Under The Volcano:Jose Maria Velasco @ the National Gallery.

It's been twenty years now since my one and only trip to Mexico. I loved it and I'd love to go back. The food, the (cheap) beer, the music, the architecture, the beaches, the scenery, and the art. I loved it all. But it's the last of those two things that come together in the National Gallery's Jose Maria Velasco:A View of Mexico.

The Textile Mill of La Carolina, Puebla (1887)

I'm familiar with a small number of Mexican artists. Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera obviously (I visited their houses in Mexico City) but also Gabriel Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Rufino Tamayo but Velasco, who was born in 1840 and died in 1912, came before all of them (he even taught Rivera). To modern eyes he's a more traditional artist but he was quietly revolutionary for his era. 

Okay, maybe 'revolutionary' is pushing it a bit but he moved things forward and his paintings are bloody lovely to boot. At a time when Mexico was undergoing huge social and industrial changes, he became the country's leading landscape painter but he didn't make romanticised paintings of Mexico, he incorporated the industrial buildings that were springing up around Mexico City and his art speaks not just of the natural world but also of the built environment.

More than anything, how those two came together. Velasco was a botanist as much as he was an artist, Wikipedia describes him as a polymath. His, on first viewing, serene imagery is subtly dynamic in its exploration of changing times and for that he was celebrated both in Mexico and globally. Although his star seems to have waned a bit, at least outside of his home country, in the century following his death. This is the first major show of his works ever in the UK - and even then it's not in one of the National's grander exhibition spaces but instead in the relatively small Sunley Room.

 

The Goatherd of San Angel (1863)

 

The Goatherd of San Angel (1861)

Agave plants (used to make tequila, mescal, and pulque) feature in his Goatherd of San Angel paintings and, along with the titular goatherd, they are contrasted with the modern industrial building to the right of the painting, pumping smoke out into an azure Mexican sky. The earlier work is a plein-air sketch suggesting that Velasco was probably familiar with developments happening in Europe and specifically in France at the time.

The Valley of Mexico from the Molino del Rey features Chapultepec Castle, at the time the home of Mexico's president Porfirio Diaz but before that occupied by Maximilian I, the Austrian archduke who became Emperor of Mexico. Before that it was home to the Spanish viceroys who ruled the country. History, as much as nature and industry, is entwined in Velasco's art. The nature in this painting is most strongly felt in the presence of the two volcanoes, Popoctapetl and Iztaccihuatl. Themselves, linked with indigenous Mexican legends adding another layer of depth to the composition for those that wish to discover it.

 

The Valley of Mexico from the Molino del Rey (1895)

 

Lake Chalco (1885)

Lake Chalco, now surrounded by the sprawl of Mexico City but then far more rural, was - before it was drained - home to many axolotls, a type of salamander that to this day can only be found in the lakes of the valley of Mexico (as well as, according to my nine year old god-daughter, in Minecraft). You can just about make out a steam train in the background of this painting, suggesting that rural though the area around the lake was that was already beginning to change.

The Valley of Mexico from the Hill of Santa Isabel features a sacred Mesoamerican site (Tepeyac) as well as a colonial era basilica (the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadelupe). Also, in the distance, the remains of Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital. Velasco proudly sent the painting to Philadelphia so he could show off to the Americans about both his painting and his country's rich history.

 

The Valley of Mexico from the Hill of Santa Isabel (1875)

 

 

Cardon, State of Oaxaca (1887)

Velasco had trained under the Italian artist Eugenio Landesio (1810-1879) at the Academia de San Carlos in Mexico City but, unlike his master, he wanted to depict transformations in society rather than idealised scenes and Mexico at the time was giving him plenty to work with. There were factories and railways popping up everywhere and the capital city was growing. It's still bloody huge now. When I flew in it felt like it went on forever.

But the natural splendour of the country could be not ignored. An enormous cactus in Oaxaca (a beautiful city, of that I can vouch) is painted with a man sheltering beneath it. It gives us an idea of just how enormous the cactus is and Velasco has cleverly made sure that the sun facing parts are brilliant green while the shaded parts are a dull brown.

 

The Forest of Pacho (1875)

 

A Rustic Bridge in San Angel (1862)

Velasco was a founder member of the Sociedad Mexican de Historia Natural (which I don't think you'll need to be fluent in Spanish to translate) and sometimes he turned his eye solely to Mexico's plant life. In some of those works you can almost feel the heat of the blazing sun, the humidity, and the density of the foliage.

But he was equally interested in, and concerned with, the country's archaeological ruins. In 1880, Velasco was appointed a draughtsman for the Museo Nacional and often he turned to Teotihuacan (the ancient Aztec city named after the Nahuatl word for "the place where the gods were created") and its pyramids and avenues. Sites of cultural memory in which we can feel the footsteps of history behind us with every step we take.

His interrogations of Mexico's pre-Hispanic past include 15c stone basins (Nezahaulcoyotl was the ruler of the city of Texcoco at that time), the Aztec Avenue of the Dead, and the Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon. The latter of which were built to strict astronomical principles and also constructed not with men in mind but Gods. To walk up one of these pyramids, as I have been lucky enough to do, you need to take giant steps. It's worth it though. It's easily one of the most fascinating historical sights I have ever visited.

 

The Baths of Nezahualcoyotl (1878)

 

The Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacan (1878)

 

The Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon (1878)

 

Rocks (1894)

 

View from the Valley of Mexico from the Hill of Santa Isabel (1877)

 

Mexico, and specifically Mexico City, is the place where, according to legend an eagle once rested on a cactus while holding a snake in its beak which inspired the building of the Aztec capital - now the site of the Mexican capital. That's why the Mexican flag, to this day, still features an eagle with a snake in its beak resting on a cactus. It's the sort of symbolism that made Mexico such a desired location for surrealist artists. The Chorley born Leonora Carrington going so far as to make the country her home and eventually becoming a naturalised Mexican citizen. 

Andre Breton declared Mexico the "surrealist place par excellence" but this, of course, came after Velasco had passed away even if he did create some of the first specifically Mexican art and, in his own small way, prepared the ground for future modernist developments. 

Sometimes his work is reminiscent, if far brighter in colour - understandably given the climate, of Brabizon artists like Corot and Daubigny. Pico de Orizaba, Mexico's highest mountain, is taller than Mont Blanc though and Velasco's art is perhaps bolder than the ealier French artists. I'm particularly taken by his Rocks on the Hill of Atzacoalco. The scene is less spectacular than others on show at the National but there's something uplifting about it. Maybe it reminds me of some of the walks I've arranged and been on. Maybe it looks like a good future walk though I can't see myself persuading the others to travel all the way to Mexico for a walk!

 

Pico de Orizaba (1876)

 

Rocks on the Hill of Atzacoalco (1874)

 

Temascalcingo (1909)

 

Near the end of his life, Velasco returned to the village where was he was born. Temascalcingo. It could be viewed as a mournful, or elegiac, painting. An old man looking back at his life. But he had one eye on the future too because the year after he made a painting that sticks out like a sore thumb in this exhibition, The Great Comet of 1882.

When he finally looked outside of Mexico he didn't just look at another country or another continent, he looked at another world. The comet passed in 1882 but the year the painting was made, 1910, was the year the Mexican Revolution began. Velasco, only two years away from dying, was no longer looking at the past. He was looking at the future. He knew that as sure as the comet is coming so was a new Mexico. He wouldn't be around to see what that future Mexico would look like but he did a fantastic job of showing us what the past, and the imagined future, of the country looked like. Arriba arriba!

 

The Great Comet of 1882 (1910)

As Long As I Can See The Light:Alison Watt @ Pitzhanger Manor.

Last April I had a lovely day visiting Kew Gardens, taking in a Matt Colllishaw exhibition, and enjoying a pizza and a Fanta. Yesterday was a very similar today except it was Walpole Park (in Ealing) I visited, Alison Watt's art I looked at, and there was no pizza. Although there was a Fanta.

 Hircus (2024)

Walpole Park is lovely (though almost everything looked lovely yesterday in the gorgeous June sunshine) and I will endeavour to include it in a future London by Foot walk because it's too delightful a spot to keep for myself. But I'll write more about that in a bit. The reason I was there was, ostensibly, to see Alison Watt's small, but impressive, exhibition From Light.

The Scottish artist, who studied at the Glasgow School of Art and as far back as 1987 won the John Player, now BP, Portrait Award at the National Portrait Gallery, served as Associate Artist for London's National Gallery between 2006 and 2008 and has even shown at Florence's Uffizi. Alongside the likes of Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Titian, Rembrandt, Caravaggio, and Durer.

That's a pretty big deal and though Watt's art can't seriously be compared to any of those artists she can certainly draw and paint. Inspired by Pitzhanger Manor in Walpole Park (where the exhibition actually is), Watt looked to create a dialogue between her practice and the former home of the celebrated architect John Soane (1753-1837, noted works:- Dulwich Picture Gallery, the now Sir John Soane Museum, the Bank of England (though not much of his work is left there), and Pitzhanger itself).

The title of the exhibition, From Light, gives you a pretty big clue as to what to expect. Though Watt paints flowers, death masks, tea cups, tablecloths, and paper it is the light, and the shadows caused by the light, that are the essence of her painting. There seems to be me to be a clear influence of the French master of still life painting Jean Simeon Chardin and the fact that Watt has named one of her works Chardin only serves to underline this. 

But I was also reminded of the work of Avigdor Arikha and even Wilhelm Hammershoi. It's the quietude, the sense of stillness, that you can find in Watt's work. A portrayal of quotidian items that somehow manages to convey a sense of eternity. There is, in her work, a feeling of absence, of something left behind. Most obviously with the death masks but even with something as a simple as a folded napkin.

 

Dream (2024)

 

Pendant (2024)

No (living) humans feature in Watt's work at Pitzhanger but their presence is often implied. That bust of a head didn't sculpt itself, that tablecloth didn't lay itself, those roses didn't pick themselves.

Roses, in fact, only exist as they do because of human interference. They are bred outside of nature and are only read as symbols of beauty because we have decided that to be the case. Even the name rose, as with all names, is a human construct. Roses are often seen as symbols of innocence and wonder but equally they can be conceived to represent decline and decay. When the Manic Street Preachers released Roses in the Hospital, one of their more disappointing early singles, in 1993 a keen reviewer in either NME or Melody Maker at the time pointed out that though the Manics possibly intended roses to represent something full of life and hospitals something full of death, the reverse was truer. 

Roses generally die quite quickly whereas most, though certainly not all, people come out of hospital far healthier than when they went in. This struck me as a very clever point to make until I recently found out that rose bushes can live for decades, sometimes hundreds of years. There is even a case where it is belief one lived to be over a thousand. Imagine the changes it would have witnessed.

 

Huntingtower (2022-24)

 

Glanville (2020-22)

 

Howard (2022)

 

The Day After (2023)

 

Watch (2022-23)

 

Shaken (2022-23)

 

Heart (2024)

 

Peale (2018)

2018's Peale, the oldest work in the show, looked like the sort of sheet a ghost would use to hide behind. Although I never really got the whole hiding thing if you're invisible in the first place. Probably not a good idea to apply rational thought and logic to the world of the paranormal.

The blue and white china cup, is that Spode? do I know the first thing about crockery?, looks in the context of the show to be a riot of colour but even the almost monochromatic likes of Tivoli and Circular act as a great showcase for Watt's undoubted skill as a painter and give us viewers brief pause for thought about the fleeting nature of everything (except, it seems, ancient rose bushes) and even the inevitably of death. Can a painting of a blank pad of paper make a person think about death? It did for me.

 

Chardin (2024)

 

Owen (2024)

 

Cast (2024)

 

Tivoli (2024)

 

Circular (2024)

 

Windmill (2023)

 

Mahon (2023)

 

Death masks, however, can only make you think about death and its grim, yet awesome, certainty. Watt's death masks depict those of Oliver Cromwell because the original forms part of Soane's collection at the Sir John Soane Museum. It was originally believed the death mask was that of one Richard Parker, a naval mutineer who was executed by hanging in 1797, at the age of 30, on the HMS Sandwich off the coast of Sheerness in Kent.

 

He lived a century and a half after Cromwell so it is unclear as how this mix up occurred but Watt, perhaps instructively, has chosen to call one of her works, part of a triptych said to be inspired by Van Dyck's triple portrait of Charles I - Cromwell's sworn enemy, Parker rather than Cromwell. Perhaps she's a royalist. Who knows.

 

Parker (2024)

 

Nore (2024)

Death Mask (2024)

The death masks marked not only the end of life but the end of the exhibition so with the sun still shining brightly in the sky it was time to explore Pitzhanger Manor itself and, more importantly, the surrounding Walpole Park. Once John Soane's garden. He must have had some money. I guess building the Bank of England would do that for you.

I couldn't explore the entire manor though, I'd received prior warning via e-mail, because Naomi and Michael were getting married there and using some of the rooms as well as, of course, the garden. What a beautiful place to get married and what a beautiful day to get married. I was tempted to gatecrash the wedding but decided better of it.

Instead, I took a look at the few rooms that were open. An ornate bed, some other furniture, and a painting that was supposed to be an imitation of a Turner (one of Soane's friends) but didn't look much like a Turner to me.

In one of the rooms I got chatting to a volunteer. A friendly, local, and knowledgeable retired lady who told me a little about Soane, about the manor, and about the chinoiserie wallpaper hanging that I had mistakenly attributed to William Morris. We talked more and she told me that, with other retired friends, she was in the process of walking the Thames Path. As me and my friends are too.

We compared routes, talked about other walks, discussed our culinary preferences for walks (she likes to stop for a banana, we stop at a pub and usually go for a curry), she told me about other recent Pitzhanger exhibitions I'd been unaware of and therefore missed (Anish Kapoor and Grayson Perry - both artists I like), and we chatted for a good fifteen minutes or so. I should have taken her name so I could credit her here. It was lovely to stop and chat but I'd taken enough of her time and the beautiful park was winking at me.

Before I left the manor itself though, I chanced upon a curious couple of rooms given over to victims of injustice. People who have served sentences, or even been executed, for crimes they did not commit. Many of them I had never heard of but some were familiar. This, it turned out, was a sculpture collection named J'Accuse put together by the French sculptor Nicole Farhi and "created in anger to help us remember".

 
Among them you could find models of Captain Alfred Dreyfus (wrongfully accused by the French of being a German spy, primarily a case of antisemitism and one which inspired Emile Zola to write J'Accuse, the name taken for this small exhibition), Timothy Evans (a Welsh lorry driver wrongfully accused of, and executed for, murdering his wife in HMP Pentonville in 1950 - the real murderer was John Christie), and, much more recently, Andrew Malkinson who served seventeen years in prison for a rape he was completely innocent of.

It's not just within the manor itself that justice is celebrated. In Walpole Park (named for the historian and civil servant Sir Spencer Walpole and not the Whig and builder of Strawberry Hill gothic mansion Horace Walpole) there'a small garden that commemorates the 1807 Act of Parliament that ended Britain's involvement in the transatlantic slave trade. Complete with a Black History Month plaque.

 

 

Elsewhere, the park is - as you may expect on such a glorious day - a place of relaxation. People kicked balls about, kids played on swings and roundabouts, a large group of Spanish girls enjoyed a very decadent looking picnic, and many simply sunbathed. 

 

I briefly joined them, even nodding off for a bit, but I also took a walk around the park checking out the waterfowl (drakes, moorhens, and, of course, Egyptian geese) and fishes, enjoyed a mint chocolate ice cream, read the paper, and was impressed by the sight of two very beautiful cedars of Lebanon. 

 

As well as a rather silly looking statue of either a frog or toad (I'm not as up on amphibians as I'd like to be). I felt very happy. All felt good with the world (which, quite clearly, it isn't) and though it was tempting to visit one of Ealing's public houses that could wait. I hopped on the train and headed back home. For the second Saturday in a row, I'd quit while I was ahead and I was glad I had. A lovely day in which the art was very good but nature and the kindness of other humans, as so often, proved even more impressive. Walpole Park, I'll be back and next time I'll (try to) bring my friends.