My Baby, Baby, Baby, The Fighting Temeraire
Ellen Angus
Still obsessively painting bad copies of JMW Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire..
I use to copy this painting when I was studying A level art..yes, I’m still stuck on it now.
Apart from genuinely finding it beautiful I also find it creepily patriotic. It is an unresolved conflict for me - they exist at once. The Fighting Temeraire was a war ship which played a significant role in the battle of Trafalgar, then later once the navy no longer needed it for war mongering/defending the isle it became a floating prison….And it is apparently the nations favourite painting according to a Radio 4 poll in 2009 (lol dunno if radio 4 polls can be trusted in terms of a nations demographic but hey ho)
In Turners painting the sail ship looks ghostly and it is being tugged to its last berth by a little but tough steam tug boat. The painting is seen as heralding in the new Industrial Age..Turner captured the faded grandeur of the boat and the end of an era.
A floating monument. But the painting also makes me think of legacy and histories and the way in which we raise up / hold up these ‘victorious legacies’ and all the pomp that it’s is shrouded in.
I spent a long summer listening to pompous experts from various different insufferable institutions talking about the genius of Turner. And although I love his paintings I hate the gilded frames (metaphorically and materially).
I wanted to find a way in. Turner used to spit on his paintings, he was very messy and tactile with them and also this particular painting he called his ‘darling’. I like the idea of a painting becoming one’s beloved. And through my own repetition I encountered failed attempts of portrayal and romantic longing. But there is something transformative about the gesture of copying and repetition (even with illegitimate intentions) over time it became more wayward, with this project I made no real intention of staying true to form, it became more like a reference, a tryst, it became something totally other and abstracted from the original source. Beginning as a painting, then a poem and then a performance.
Ellen Angus, April 2023