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Pictures from the vaults
Jan. 18th, 2007 09:01 pmMore from the great unread: a Guardian article from May 2003 praises Welsh artist Thomas Jones.
I would normally skip past a write-up of an exhibition I was not going to see by an artist I'd never heard of, but the large illustration stopped me dead. I wish I could reproduce it here, with the question "When do you think this was painted?", but linking to it gives the game away. A Wall in Naples is the smallest picture in London's National Gallery, little more than a picture postcard of a wall in the sun, a patch of sky glimpsed in the angle of some buildings, washing hung out to dry. (The estimable Mister Aitch gives a larger image of this painting and others, and some well-chosen words to accompany them).
Mister Aitch speaks of the "freshness and immediacy" of these little oil sketches; The Guardian's Jonathan Jones says "He hit on such wildly unexpected territory that he never grasped its implications. Only with modernism's hindsight would the astonishment be felt, as if Jones painted for us, only for us." A Wall in Naples looks contemporary to me because it looks photographic - not in the sense that detail is rendered with minute precision, but in the sense that every detail, every surface is given equal importance. Compare this picture plucked almost at random from Flickr: both of these pictures give me the same kind of pleasure.
I would normally skip past a write-up of an exhibition I was not going to see by an artist I'd never heard of, but the large illustration stopped me dead. I wish I could reproduce it here, with the question "When do you think this was painted?", but linking to it gives the game away. A Wall in Naples is the smallest picture in London's National Gallery, little more than a picture postcard of a wall in the sun, a patch of sky glimpsed in the angle of some buildings, washing hung out to dry. (The estimable Mister Aitch gives a larger image of this painting and others, and some well-chosen words to accompany them).
Mister Aitch speaks of the "freshness and immediacy" of these little oil sketches; The Guardian's Jonathan Jones says "He hit on such wildly unexpected territory that he never grasped its implications. Only with modernism's hindsight would the astonishment be felt, as if Jones painted for us, only for us." A Wall in Naples looks contemporary to me because it looks photographic - not in the sense that detail is rendered with minute precision, but in the sense that every detail, every surface is given equal importance. Compare this picture plucked almost at random from Flickr: both of these pictures give me the same kind of pleasure.
