbed Prince of the Rocks for the dramatic, dynamic way he painted landscapes (and seascapes). He most certainly captured the sublime in his towering alpine cliffs, or in the towering ocean waves that seem to bound off the canvas. You can practically hear the ocean crashing into the rocks. I can get lost in his paintings for days.

Fishermen at Sea,  by JMW Turner

That's just what I did this past summer, when the Frist Art Museum here in Nashville finally re-opened for socially-distanced, masked patrons. The Turner exhibition had been held over from spring, with many pieces on loan from the Tate in London. I went to see the show twice, and each time I walked each of the galleries twice, doubling back to look again at a favorite, or just to marvel at something I hadn't seen—really seen—the first time through. Honestly, there could never be enough time to truly see everything in all those paintings. 

The exhibit included many famous works—endless mountains and waves, monumental oil paintings, sweet watercolors, open sketchbooks. It was overwhelming. But during both visits my mind fastened on an unfinished painting that looks more like a work of abstract expressionism than it does a Romantic seascape. The canvas is covered in an ethereal, swirling yellow; there's some pink, some grey-blue, some red and orange, and it's just, well, beautifully misty and sunny at once. 

JMW Turner's Sunrise with Sea Monsters

"Turner seems to paint with tinted steam, so evanescent and so airy," wrote his contemporary, John Constable (according to the curator's notes). 

And nowhere was that more evident than in Turner's Sunrise with Sea Monsters, with its yellow-pink-grey-blue-red-orange "tinted steam," and, at the bottom, some dark swirls just beginning to look like fish or whales. Or the face of an underwater dragon. 

No one seems to know for sure what Turner had planned for this canvas. I'm fine with not knowing. I like it the way it is. An unfinished canvas is so very human, a perpetual work in progress.

I also love this painting because, on any given day, who doesn't have some little monster tucked away in the bottom of their psyche? Some kind of worry or long-carried grief. Some obsession. 

Or some physical malady, perhaps, quiescent for now. 

Maybe, like...oh...I dunno...late stage cancer? Because when you live in Cancerland, sometimes even in the most escapist of Romantic painters, you still see the work through the lens of your cancer. Because once you have cancer, or even have had cancer, sometimes it's hard not to make everything a fucking metaphor for your fucking cancer. 

Like maybe you're floating your little boat in the night through the rocks of the Cancerland Sea, grieving yet another recent loss of a lovely friend to the disease, or even the death of an acquaintance, a cancer compadre you "knew" on Facebook (both of which happened in the last few weeks). And you're afraid, very afraid of your little dinghy being smashed to pieces, of the sharks circling. 

But then, you step into another painting, and just like that, it's morning. All around you there's light. The rocks and the monsters are still there, of course. But now so is this swirling, misty yellow-grey-pink-blue-red-orange light, wrapping you in a kind of benediction. Like every sunrise inviting you (and your little monster) toward it, through the rocks and mist, into another imperfect day of an unfinished life in your imperfect, dynamic body. And you are grateful.