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Content:

• Jonathan Griffin on John Martin
• Ian Christie on John Martin
• John James on Barry Flanagan
• Flan Flanagan on her father, Barry
• Appreciations on Barry Flanagan
• John-Paul Stonard on Gerhard Richter
• Thomas Schütte on Gerhard Richter
• Philip Tinari on Tacita Dean
• Marina Warner on Alice in Wonderland
• Sam Thorne on Alice in Wonderland
• Mary Heilmann on international abstraction paintings at Tate St Ives
• Nicholas Cullinan on Robert Rauschenberg's photograms
• Phyllida Barlow on Eduardo Chillida
• Vincent Katz on Max Ernst
• Chon A Noriega on Chicano Art
• Nicholas Tromans on Richard Dadd
• Klaus Weber, Ian Collins, Clare Woods and Josephine Meckseper on a work in the Tate Collection
• Austin Collings in the Tate Archive
• Poem of the Month

JMW Turner
Norham Castle, Sunrise 1845
© Tate
Oil on canvas
support: 908 x 1219 mm frame: 1060 x 1370 x 70 mm

Paintings instead of Wigs
 
His father saw it before anyone else,              
the boy could paint light, could take the sky
into the bristles of his brush and lay it flat 
like ribbon around a haberdasher’s card.  
 
He could take the curl of cloud, the line
of sea, and drop them on to canvas
pinned and waiting for him like a spider’s
web on a window pane.  He could make
 
colours his father had never seen appear
in white china bowls,  grinding red lead
and smalt, madder and green slate while his
father washed bundles of hair ready for
 
the next day, rolling them between finger 
and thumb, smoothing the shafts so they lay
as flat as fish scales.  In the morning,
when the light was at its sharpest, Joseph lit
 
the colour with water  and gum, stirring in
honey so the Prussian blues and milky greens,
the scarlets and viridians, could breathe across
the hatched threads of the canvas.   And while
 
his father knotted and threaded the hair
into silken caps, weaving it into clusters
of curls,  the boy split shafts of light until
they shimmered on the tip of his brush. 
 
And for a moment, the father looked up
from his work and was scared by the boy
who could paint God’s light across the water, 
the air’s joy at being empty handed.