Benjamin Zephaniah on Turner Private View

I've always felt like an outsider.

And I'm drawn to outsiders, or people who find different paths,

people who break the rules.

Turner was an outsider, a maverick.

He turned the art world upside down.

He liberated it, even.

They are calling this show Late Turner - Painting Set Free.

This is me, Benjamin Zephaniah and this is my private view of Turner.

I had heard the name Turner when I was a kid.

But I thought he was one of those kind of dead white

British artists that really don't say anything to me.

And then I remember when I was a young Rastafarian,

I was really angry at the world, and this friend said,

"You have got to check out this painting by Turner."

It's a slave ship off the coast of Jamaica.

Probably not far from where my family come from.

The captain has worked out that it is more financially rewarding

if he throws the live slaves into the sea rather than landing with them.

But it's not in this exhibition. It's not here!

Fortunately, it's in the catalogue. So I can look at it now.

But you can see the bodies of these Africans

and they are drowning

in their chains.

But actually, what really strikes me is the amount of blood.

It seems that there is blood in the sky.

I mean, it is kind of almost impossible for us to imagine.

Turner wrote a poem. There is a bit here which I will read from it.

"Aloft all hands, strike the topmast and belay

"Yon angry setting sun And fierce-edged clouds

"Declare the Typhoon is coming

"Before it sweeps your decks, throw overboard

"The dead and dying, ne'er heed their chains

"Hope, Hope, fallacious Hope -

"Where is thy market now?"

It's...probably the one that's most connected to me, personally.

So...thank you, Mr Turner.

Fire!

So here we have it.

I mean, it's amazing.

Yeah. When I see paintings like this, I think...

"What would Turner be doing now?"

If you think about the riots

that happened in our streets not so long ago,

he probably would have come out,

he probably would have borne witness to it and painted it.

Sat there with his brush and painted it.

He was a chronicler, if you like.

He liked to bear witness.

This is a terrible, dreadful moment.

But you also have

a lot of...detail.

One wonders, these people who were watching from the sidelines,

some of them are looking towards the fire, but there are a couple here

that are looking towards us as if saying, "Come and have a look!"

But this is, to me, this is a little bit revolutionary.

To see the Houses of Parliament burning down and then you come

and paint it, I mean...

# Babylon is burning Babylon is burning

# With anxiety... #

Burn, Babylon, burn.

It's like the system is being burnt.

But what do we replace it with?

Another system.

I am seasick!

Wow! This is...

This is all over the place.

It is obviously a ship in a storm, but...

I just can't tell which way the wind is blowing,

it is just all over the place. It's, er...

It's kind of crazy, but it's very, very beautifully crazy.

I kind of think that he just carries on, if you take the frame away,

it will just carry on all over the place.

From what I understand, at this time, paintings were precise.

You knew what they were. There was a kind of standard.

Turner kind of throws this all upside down.

He has looked at all his contemporaries, all the artists

around at the time and said, "I won't do what you do.

"I want to do what I do.

"I want to do what's in my head and never mind the rule book.

"You come along and you move forward and be true to yourself."

This is true.

I have family in Jamaica who work on the sea and they have told me

they have been in storms sometimes.

They say they don't know what hit them,

they looked up and there wasn't sky

because they were upside down, and all that kind of stuff.

So, it's a world that I don't know...

It's a world that I fear.

And maybe that's because...I can't swim!

Turner tells a story that he was actually tied to this mast

as the storm was raging about him.

Now most people don't believe that -

apparently people have checked his diary, his appointments.

He is probably having a meeting with his agent.

He wasn't there. But that's not the point, actually.

I guess, like a poet or writer, your job is to use your imagination,

to take your imagination there.

Turner might not be there,

but his imagination is right up there.

Ah...

Regulus.

Now, this is interesting because this is one of those paintings

I have seen in books. I saw it in a catalogue.

But to be standing in front of it, it really is bright.

He really is trying to tell us something...

..about the power of the sun. Look at it.

Whoo!

Lights up the river. Whoo! Out.

Apparently, there is some story -

Regulus was a Roman consul that was captured by the Carthaginians.

They took off his eyelids so that the sun burnt his eyes and blinded him.

We, the people looking at the painting,

stand in place of Regulus.

We are blinded by the light.

Sounds like a pop song, doesn't it?

And maybe...

Maybe Turner is actually Regulus?

Because Turner started to have eye problems,

in fact he started to have cataracts.

And he loved the sun.

It is like some people who are kind of creative get a drug.

Sometimes it is an artificial drug.

I can't work without doing martial arts

or t'ai chi or some deep breathing, some deep meditation.

I am kind of addicted to breathing.

Well, Turner probably was addicted to the sun.

He kept staring into the sun.

So, maybe this is Turner kind of thinking about himself

and thinking about his relationship with the sun.

And what it is doing to him.

Then looking back at the story and thinking...

"My eyes are being burned.

"I, too, am blinded by the light."

There is this great story about a woman who is sitting on a train

and a man in front of her,

this well-behaved, well-dressed gentleman,

for some reason jumps up,

puts his head out of the train as it's going at speed

for almost ten minutes and then he sits down,

closes his eyes for 15 minutes and just sits back.

And she thinks, "Let me have a go at it."

She puts her head out of the window, kind of gets a bit blown away,

and a bit wet, sits down and falls asleep.

Couple of months later,

she is at an exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts

and she sees this painting and then she realises that the person,

that man who sat in front of her, was Turner.

I wonder if...what the dancing maiden signifies?

They pass with the boat as well.

It is like somebody doing analogue and this is digital.

Know what I mean? That is the past, this is the future.

And the way he has painted it, you can feel the movement.

It's speed.

It's speed captured.

Somehow.

It's as if the train is just going to go "Whoosh!"

This is just the moment before it goes. And look at this.

It's a little hare.

Or is it a rabbit?

I can never really tell the difference.

But it's racing down the track, as they do sometimes.

It could be symbolic.

A race between nature and modernity.

Who's going to win?

Listen, little hare. It doesn't matter if you win or lose,

make sure you get off the track, cos that train will run you over.

Well, this is Turner being very political.

That's what I would call it.

Others would call it social commentary.

I guess it's both.

This is based on a story, or the true happening,

of a British ship that was taking women convicts to Australia.

And the ship got in trouble just off the French coast,

and the French offered help, but the captain refused the help,

and so...allowed them to die.

You can see the women clinging to each other,

clinging onto their babies.

The ship in the background going down.

This is about saying to that captain and the powers that be

that this should not happen.

I could imagine at the time he was painting this he was really angry.

There's a kind of...violence in the in the way that it's painted.

I suspect that he probably was lashing with his brush a bit.

I don't feel you could paint this painting sitting down and...

..doing it gently. This has to come from emotion.

This has to come from somewhere deep. This painting...

..was never exhibited in his lifetime.

But it's exhibited now.

For those who cared about these things, who want to look back.

Here you have a great travesty recorded.

Forever, hopefully.

Now, who would have guessed it?

I mean, just look at this painting.

There's nothing here that's really solid.

Here, the sun is the subject,

and although the sun is the subject, look at the sun.

It's just a little blob down there on the left-hand side of the painting.

It is a rather weird sun, though, I must say.

You see, I would get the brush and make the sun perfectly round,

cos I know that the sun is perfectly round.

But Turner's not like that.

It seems to me that one of things he did very beautifully

was break the rules, was kind of make his own path in the art world.

He was kind of the anti-artist artist if you like.

When some of the critics saw this painting, they said he was going mad,

he was senile, he was losing it, he was off his rocker.

It was just...

"Not worthy of review" or whatever.

But there's others who thought that he'd been very futuristic.

It was abstract before abstract.

He was like the first Impressionist before Impressionism.

I just can't get over that sun. It's so cute.

I never thought I'd say that the sun is cute.

It's lot of things, but I didn't think I'd ever say it was cute.

But there you go.

I've been sitting here looking at this painting for a long time.

You see, it's called The Parting of Hero and Leander.

Is this them having a parting kiss?

And are these kind of angels watching them or whatever? But...

..to be honest, that stuff doesn't really interest me

when it comes to this painting. It's just a beautiful painting.

In a way, it could be Turner just showing off.

But poets do that. Not all poems are about things.

Not all poems are about happenings.

Not all poems are about emotions and stuff like that.

Sometimes a poet just does word play for the sake of it.

And here, Turner might be just painting a beautiful painting,

which is loosely based on a story.

But he's not necessarily trying to tell us anything.

It doesn't really tell me anything, but it tells me that the guy

is a damn good painter.

He has the sun and the moon in the same sky.

It's like what happens in Lincolnshire every now and again.

It's just a beautiful painting. Art for art's sake, if you like.

It's beautiful. So back off, Benjamin. Sit down...

..and enjoy it.

So look at this work of art. It's called Peace - Burial at Sea.

Turner painted this because one of his friends died at sea

and was buried at sea.

Quite a mournful picture, really, although we have fire again

and we have more light.

But the ship itself is...

..the colour of mourning, black.

In fact, somebody complained when he painted this

and they said that the sails of the ship were too dark, too black.

And Turner said he wished he could've made them blacker.

One of the things I notice is...

Here we have this burial, but there's this bird...

..just flying low above the water.

One has to wonder whether Turner is also thinking about his mortality.

And there's going to be a day...

..when the painting stops.

But even after the painting stops...

..the birds keep flying around.

And the sun rises once more.

But don't get too depressed, you know.

Better must come.

The thing about this painting is that it's a great time of the day

to go out there breathe deeply.

I play t'ai chi, and if you know anything about t'ai chi,

we believe that in the night,

all the chi settles in the trees and in the atmosphere,

so if we go out at sunrise, we can breathe in the chi.

We kind of use it for our energy.

So we breathe in...breathe out.

We breathe in...we breathe out.

And we get the energy from the atmosphere.

That's what I feel when I look at this.

I feel like I want to play t'ai chi, I want to breathe, I want to live.

This was later on in his life. It was actually not long before he died.

So he probably didn't have to prove anymore that he could paint castles.

So he just kind of leaves the castle floating in the air.

What stands out is the sun.

The sun shining through at the centre of the painting.

There's this story.

It's December, it's dreary, outside it's cloudy.

Turner is laying in bed very, very ill.

Suddenly, the sun shines through.

It shines onto his face and it lights him up,

as if to just kind of illuminate him and breathe life into him.

But one hour later...he passed away.

It's a bit like before somebody dies and they have a burst of life.

Well, he had a burst of light.

Yeah.

Breathe.

It's morning.

Now, look at this.

This is a weird, very, very weirdy Victorian thing that they used to do.

I've seen a couple of these - death masks.

Just after the person's died,

somebody comes along and makes a mask of them.

Well, I've come to the end of my journey around this exhibition,

and I'm not sure how I feel coming face to face, as it was,

with the creator of these great works of art.

I know you're not really here, old man,

I know you're somewhere else,

but I just wanted to say thanks for the paintings

and thanks for that stuff you did against slavery.

You've got a good heart, my brother.

Wherever you are, man, just keep it real. You get me?

Safe.