(painted book cover - Cathy Cullis 2018-ish)
A very warm October day in central London (a few years ago) and I am here to visit galleries. Going into town, that’s what my sister and I would call this day out. We grew up in the suburbs, at the end of the Met line and, as a teenager, going into town was something I did whenever I could. My free travel pass helped out. Now, however, I have come from further afield. I am overdressed, hot and bothered, feeling like a stranger. Walking from Waterloo I notice phones everywhere, men in scruffy designer clothes, women in heels and suits, and everything feels less glamorous, edgy.
But I am just as invisible as ever and that is fine. I like to mingle with people (remember that), though not too closely (even then). It is my mission to go out into the world, gather fragments of human beauty and tragedy and keep them for a rainy day. So I eavesdrop and mind-sketch.
I am also a thief, of a kind.
I find myself walking on autopilot to the National Gallery. Trafalgar Square is just as I left it a few months ago. Pigeons scuffing chalk art, teams of foreign students, monosyllabic huddles of random bodies. The Sainsbury Wing is where I find myself first, as nearly always. There are paintings here I will visit like nodding at old acquaintances. Here are the earliest paintings you are likely to see in London. Gold-leafed, vivid, stiff figures that are somehow more alive to me than the privileged portraits in other rooms.
I make a visit to Paolo Uccello’s Saint George and the Dragon. I think of the poem Not My Best Side by UA Fanthorpe. (I think of the fan letter I once thought of writing to Fanthorpe but never wrote.) I love the otherworldiness of this painting and the poem is one that I hope many know.
Moving on to other favourites. The gold leaf can be blinding. But Michelangelo’s ‘The Manchester Madonna’ is incomplete and has, to my eye, more to say, more to give, than many other works. The incompleteness is something that will be replicated, in ways, by more modern painters to come.
There are so many Madonnas in the Sainsbury Wing and the more I see the more inoculated I am to any transcendence. They are young women suddenly handed a baby. So I seek out the singular: A Woman by Robert Campin is a favourite familiar face. Today there is a gallery guard, a woman wearing a headscarf, standing just a few feet from this work - I stand and stare, I smile at the guard who blinks straight past me. To take a photo would be crass, I decide but later wish I had.
Onward then, taking no time it feels, I find myself in room 51, where the really old Italian stuff is kept. There are six or seven older women dotted about, sketching from the paintings. I think perhaps they are from an art society but something tells me, perhaps it’s the dangling earrings and fabric handbags, that they are textile-minded folk. This is enough to make me try my best to look over someone’s shoulder without really looking. If you are going to sketch in public you come prepared to share, or else you should stand in a dark corner and hope you can identify your scribbles later. I rarely sketch directly in a gallery. Not because I am concerned about what people want to know from work (she can’t draw). I simply prefer to spend all my time staring at things. Not just the paintings but the way paintings are framed, the edges and craftsmanship of joining. The spaces and shadows between paintings. And the way other people look at things. The constant taking of photos on a phone is a contemporary phenomena, which splits my opinion. If I take photos, it is of the gallery space and the visitors, or the way a painting is hung near to a fire exit. Or I take such an up-close shot of a painting in semi-darkness that it is unidentifiable, made anew.
The sound in a gallery can alter one’s experience, shifting heavy loads of paint through time and space. The rumble of traffic and the chatter of mixing languages can transform an everyday Madonna into a paper-cut who may appear, for a moment, to tilt her head with curiosity. I like the juxtapositions of shifting sound and constant familiarity. The picture remains the same and yet the world turns. The National Gallery has remained open during wars and times of grief. (Only late, due to a pandemic, will it temporarily close).
There are many angels in rooms 51, 52 and thereabouts. Angels with wings, musicians or professional mourners. Like many, the Spandrel Angels by Ugolino di Nerio have become detached from any sense of their reality - no longer part of an altarpiece within a religious space. Their Saint is missing, whereabouts unknown. They are stared at without the aid of candlelight. Yet still they shimmer.
One of the angels appears to turn their head just ever so slightly toward me.They sigh. You are bored, they say to me. No, I tell the painted figure, you are, you are bored.
Take me away from here, they say. Not exactly pleading. As if I might slip the angel into my pocket. As if this were a possibility.
I turn on my heels, feeling the weight of ages dragging the hem of my jacket. Quickly, I make an exit through into the fleshy world of Titian’s Venice. It is all too much. An hour into my visit and I am giddy, with an angel in my pocket and the need for a good cup of coffee.
I love your Studio Notes. Very inspiring. Thank you, Cathy Cullis.
I found myself nodding in recognition throughout…. “I am a thief, of sorts.” Yes, I feel like a gatherer as I comb through galleries, taking those phone camera shots of the corners of gilded frames, of detailed borders, of paint textures, of color combinations that make my pulse race. I also collect the essence of the space, the proximity to great works, the very atoms we share as cohabitants on this planet. I, too, do this silently and anonymously, grateful that art is meant to be shared and experienced and that any inspiration we draw from these experiences will in no way resemble any individual work but will only make us fuller and more complete humans. It is a form of reverence.
Your writing, along with the accompanying links you provide, are food for thought always, but especially in times of travel limitation when I so miss having exposure to the wider world of art and culture— thank you! ✨