Truth and Beauty

What do clouds and ballerinas have in common? Bryan explores that question with a trip to the Yale Center for British Art. Then, Jesse introduces us to the scientist with his head in the clouds who helped revolutionize the way painters depicted the sky.

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Links:

Turner’s landscapes at the Yale Center for British Art https://collections.britishart.yale.edu/vufind/Record/1667701
Constable’s cloud studies at the Yale Center for British Art https://collections.britishart.yale.edu/vufind/Record/1670757
Degas’ ballerinas https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/degas-and-his-dancers-79455990/
How do clouds float? https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-do-clouds-float-when/
Luke Howard, the man who named the clouds https://rmets.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1256/wea.157.02
The volcanic eruption of 1783 https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidbressan/2015/06/08/this-1783-volcanic-eruption-changed-the-course-of-history/#53fde2b353c8
Luke Howard’s cloud art http://journal.sciencemuseum.ac.uk/browse/issue-02/made-real/luke-howard-s-clouds-and-the-persistence-of-convention/

Music in this episode by Alan Piljak, Podington Bear, Blue Dot Sessions, and Return to Normal. All music courtesy the Free Music Archive.

Our theme song is “Silver Moon” by The Columbians, from the Internet Archive.

Episode Transcript:

Bryan  0:20 
Hi everyone, welcome to Truth and Beauty. I'm Bryan.

Jesse  0:23 
And I'm Jesse. We're bringing you conversations about the world between an astrophysicist who can't draw

Bryan  0:28 
and an artist who dropped out of high school.

Bryan  0:45 
We went to the art museum this week. Didn't we?

Jesse  0:48 
Yeah, we did. It was really fun.

Bryan  0:50 
Yeah. So we are lucky enough to have the Yale Center for British Art in our hometown of New Haven where we're recording right now. And we went over there to look at some paintings by J. M. W. Turner. So a little background on him: Joseph Turner was born in 1775 and was part of the Romantic movement which emphasized dramatic emotion and the spiritual power of nature. So throughout his life Turner focused mainly on landscapes and seascapes, which might sound pretty dull, but I mean, you saw these. What did you think?

Jesse  1:23 
I thought they were epic. Yeah, they were so cool. There are these crazy oceans, these waves, and the clouds were pretty incredible too...

Bryan  1:47 
Look at how much of each composition the sky takes up. It's like two-thirds of the composition.

Jesse  1:54 
That's really interesting. Yeah, most of these ... I mean, there's some smaller ones.

Jesse  1:59 
landscape, but

Bryan  1:59 
Those aren't by Turner.

Jesse  2:00 
Oh, really?

Bryan  2:01 
Yes. So Turner was known for his seascapes. So let's go look at these clouds.

Bryan  2:08 
How long do you think it takes for a cloud like this to become a different cloud, to stop looking like that? Imagine you're lying on the ground, looking up at a cloud.

Jesse  2:17 
Yeah, like 10 minutes.

Bryan  2:19 
And how long do you think it took to paint this?

Jesse  2:21 
Like 10 minutes?

Jesse  2:24 
Like this whole painting?

Bryan  2:25 
Yeah, this whole painting.

Jesse  2:26 
It would take me weeks to paint.

Bryan  2:28 
And how big is this painting?

Jesse  2:31 
Six feet across and four feet tall.

Bryan  2:33 
So the perspective of the painting is as though you're sitting on the water, looking at these ships. The people on those ships are above the viewer. Do you see what I mean? It's like you're down on the water.

Jesse  2:47 
Yeah, it's very much a duck's-eye view.

Bryan  2:50 
What I'm trying to communicate is that these clouds, which are very much a moment in time, the size of the piece, and the perspective of the piece mean that he couldn't have done this on location.

Jesse  2:59 
Oh yeah, no way. He wasn't sitting out there with a canvas on his little raft.

Bryan  3:03 
Yeah, it's just impossible. And another reason that we know he didn't do this on location is if you look at the date...

Jesse  3:12 
1818.

Bryan  3:12 
This was before oil paints came in tubes. Artists had to mix their own oil paints in their studios. They didn't have portable tubes of oil paint. They didn't have pre-mixed pigments. You've seen those powders in museums, you know, this really musty yellow color. And you mix that together with different solvents and you create your own pigments.

Jesse  3:32 
Oh, wow. So that was a lot of work. You couldn't do that in the field very easily.

Bryan  3:37 
No, all these artists who have oil paintings, they would go out, and they would create all these watercolor studies, and then they would translate them into oil paintings.

Bryan  3:55 
Turner was obsessed with storms. There's actually a story that he tells. It's to be taken with a grain of salt, but in his old age, apparently, he asked some sailors to lash him to a ship's mast during a storm.

Jesse  4:11 
What!?

Bryan  4:11 
So he says that he stayed there for four hours and was just in the thick of the storm. He says, "I did not expect to escape, but I felt bound to record it if I did".

Jesse  4:24 
What!?

Bryan  4:25 
So then he painted this crazy seascape, which just looks like you're falling down a well and looking up at the sky. It's just a vortex of mist. But apparently, that's what he experienced on the ship.

Jesse  4:37 
This is like Odysseus, isn't that what happened to him?

Bryan  4:40 
Yeah.

Jesse  4:40 
But in Turner's case, it was because he just wanted to watch the storm. Why did he need to be tied to the mast?

Bryan  4:47 
I think he's trying to say that he's committed to accurately representing reality, which he was. Turner painted the same thing throughout his entire life: variations on landscapes and seascapes. And that involved sitting and looking at the sea for hours and hours and hours for his whole life. He had an incredibly long and prolific career. He made hundreds of paintings and they're all of nature, which is a big part of this romantic movement. He was so committed to accuracy. Oh, we talked about this in the museum...

Bryan  5:20 
If you look at this one by Turner, also, you can barely see what anything is.

Jesse  5:25 
Yeah. It looks like a dream. Yeah, this is totally different, really foggy.

Brya...

Jesse takes us back to 1707, when a simple navigational error claimed the lives of hundreds of sailors, sparking a race to build the perfect clock. Bryan introduces us to a quirky mathematician known as "Pussy" who spent decades studying the colors on maps

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How do we draw the world? How do we see the world at all? We trace these questions back to Renaissance Italy and the Islamic Golden Age, stopping along the way to discuss supermoons, Monet’s cataracts, and more.