Homer Jackson

The Fourth Plinth, Trafalgar Square

I made my first rail trip up to London in over two years a couple of weeks ago. It still seems strange to consider something as mundane as a train journey as a risky experience, but Covid numbers have started to climb again, and yet virtually nobody was wearing a mask in what turned out to be quite a crowded train, all of us sitting in carriages in which any attempt to mandate empty seating space between passengers has lapsed. Surely the connection between these things doesn't really need pointing out, does it? Or maybe it does, not least to the guy with a persistent cough seated somewhere near the front of my carriage. I felt sorry for anyone sitting next to him.

I was accompanying my partner, who was catching a Eurostar connection to an academic gig in Paris. I didn't feel like tagging along, as I have done in the past, but did think it was time finally to venture into the capital before everything is shut down again. To be honest, the whole Covid experience has made me quite travel-averse, despite being up to date with my booster shots and, after two years, now taking elementary precautions as a matter of habit; my hands have never been so clean! So instead I arranged to meet up with a friend at the National Gallery who had expressed an interest in seeing the exhibition of paintings by Winslow Homer on show there.

Apart from the one very famous but slightly hysterical picture of a man in a damaged boat being menaced by large sharks and an oncoming storm, I was more or less unaware of the work of this American painter, and I get the impression that I'm not unusual in that regard. Unlike, say, Norman Rockwell or Andrew Wyeth, his renown as a "realist" painter seems not to have travelled much outside North America, and I had no real idea of what to expect. But the reviews were enthusiastic and it was a good enough excuse finally to catch a train to London.

Actually, some of the reviews were ecstatic:

I neared the end of the Metropolitan Museum’s grave and vital Winslow Homer exhibition shaken by its accumulation of tragedy, struggle and catastrophe. And then I encountered a large painting that overwhelmed me with a climactic rush of dread. My heart accelerated, my eyes welled up and I tried to turn away from a scene that was both inconsequential and epic.

Ariella Budick, Financial Times April 20 2022

Crikey! I know climate change is happening fast, but outbreaks of Stendhal Syndrome in Trafalgar Square? This is getting serious.

Despite the enthusiasm of the professional reviewers, I have to say that – apart from one or two large canvases ("The Veteran in a New Field", for example), some of his Civil War paintings (which reminded me of nothing so much as the gruesome Civil War bubble gum cards we used to collect in primary school), as well as the very different work done while Homer was living at Cullercoats on the English north-east coast – I really could not see what all the fuss was about. As another friend commented, a lot of it is borderline kitsch. There is also a sublimated eroticism running through the work that, once noticed, is hilarious: at least, that was our reaction, confronted by yet more women in clinging wet clothing, this time rescued from the waves by posturing WASP-y hunks in trunks. And, no, that wasn't the one that caused Ariella Budick's "climactic rush of dread".

When it comes to paintings worth travelling to London to see, I expect at the very least to admire bravura technique, but Homer's work in oils could mostly be described as rough to the point of slapdash (Jonathan Jones, despite reviewing the show favourably in the Guardian, called it "clunky"), and for a "realist" his rendering tends to the perfunctory – he seems to have been less interested in surfaces, or indeed people, than in shapes. Curiously, he could handle the far more tricky medium of watercolour rather better. In the end, it seemed to me that some good illustrative work – the sort of thing that would work well reproduced in a magazine alongside a short story or feature – was being over-scrutinised for its comment-worthy metaphorical content at the expense of its actual achievement as painting. Take that famous one, "The Gulf Stream": is the Black man in the leaky boat menaced by sharks and an approaching waterspout really a comment on racism in America? Are those by any chance "great white" sharks? (Actually, no, they're not). Well, yes, you can certainly choose to read it that way; but it could equally well be seen as an overwrought scenario of multivalent peril, from which the only possible hope of rescue is by some comic-book superhero, or indeed by the ship appearing over the horizon in the background. It would be a decent illustration to "Gripping Yarns of the Caribbean", but is poor stuff, to my eye, as a painting.

Quite what was intended by the exhibition's subtitle, "A Force of Nature", in particular, seems mysterious to me, assuming the "A" refers to Homer himself. These are not the paintings of some tempestuous wild man, channelling nature's power like a human turbine; they are mainly rather static scenes taking place at the ocean's edge, or on placid inland waters, or even on genteel croquet lawns. The rather unconvincingly-painted ocean waves do rise up in solid-looking peaks, it's true, but he seems less interested in "natural forces" than the semi-silhouettes of things like umbrellas or long skirts blowing in the wind. So I was underwhelmed, shall we say, and felt we had been sold a false prospectus by the reviews. But, then again, I was also glad not to feel the need to stay in the exhibition rooms for very long, as it meant there would be more time for catching up with an old friend over coffee in the gallery's restaurant.

Oak and Beetles

(Kurt Jackson, 2018)

A rather safer and, as it turned out, more satisfying recent excursion was to Kurt Jackson's travelling exhibition "Biodiversity", currently at Southampton City Art Gallery, but due to close at the end of this month before moving on. For some while I've been in receipt of his emailed newsletter, and it was a reminder in the most recent one that prompted me to make a Saturday afternoon visit to the show before it was too late. Who is Kurt Jackson? Well, he is at least two unusual things: a scientist (well, OK, a zoologist) who became an artist, and a decent artist who has managed to turn himself into a brand without the preening self-regard of others who have managed the same trick. I doubt his work is rated highly, if at all, by the sort of critic or gallerist who has dizzy spells over Winslow Homer – the national newspapers haven't deigned to review "Biodiversity" so far – but he is popular, prolific, and an activist in some very laudable causes (although being court painter to the Glastonbury Festival strikes me as a dubious honour, these days). Rather than go on, I'll link you to his website, where the full range of his work and activities is on show. There's also a nice appreciation of Kurt here.

Now, my previous acquaintance with Jackson's work was almost entirely based on print (I have a couple of his books), and online viewing. As I'm sure I've said before, an awful lot of the painting I enjoy, like an awful lot of the photography, has only ever been seen by me (and is, in my experience, often best seen) in reproduction. The things that turn on true fans of paint – transparency, impasto, brush strokes, imposing size, and all that – can only be experienced when stood before the Real Thing, but that's not an experience many of us have in our formative years. Like any small-town kid with an interest in art, I grew up looking at colour reproductions in Sunday colour supplements and the glossy black paperbacks of Thames & Hudson's "History of Art" series. In my mind, all famous Renaissance paintings, for example, were about as big as a 1000-piece jigsaw; I knew they weren't really that small, obviously, but it was still quite a shock the first time I stood in front of the gigantic originals. Anyway, one surprise in store for me at the City Art Gallery was that some of Kurt Jackson's paintings are very big indeed, and others are really quite small. In reproduction, it's hard to tell which is which.

Oak and Beetles, up close...

As they say, it's not size that matters, but what you do with it (settle down at the back, I'm talking about painting). Working on a large scale does give Jackson the space to work freely with his favoured splatter and impasto techniques, and the sheer quantity of paint on a large support a couple of metres wide is impressive in itself. Standing with your nose close to a very large painting made by flinging paint at a large canvas out of doors is a very different experience to seeing it reproduced in a book, not unlike "pixel peeping" a digital image at 100% on a screen. I must admit I found myself seriously wondering, how much did something like this cost to produce? How much does it weigh? Can you buy oil paint by the gallon, like emulsion paint? Maybe this is emulsion paint? Take a few steps back, of course, and the thing comes together as a picture, not unlike the one in the catalogue, just a lot bigger and more ... bumpy. It's nice to be in the presence of the Real Thing, but "Oak and Beetles" above is not particularly large (roughly 60cm square), and to own the original will cost you £8,500. So I'm happy with my own snaps, and the small, un-bumpy version in the catalogue, which gives you everything in the show for just £25.

Mind you, if it's big paintings you're after, as in BIG, Anselm Kiefer is your man. He's an engaging character, in that mischievous-but-sincere Germanic vein exemplified by Werner Herzog, and there are various videos online of him at work: here's a nice one talking about his chosen materials, which include straw and a machete (and in which he reveals his talent as a cowherd; who knew?). I like Kiefer's work a lot (as I'm sure he'll be glad to hear) but I have never quite forgiven the hangers of the 2018 Royal Academy Open Exhibition for what they did to some of that year's successful entrants, whose works were used as a sort of frame and cordon sanitaire around one of Kiefer's more modestly-sized works. If I'm ever selected again for the RA Open – so far it's been 1 out of 5 (or 2 out of 5 if "shortlisted" counts as 0.5) – I just hope they don't put me at "binoculars only" height. What would be the point?