How Petunias and William Mallard Turner Saved My Life

Petunias and the Era of Romanticism

Sometime this spring, bright purple flowers began to appear in my driveway growing in the gravel, all on their own. All summer— in the suffocating heat — they bloomed in a bright and joyful cadence of purples and pinks. Appearing first in sprigs of one or two, within weeks they had proliferated to form a beautiful strip running along the length of the carport and filling a wooden barrel. With no help from me – no water, no careful planting of seeds – these petunias persisted. They surprised and delighted me as they grew in a difficult environment, transforming a strip of gravel into a colorful, lush garden.

As I contemplated art and history to determine a period in which the artwork most appeals to me, I thought of these petunias, the things in my life that I find beautiful, and William Mallard Turner.

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My friends have always known me to be a \”hopeless romantic.\” I love floral prints, the French country cottage style and rich colors, tones and textures in fabrics. I love the contrast of the elegant mixed with rustic found in French country styles, and I love to mix rich fabrics like satins and prints with common fabrics like denim. This sense of style also spills over into the artwork I most enjoy, (but many times cannot afford.) I splurged a few years back on a $400 oil painting of a soft yellow French country cottage by a local artist, J. Ivar Chilman that now hangs in my kitchen.

My favorite books are romantic in nature too. The History of Love, by Nicole Krauss is an all-time favorite. I am currently reading Loving Frank by Nancy Horan. I have met both artists in person. I also love the music of composers like Beethoven, Mozart and others. There is a contemporary piece of music, with several notes from a harp, that I often play over and over, just to hear the way the harp strings sound. Those notes carry me away.

As I thought about all of these things, a common thread began to emerge. It was a quality of colors and space, the expressive line meandering through a painting, its curves reaching out to grab my soul as if facing adversity, pain and struggle with courage and elegance, like my Petunias.

While other qualities are important to the aesthetics of art, for me, the expressive line, whether in pencil, ink or thick charcoal, or whether in pastel, watercolor or oil or sculpture resonates with my soul. The soft curves, rounded lines and shapes speak of the infinite, the creative, the unbounded, and the uninhibited.

Like my Petunias, the expressive line is organic, found in nature. In many ways, my Petunias and the qualities the expressive line imparts, are found in the period known as Romanticism, a time of great beauty that sprung up despite a time of war and turmoil, despite pain and suffering. It was a time of great longing: to be seen, to be heard, to matter, to be loved and to follow one\’s dreams.

According to Henry Sayre, in A World of Art, “The Romantic painter was, in fact interested in much more than the sublime…..It was the love of Nature itself that the artist sought to convey. In Nature, the American poet and essayist, Ralph Waldo Emerson believed, one could read eternity. It was a literal ‘sign’ for the divine spirit.” (493)

According to a report on Romanticism in The Encyclopedia of the United States, \”Romanticism refers to a worldwide movement that emerged in late-eighteenth-century Europe within the realms of literature, law, philosophy, religion, art, and politics as a collective reaction to perceived excesses of the Enlightenment ideal of reason.”

Yet rebelling against the “excesses of the Enlightenment” doesn’t tell the whole story. From the late 1,700’s to the early 1,800’s, the world experienced much upheaval: an ice age, famine, rebellions, battles, war, earthquakes, yellow fever, the death of Louis XIV of France, the start of the French Revolution and the American Revolution, among others. Wars raged nearly every decade between the European countries devastating villages, towns and countrysides. Along with the defeat of France in the Americas in the 1760’s Great Britain became a major power but lost most of her North American colonies after the American Revolution. Then, early in the nineteenth century, Napoleon invaded Spain. (346 – 417, Grun)

These events of history had profound effects on the people of the day, and, as it influenced them, the era of Romanticism was born.  One of the artists from this era that stood out in my mind was William Mallord Turner. Turner was an English romantic landscape artist who also worked in watercolor and printmaking. Turner’s work reflected the ideals and the hope that sprang up from the Romanticism movement in landscape paintings. One in particular caught my eye. It was the “Dido building Carthage; or the Rise of the Carthaginian Empire” of 1815, an oil on canvas piece that was one of Turner’s earlier works. (National Gallery of Art Exhibit, www.nga.gov/exhibitions/turnerinfo.shtm)

In this work, Turner employed many techniques, including texture, a grid, two-point perspective and vanishing point, as well as linear and expressive lines, using a transparent yellow over a white ground to create three-dimensional form and space. These effects work together to achieve an otherworldly glow of energy and light, and they bring a sense of order to the chaos of civilization along the banks, which is juxtaposed against the unruly lines of nature encroaching into the scene with a tree jumping out top right. The oil over a white ground, which is covered in a transparent yellow, gives the painting a soft glow of the afternoon sun.

Using the yellow, the space, form and shape of the landscape, Turner speaks of hope, shows the beauty despite the chaos that was destroying landscapes all around. Perhaps the pain and trauma of the wars and famines caused Turner to create an escape, to turn to his imagination to free himself from the turmoil. Thus the style of Romanticism was evoked in his work.

Like Turner, another artist whose work emanated from the chaos of the times and helped to define the era of Romanticism, was Beethoven.

“Beethoven was eighteen when the Bastille fell. For the next quarter of a century, armies battled almost continuously throughout Europe,\” states Stephen C. Rumph in Beethoven After Napoleon: Political Romanticism in the Late Works.

Other artists expressed their interpretation of the times as well. For example, in response to the atrocities brought on by Napoleon’s invasion of Spain, Spanish painter Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, one of the early artists of the Romanticism era, recorded the devastation in paintings and etchings he called “The Disasters of War.” (490, Sayre)

In some ways, the era of Romanticism wasn’t so different from today, as we find ourselves embroiled in a protracted war. Thus, we can understand how the Romanticism era emerged with artists wishing to express “spontaneous emotion and the free imagination.” To these artists, expressing such freedom was of “greater importance to the romantic sensibility than analytic or calculative rationality. Refusing everything that had been imposed on the mind rather than spontaneously created, exponents of the Romantic Movement elevated dynamic organicism above the mind\’s rote formalizations. Romantic theory represented the poetic imagination as agent, as well as product of nature,\” (\”ROMANTICISM.\” Encyclopedia of the United States in the Nineteenth Century.)

In looking at my life, I realize my tastes spring up from a desire to set myself free, to experience freedom, to unleash myself from the confines of my life, to live just like my Petunias despite forces that might speak otherwise. My own life has been marked by turbulence, pain and suffering with the death of my mother to breast cancer at a young age and other traumatic events. Looking at the artists and artwork from the era of Romanticism, I can see a resonance that begins to shed light on why I am attracted to certain artworks, which this era exemplifies.

In Loving Frank, Mamah Borthwick Cheney states: “I have been standing on the side of Life, watching it float by. I want to swim in the river. I want to feel the current.” (Horan, 35)

The art, artists and figures of the Romanticism era urge me to jump in, to be free, and, as Randy Pausch said in The Last Lecture to “be willing to take risks if you really want to live.”

Works Cited

\”Country French Decorating Ideas.\” Better Homes and Gardens  http://www.bhg.com/decorating/decorating-style/country-french/country-french-decorating-ideas/

Exhibitions, National Gallery of Art. J.M.W. Turner, http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/turnerinfo.shtm

Grun, Bernard, The Timetables of History. New York: Simon  & Schuster. 1991.

Horan, Nancy. Loving Frank. New York: Ballentine Books, a division of Random House Books, 2008.

Pausch, Randy with Jeffrey Zaslow, The Last Lecture.  New York: Hyperion Books. 2008.

\”ROMANTICISM.\” Encyclopedia of the United States in the Nineteenth Century. Farmington: Gale, 2000. Credo Reference. Web. 16 November 2009.

Sayre, Henry. A World of Art, 5^th edition. New Jersey. Pearson Education. 2007.

Watkins, Daniel P. \”Andrea K. Henderson. Romanticism and the Painful Pleasures of Modern Life.\” Studies in Romanticism 48.2 (2009): 359+. Academic OneFile. Web. 16 Nov. 2009. http://www.student.wvc.edu:2158/gtx/start.do?prodId=AONE&userGroupName=wena37071.

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