Sublime STate

The iridescent glow of burning darkness, burning worlds, burning canvas. My heart skips a beat, skips up and down with startled joy, jumps up to my throat. Too dramatic, too show-offish, too bright, too huge. Love it!

I take in the whole room. Paintings upon paintings, too huge, too dramatic, too many. I find myself moving backwards and forwards in front of each work, sometimes ending up with my back leaning against the opposite wall (and still I’m too close to see it all), sometimes almost touching the little details which give little hint of (or maybe: “a little hint to...”) the big picture.

Entitled “Sublime”, the room itself is such a sublime landscape, exaggeratingly impressive, huge, vulgarly awe-inspiring.

The burning darkness is fluorescently orange; I do wonder how one can squeeze such a color out of oil paints. Mountains scarred with painstaking detail roll and shudder and collapse, stand on edges at dizzyingly impossible angles and hover in a perpetual suggestion of movement. A hair-thin lightning bolt of infinitely white paint points the eye to the bottomless pit of eternal damnation, pitch black and falling out of the painting, somewhere below. The little people that fall with it are barely noticeable – this is more of a metaphorical abstraction of terror than a vision of real human suffering. A pleasurable terror – at least for the viewer – as a panel in the room describes the sublime. Apparently, though, this is all in accordance with the vision from the Apocalypse – where mountains were moved from their positions and humongous fires danced with orange too bright, too bright.

Such luminous silver! A drop of bloody sun drowns in the quietly roaring sea (for the night and the sea are quiet even in their roar; and a painting is quieter still, despite its eternal roar of light and shadow). Fog pours down from the sky in perpendicular torrents that slice the eerie moon in half. Like in The Great Day of His Wrath, the figures are only secondary to the scenery. But here they warrant a little more compassion on my part. The painting is entitled The Deluge, and the name refers to the biblical flood of Noah and the dove. Yes, Noah and the dove – such is the iconography I am used to. Childish animals lined up all in a row, pairs of giraffes and lions painted by people who had never seen any. Or rainbows, white wings and beaks of olive branches. What one forgets is that the flood allegedly killed all save Noah’s family. A story of hope and a compassionate God, indeed! Danby’s work, with all its pomp and glory, stays truer to the story.

Three-meter tall painted cliffs are slightly too much... Lost in the mist of light reflected off oil paint, hung another half a meter above your head, James Ward’s Gordale Scar will always be more impressive than beautiful. I like the geometric patterns of the painted rocks and the minuscule, twenty-centimeter cows you can actually come up to and comprehend.

Some of the works are of rather smaller format. Take John Brett’s Glacier of Rosenlaui. Just a landscape. No deluge, no last judgment, no battle. Not even much of a mountain range, only some snow and pebbles. But the little pebbles bore themselves into my insides with all the drama of the last judgment. Nothing is ever that realistic. Pebbles blur before your eyes, be it in fog or in bright sunlight; and if the pebbles don’t blur, the snow behind them does. But these pebbles, this snow – they just are. Oh yes, there is the sublime in the pre-Raphaelites’ hyperrealism – in the monumentality of a pebble and a blade of grass.

I bend my fingers in all directions and am truly afraid I shall break them. John Everett Millais’s Dew-Drenched Furze manages to be misty and clear at once, red and green, calming and finger-breaking.

I had never really appreciated Dante Gabriel Rosetti that much. Millais was more to my taste, with his crisply cut flower buds and blades of grass, and Rosetti’s crayon-colored odes to Christianity seemed overrated by comparison. His Beata Beatrix was in my view no exception. Yes, a pretty woman, but not much more, really. That just goes to show that reproductions and originals are two different things – for this Beatrix was something much more than a pretty woman. Drenched in sunlight squeezed into a shimmering halo by an otherwise commonplace bridge behind her head, flanked by two figures of an intense mysteriousness, her face seemed to reflect just the sublime feelings I had been experiencing here. Which isn’t exactly a good thing, as the sublime vision she was experiencing was the vision of her own imminent death.

Yes, it’s all cheap pomp and meaningless drama. No, wait, it isn’t. It’s the sublime beauty of a mountain range, a storm at sea, a sunset. The beauty’s there, no matter how kitsch repetition has made it. And how glad I am to be child enough to be moved by it!