TUPPENCE COLOURED

Press, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22551, 5 November 1938, Page 20

TUPPENCE COLOURED

Take any flower to pieces, examine anything in Nature at the closest range—a snowflake, frost en the windowpane, a cress section of an apple or a cabbage—and you will find an underlying principle of beauty as formal as geometry. As we all know, in every nook and cranny Nature's exquisite and unspectacular work goes on. If sometimes we can criticise Nature, it is not in any arrogance of superiority, but because, copycats that we are, we perhaps learned that trick from Whistler. In his "Gentle Art of Making Enemies" he has shown us that Nature is not always art, while others of our own time have demonstrated, conversely, that art is not always Nature. Risky Moon "Here is quite a passable landscape, really good and paintable," we concede, looking at the original itself. "But the foreground is all to the dickens!" Many times we see these little faults. If you have stopped to consider, you know for yourself that the moon in any landscape must be treated with caution —especially the full moon. While it may maxe you feel like jumping over it, like the cow in the nursery rhyme, as a purely aesthetic factor it may not pass so easily. In painting, the full moon has been known to descend to the sentiment of a picture postcard, even on a Christmas calendar; and lower than that no sentiment could go. To-day we use Nature more as a textbook, to be consulted for references and certainly not to be copied word for word. I know a painter living in this very country, who, after literally hundreds of careful studies, has so exhausted the basic principles of form and colour in landscape that he is turning more and more to abstract painting. , You have only to see a sunset at a. film—one of those coloured 100

Nature and Art (srEC'ULT.Y WRITTEN FOR THE TRESS.) [By JESS BARCLAY]

per cent, sunsets—to hear the chorus of Ah-s going up from the audience. Sunrises, I should say, are safer—subtler, more tentative; and it is only the genuine Nature worshippers who are present, . "Not that there are pretty sunrisings and suchlike gawds," as Lamb says, "but having been tempted once or twice, in earlier life to assist at those ceremonies, we confess our curiosity abated." You may love Nature as a spectacle. You may revel artistically in, say, storms at sea; but are you prepared to be tied to the mast, as Turner was, to observe and paint Nature in her angriest mood? The Inventive Sun Now sunsets in particular remind us what utter microbes we are when it comes to the miracles Nature so often performs with such ease and grace. But even there you have to admit to effects that are rather mawkish, with colour at times so raw and messy as to suggest a spillover of raspberry jam or possibly even a dye-works in eruption! I mean Nature herself. Just as some mornings seem to be born tired and old, we have seen setting suns looking equally tired; indeed, rather like some tired businessman who has had a busy day and goes teetering to his den, asking not to be disturbed till morning. But one sunset I shall long remember; and for sheer inventiveness it put the work of all the great colourists to shame. If I have picked a hole or two in Nature. I realise only too well that man'c highest art is the merest approximation of her wonderful performances. This sunset, then, was a tour de force, the kind of pageant Turner would be glad to seize upon and spread before us. Yet at his very best he would catch only a bar of the symphony. From our seat on top of a hill, we watched it as we would watch a ballet from the dress-circle, a ballet without figures. Erik Satie, musical humorist, has toyed with the same idea. What a sunset—a poppyshow on planetary scale, thrown against the backcloths of heaven! Massed in the west, the cloud promontories and gulfs and terraces were charged and molten with every range of colour, floral fantasies lively as flames, the colours of the notes of bells and wines of tropical birds. Burning and dilating, the flames cooled gradually to cinders, and, as cinders do, to ashes of roses, shall we say? The processes of Nature are beyond .-' description. Words only cheapen them. Never mind: let us go on enjoying these lovely shows. Remember what Whitman —ys, that, pocketless of a dime, we can purchase the pick of the earth. /

CINEMA [By A.W.] Over your head The rigid, pure, persistent ray Pierces the darkness like a blade, Wherein is no thing seen Save that the dust motes in their millions Eddy and play In carols and cotillions, Until it breaks upon the screen, And then j Appear the shapes of driving clouds And desperate men, Sailors in the shrouds Of labouring ships, Sails shaking, Seas breaking, Men and the sea at grips; That empty, lifeless band of light Carries the terrors of the stormy night On unimaginable waves, Drawn from their graves, And makes to live again The struggling men In your sight; Just so our earth With all its striving and its stresses, Its loves, its hates, Its tears, its mirth, Riven souls, relentless fates, Cities proud and haunted wildernesses, Is not, as men have guessed, Some God's-uneasy dream, Or hideous elvish jest, But just the interruption of a beam..