Extract from The fallacies of hope
and a lunchtime of fear:...
By Martin Holman
...
When I was six, I was traumatised by my lunch. And I blame Turner.
I am now much older than six and cannot recall, from the several decades since, an encounter so uniquely disturbing, isolating, humiliating and baffling. Do I exaggerate? Or have I led a sheltered existence? No, and I have not. For the calibre of impact on that day had much to do with it being a first; worse things have followed in my life. But this hammer-head fell on my subliminal self in what experts in child health acknowledge are the formative years. I was practically a tabula rasa in the wider world of table d'hôte; I was the victim of the cruel force of novelty.
And Turner? His part in this story comes courtesy of my father. I can never remember him visiting an art gallery, but he decorated my childhood home with colour reproductions collected on subscription from clubs that advertised in the then-new colour supplements. He constructed from the same moulded batons he had used to make my sister's toy stable a frieze of van Gogh and an advanced taste, my father's Vlaminck images to line the staircase. Vlaminck once said that van Gogh meant more to him than his own father. To my father the late Vlamincks meant more to him than the juicy, jaunty Fauvist ones. So moody tones and sombre streets jostled with the Dutchman's starry night and lonesome furnishings as every day I approached them from the right (on my ascent) and from the left (as I walked down). I still feel most comfortable with Post-impressionism at a slant.
I realise now that my sight, noticeably
shortening from an early age, was being in another respect
visually sharpened on my way to breakfast or when I retreated
upstairs to the loo, and when I entered one room to steal a toffee
or fled another for the fridge. This exposure to art was, in retrospect,
bound together with that dreadful lunch, along with the lithographed
Canaletto that graced the dining-room in its mitred frame with
a hessian border and slender gold rebate. They converged, like
the waterborne galas of Venice to which my father gave additional
flourish: a border of the same sticky, claret-red Dulux gloss
my father had applied to the shelves and cupboards he had made
for the room. Canaletto had, in my upbringing, become part of
the furniture.
...
click here to view Slavers throwing overboard the Dead and Dying 'Typhon' coming on by JMW Turner, 1840, in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, USA