Turner: Painting Light, Not Things, a Century Before Abstraction

There is a painter who, at the start of the nineteenth century, was already doing what painting would officially grow into only a hundred years later — William Turner. On his late canvases ships, sea and sky dissolve into a vortex of light until you can no longer tell where the object ends and the radiance begins. His contemporaries said “soapsuds”, “unfinished”. He was simply painting not things but what lies between them — light and air. And that is why he is close to me: he understood before anyone else that the true hero of a painting is invisible.

Light cannot be touched and cannot be drawn “as it is” — it has no outline. Yet it is light that decides what you feel in front of a canvas. Turner put light at the centre and let go of everything else.

What he saw

Turner saw that matter is temporary and light is constant. Rocks, ships, figures exist for as long as light falls on them. Take the light away — and nothing remains; give it free rein — and it eats the contours, leaving pure radiance. He painted storms, fogs, sunrises, fires — states in which the world stands on the edge of dissolving, where form is about to pass into pure energy.

And he did it bodily: before his vortex of light you are pulled in, you lose your footing as in a real storm. He was after the sublime — a meeting with a force greater than a human being. Here he and I stand on the same ground. When I build light in a work, I know that it is the light, not the object, that will switch a state on in you. Form is only a reason for light to pause.

Where his model is not complete for me

But Turner dissolved everything in light and left you inside an element — beautiful, enormous and indifferent. His light is a force of nature: it takes your breath away, but it does not address you personally. The ship sinks, the sun burns, the human being is small. Sublime — and lonely.

I am not correcting him — he painted the truth about the power of the world, and painted it with genius. There is no ideal model, and his would not have become mine even if we matched in every brushstroke. My map simply draws its light from a different source. Turner’s light comes from outside — from a sun, a fire, a sky that are indifferent to you. My light comes from a portal, from what gives birth to the soul — it is aimed at you and it is about you. Turner showed light as an element before which a person vanishes. I show light as a state in which a person creates. Both are light; the question is whether it dissolves you or gathers you.

What this means for you

Honestly, with no promises: light on a canvas will not literally warm you and will not heal anything. I am not selling “light therapy”.

But what Turner saw, you have tested hundreds of times. The same courtyard presses down on you in grey light, and at sunset it suddenly aches and lifts. The courtyard has not changed — the light has, and your state with it. Light is in charge, even though it is “not there” on the canvas. The only question is what kind of light fills the things around you — accidental or chosen, dissolving or gathering.

And still

A hundred years ahead of everyone, Turner let go of form and trusted the light — mocked, and alone. That was the courage of a discoverer.

I suggest turning his discovery one step further: let light not only swallow the world but point out a direction within it. Look at the light through your window right now — what is it doing to you? Turner proved that it is light, not things, that leads you. I only want that light to lead you towards yourself, not dissolve you.

The work behind this essay — “Joy” →

— Evgeny Fleysher