The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work - Alain De Botton [43]
Taylor found his teachers on museum walls. The great dead masters are generous instructors: it is not uncommon for one of them to impart a piece of technical wisdom to a pupil born five centuries after him. Works which ordinary gallery visitors might regard as inert entertainment are, for artists, living prescriptions.
It was Titian’s Man with a Quilted Sleeve (1510) that taught Taylor how to paint leaves. It was not even the whole painting that engaged his attention during the hundred hours he spent in front of it in the National Gallery in London. He had no particular interest in the man’s face; what detained him was the blue sleeve and, more specifically, the way Titian succeeded in suggesting an expanse of fabric at once weighty and airy, despite working with a minimum of colours. Titian taught Taylor about economy, about how to imply things rather than explain them. He taught him that a painting of a tree should be the story not of each individual leaf but of the dynamic mass of the whole. There are only five blues in Titian’s sleeve; the genius lies in the careful choice and judicious combination of these hues, so that while the lower folds appear flattened and empty, the upper ones manifest the presence of an arm so clearly that a viewer might almost think it possible to reach into the painting and grasp its bulk.
4.
Taylor defines Titian’s place in the pantheon with the greatest compliment he knows: the artist was able to look at a piece of clothing as if he had never seen its like before.
Precise delineation is central to Taylor’s conception of painting. The sky is never simply blue, he explains. In the region nearest the sun, at the top of a canvas, he uses ultramarine, to which he adds increasing amounts of turquoise as his brush descends towards the earth. At 25 degrees, he mixes in small amounts of nickel yellow and magenta until, at the horizon, there is nothing left but a soft white haze.
Taylor accepts the restricted nature of the challenge he has set himself. An essay he wrote to accompany an exhibition of half a decade of painting opened with the following declaration: ‘For most of my adult life, I have worked on certain observations of the physical world. In particular, for the last ten years, I have been interested in changes of light as you look towards and away from the sun’ – a summation of ambition finely poised between self-deprecation and megalomania.
The year before, for two weeks of a wet January, Taylor stretched himself out on waterproof covers at the foot of his oak tree and sketched studies of leaves, sticks, grasses, worms and insects. Some 180,000 leaves fell from the oak that winter, destined to be eaten, at an imperceptibly leisurely rate, by hundreds of millions of bacteria living around its roots. Taylor painted the grey-brown habitat of springtails, rotifers, eelworms, earthworms, millipedes, false scorpions, slugs and snails. He undertook a close study of lichen overspreading a bit of bark, having been drawn to the fungus after learning of its status as an epiphyte – that is, an organism which grows upon something else without feeding on it. He observed a stalk of goosegrass, a tall green plant known to naturalists as Galium aparine, whose leaves concluded in minuscule hooks coated in cuckoo-spit, a viscous secretion produced by froghopper nymphs to protect themselves against predators while they suck their host’s sap.
The specialised vocabulary of biology is dear to Taylor. It is a sign of attention and of a community ready to honour details. Technical terms do not in his eyes insulate us from the natural world, they merely help us to cleave with greater fidelity to its most precious and discrete phenomena.
5.
It is the close of an exceptionally hot summer day. Taylor is outside in his field, preparing to work through the night.
The moon is rising above the nearby village of West Bergholt, a view which he spent four and a half years painting before