Entropic paintings: Between movement and inaction, water and oil

In 1810, John Gandy dipped his brush into the water, hands over his reference image, and drew another
stroke of ultramarine blue across the pulp of the page, its colors mottling the sky of brown and beige. The final
painting is a cut section of the John Soanes museum (house and office) in London. The section of the house
takes up almost the entirety of the page and presses against the top margin of the art board. As background,
Gandy paints dark blue and grey clouds, as if an impending storm brews in the distance.
The interior that lies beyond the cut shows a building organized as three floors. They share a centralized
atrium that pushes half a floor height out of the top of the building to let light in. Besides the through the other
unshown windows in the building, the viewer perceives this is the only way light can come through into an
otherwise dark interior. Not only is the building organized in three floors, but each floor is also divided in three
parts, composing of two naves (A) around the central triple-height atrium (B) in an A-B-A composition.
Like a cabinet of wonders (wunderkammer), the painting illustrates the compactness of objects and
artifacts crammed into a small space. John Soane was known for collecting antique works; paintings, busts,
columns, remnants of classical temples, Greek or Roman engravings fill up the space. There is no apparent
order to this composition. Maxed out to its saturation point, the walls seem have multiplied and crystallized into
itself, so that plain arches flower with stone carvings, and frames grow on every available wall space.
Everything fits in a loose symmetry. That is, if one were to fold the image over its long axis, the objects
collapsed onto each other generally matches in shapes, size, and type.
This symmetry may be even more perfect, if the objects were themselves in a more complete state of
existence, without missing appendages, broken metopes, or halved capitals. Rather than the peak of growth,
Gandys section captures the building just as it steps into decay. The building is didactic. It is a museum for a
museum, with instructions at the bottom row tacked onto the cutaway stone. If everyone died on the earth, the
next intelligent life beings might still know what the building was before and how it came to be populated, how
it was first constructed, how it is meant to be used and what zones existed in it.
Interestingly, the light that enters the building from the skylight atop the atrium further dissects the
interior into high and low contrast areas. The sharp, angled light is brightest on the central vertical atrium, while
many crevice and corners are dim by contrast. This highly differentiating, unfiltered light further fragments the
ancient pieces in Soanes collection, and required a careful brush to situate the darker paints as shadows to the
white of the paper. This light, and its precise leakage from the few glass panels of the skylight, is not a natural,
exterior light. Rather it is the dramatic light of the interior, a kind of light that passes through heavy apertures to
form a spotlight on Soanes collected interior.
On the subject of light, one ought to note also the quality of the wash Gandy employs. The technique
Gandy employs here is not natural to watercolor, in the sense that watercolor is often used to convey moving
broad strokes and fleeting movement in the transparency of water. Rather it is a meticulous layering of paint
that ultimately looks more opaque and ink based. Paradoxically, it is the fluidness and clarity of water that
provides the vehicle for the heaviness of stone.
Fittingly, there are no persons featured in the image, no living bodies gazing, no visitors traversing its
tight halls. The only living person in the image is that of the beholder: you. And instead of freeing you to gaze
freely through picture frame of the watercolor, the section and its perfectly flattened perspective locks the
viewer into position. The image allows only vertical and horizontal gazing, and provides no depth beyond the
flattened perspective. One feels the confinement as viewer as much as the objects themselves appear to be
pinned precisely in place.
Forty-one years later, in 1851, the Crystal Palace raises itself off the ground to be one of the biggest
enclosure in the world, not to mention one of the first to be so composed of metal and glass. The image here
analyzed was not drawn or painted by any artist. Unlike the one-time artistic application of water and paint in
John Gandys painting, the image of the Crystal Palace carries no authorship. An illustrator for a newspaper
likely took sketches from the second floor of the Crystal Palace, noted colors and the general atmospheric feel,
and brought back the sketch to produce a chromolithograph, a chemical process to layer colors onto a single
print to mass produce colored images. Every stroke in the artistic rendering can be repeated again and again in
stunning accuracy; there is no need for an artists name to attach to this industrialized snapshot, a colorful
moment in time.
The chromolithograph sets the scene within the Crystal Palace as a perspective from the second floor,
overlooking the long central nave. The perspective ends in the vanishing point just to the right of center, setting
a horizon line directly across the middle of painting. The long axes, one diagonally from corner of the image to
the center, and the other implied in the horizontal axis across the middle, situate the viewer at the beginning of a
line of motion, somewhere in the near future. These axes imply motion forward, rather than inward stasis seen
at the Soane Museum.
The image shows the structure organized into three parts, not unlike that of Soane; the structure is
tripartite. It has three horizontal floors (two occupiable, one nonoccupiable floor) as indicated by the x-supports
that distinguish each floor level. It is also divided into two naves (A) overlooking into a third, which is the
central tall atrium space (B) that reaches from ground to ceiling, in an A-B-A configuration as at Soanes. This
A-B-A however, is no longer a single cut ending in a flattened perspective; rather it is an extrusion into
perspective, vanishing into the distance. This long expanse of the structure is clearly understood as repeating
parts of a single module. The closest modules to the viewer show how iron columns meet an entablature of
cross-xs that support the second level of x supports, which extend into the glass ceiling above.
This experience describes that of a moment in motion. The people are caught frozen in motion, in
various acts of walking, pointing, and chattering. The viewer is presented with many narratives, each at a
microscopic scale below us. Indeed, we are provided with a sympathetic viewer to help guide our own gaze. To
the left of the image, a man looks from the second level, peering down to the tiny people down below. The scale
difference from person to person is here highlighted. Moreover the scale between objects and people are even
more obvious. From this vantage point, the viewer can freely compare each object at its own scale. None are
broken, none are cracked, none are missing parts.
Red paint, imprinted on all at once in one print in the chromolithography process, sets the colorful tone
of this image. Red drapes, red flags, red pedestals highlight the goods on display. They point to the galleria,
they signal where one finds exotic silks and linens. They carpet the cool iron bars and domesticate the scene.
They make the Crystal Palace habitable. They support the objects and the people in the structure.
Contrasting the transparent washes that convey architectural material and heaviness, here it is the
endless layers of heavy oil-based paint that conveys the ephemerality of transparency at the Crystal Palace. The
objects on display (as previously mentioned, they are highlighted by the startling red paint) are seen under an
even and well-diffused light. Another color complements the red: a light, almost lilac blue. Instead of
emphasizing the objects, the blue highlights the architectural metal supports, which, though structural, is the
reason for the atmospheric lighting within the Crystal Palace. This is evident in the blue paint that hovers over
the ceiling at the far distance in the vanishing point, which is painted on in a general haze to emulate a kind of
ephemeral quality under the glass plated hall.
The paradox of conveying opaqueness through transparent paints, or conveying transparency through
opaque paints demonstrate the kind of anxiety and tension in the contemporary experience of Art and an
industrializing world. Acting as a form of critique, Gandys representation carries an inherent paradox of
Soanes agenda, in that he employs watercolors to convey opaque, heavy, and the inward-looking, tomb-like
quality of a flattened order at the Soane Museum. It almost anticipates its own demise by preparing a
dichotomous key for viewing and classification itself. Unlike Gandys watercolor, however, the
chromolithograph of the Crystal Palace provides no anatomical dissection and attempts no didactic lesson. It
merely provides a snapshot of a live scene, without explanation. It is not eager or anxious about its survival, but
it embraces the vanishing of objects in the long-off distance, with a sureness of its own technology and modular
system, through which infinity is a distance man can understand and can occupy.