Just mud and water

click photo to enlarge
"There is nothing ugly; I never saw an ugly thing in my life: for let the form of an object be what it may - light, shade, and perspective will always make it beautiful."
John Constable (1776-1837), English landscape painter

People, in general, have little hesitation in pronouncing things "beautiful" - a person, some flowers, a sunset, an upland landscape - all will readily be awarded the title. Nor too, do people shrink from bestowing the word "ugly" - a graffiti-covered facade, overflowing bins, a weed-strewn urban wasteland, or a dead fox by the side of the road would all invariably be thought so. But John Constable said he'd never seen anything that is ugly. How do we account for this?

It certainly isn't anything to do with today's world compared with Constable's. What we would call ugly certainly existed in his time, possibly more so. No, it's more to do with what we see when we look at the world. The eye of the painter (and the photographer) looks at the world in the same way as everyone else, but often sees it in a different way. One of the principal aims of these people is to see the extraordinary in the ordinary, the marvellous in the mundane, and the beautiful in the "ugly". Sometimes it's difficult to explain why a photograph (or a painting) looks the way it does: to say why, in the eyes of some it is "boring", "simple", "empty" or "nothing". I can see those words being levelled at this photograph. After all, it shows just mud and water. Yet from the moment I saw this particular piece of estuary, revealed by the receding tide, I liked it. I'd hesitate to call my photograph beautiful, but I do think it has a certain attraction. I suppose what I like is the contrast between the "substance" of the flat, glistening mud and the dark, angular shadows of its broken edge, with the smooth, only slightly rippled sheen of the water. I like, too, the ragged line going up the centre of the image, and the way it curves away into almost nothing in the fog. I'm pleased by how the foreground mud and inlet give the composition a base, and I appreciate the tonality across the photograph.

Now, all that sounds a touch pretentious! But then trying to explain in detail what you like about a painting or a photograph sometimes tends to veer in that direction. Yet, it's worth enduring the risible remarks it can provoke because giving voice in this way adds more to our understanding than just applying the over-worked, over-rated, and frequently wrong epithets, "beautiful" and "ugly"!

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 45mm (90mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f5.6
Shutter Speed: 1/200
ISO: 200
Exposure Compensation: -0.3 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Above us only sky

click photo to enlarge

From the mid -eighteenth century, through painters like Richard Wilson (1713 - 1782), Thomas Gains- borough (1727 - 1788) and Alexander Cozens (1717 - 1786), English landscape painting found its feet. Yet, their art still shows that century's belief in man's superiority over nature, and the idea that it can and must be "improved". It was the group of artists who followed them - Thomas Girtin (1775-1802), John Crome (1768-1821), John Sell Cotman (1782-1842), J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851) and, pre-eminently, John Constable (1776-1837), who cast aside this mindset in pursuit of the natural world as they found it, and created "a prodigious flowering of landscape painting in England, unparalleled in any one country on the Continent."

Drawing his inspiration from Titian backgrounds, the work of Rubens and Dutch landscape painters, as well as the English artists of that earlier generation, Constable painted scenes from around his home in Suffolk. Cottages, barns, trees, ruins, waggons and horses - all were worthy subjects in his view. However, his interpretations were mediated by an English sensibility and depend for their power on his rendering of the changing English sky. Constable called the sky "the keynote" of a landscape painting. He gave much of his energy to capturing the fleeting beauty of clouds and light at different times of day and different seasons. The lessons he learned from his cloud studies were transferred into his major paintings. Constable's skies are suffused with the variations that come from weather that originates over the Atlantic, is moderated by passing above our small island, and is further changed by never being far from the influence of the sea. These qualities can be seen in paintings such as Weymouth Bay (1816), Brighton Beach with Colliers (1824), Hadleigh Castle (1829), The Valley Farm (1835), or Norham Castle (1835-40).

Today some people appreciate Constable's work for its depiction of an idyllic, English countryside that has either disappeared or changed, except for in a few corners of our land. But, whilst Constable was not insensitive to the beauty of the English landscape of his time, he simply painted what he saw. In 1820 it was a haywain by a farm and stream: if he had been painting today I'd like to think it would have been a bright red combine harvester passing over a field of ripe, yellow wheat! And, whilst Constable would not have recognised this piece of modern farm machinery, he most certainly would recognise and celebrate the wonderful clouds drifting over these flat, Lincolnshire Fenland fields.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 40mm (80mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/1600
Exposure Compensation: -0.3 EV
Image Stabilisation: On