THOUGHTS / On Celestial Looking
Night sky at Les Houches, France, Patrick Carr via unsplash.com
Walking in haste from A to B, head down, plugged into a smartphone, intent on reaching a destination on time (or running late), staring at pavements and feet, and a fog of faces and passing traffic: life demands a lot from us. We unwittingly subscribe to the noise and distraction of twenty-four hour culture, addicted to busyness in our work and in our personal time. Our attentions can be everywhere and nowhere at once.
People on Jubilee bridge, London, via IG @manu.dimartino81
Looking, in its essential contemplative and reflective sense, is often bypassed in our daily lives. It is sacrificed to the urgency with which we travel from one place to another and endeavour to get things done.
But last month in London came a welcome respite. During Fashion Week, the designer Anya Hindmarch’s Chubby Cloud installation at Banqueting House encouraged visitors to do just this. To stop, to lie down and to look up, admiring Ruben’s painted ceiling from the generous comfort of an enormous white beanbag. Exhale!
Chubby Cloud, experiential installation by Anya Hindmarch, 2018. Image: anyahindmarch.com
Whilst we may take moments to be present and to appreciate our surroundings we do this increasingly in a digital realm. Yes, , the world can open up. Social media can be stimulating, exciting and inspiring, and we can forge new relationships. However, without properly physically and mentally pausing in real time we miss out on having connected, meaningful and fulfilling experiences, visual and otherwise.
“Our culture… values doing more than thinking and believes answers are in the palm of your hand rather than in your own head.”
Details are missed. Nuances are invisible. Thoughts cannot collide. New directions and opportunities are lost. Eureka moments and life-changing realisations don’t come unless you stop to look for them in a receptive and introspective state. Unless you slow down. Kate Murphy, in The New York Times, even posits that we have an aversion to spending time with ourselves and with our own thoughts.
Charles Snell (Aster Muro), Light in the Storm (2016), fresco panel 272 x 182cm
“Sometimes we need to stare into space.”
Lauren Child, author and current Waterstones’ Children’s Laureate, is on a mission to ensure that children at least ‘dawdle and dream.’ She spoke on the subject last year at Hay Literary Festival and continues to do so with her ‘Staring into Space’ lectures, cementing creativity as equally important to literacy and numeracy and, crucially, as essential to good mental health. It promotes looking, thinking, problem solving and reflecting inwardly, but also reflecting in relation to others and the world around. We adults would do well to take note, especially in a society where mental health problems are increasing.
Our maelstrom of fast-paced action, instant stimuli and digital dependence reduces the very act of Looking to the Overlooked. We just scroll past things. Endlessly. How often do we forget to look up when we are walking along, to really consider something that catches our eye? Do we permit ourselves enough time to follow up the spark of a thought or to layer images and make visual connections? There is a lot to be gained from looking deeply, above and beyond.
“Looking at something is more interesting than doing anything else.”
Image: Siim Lukka unsplash.com
Within us as humans is an innate ontological and spiritual fascination with the sky and with looking to the heavens. Star-gazing and cloud-watching and pondering the infinite have always had their place. As if answers lie ‘up there’ and therein is something more magical and hopeful than just us. And it is humbling. We do not do it enough. In our downward-facing technological and digital days life is chaotic and a lot of what greets us in the morning news is disturbing. Meditation and prayer counter this but even simply looking skyward is a counterbalance that can offer solace and possibility; perhaps what Van Gogh wrote rings true:
“Hope is in the stars.”
Sistine Chapel. Image: stpetertravel.com
Historically, frescoes on ceilings and walls, in churches and other buildings, encouraged viewers to look up and to be immersed in art. Their interweave with architecture and their impressive scale and presence gave people no option but to stop, look and feel. They captured onlookers in the narratives told, in their beauty and in their transcendental power. Although artistic languages, narratives and style may have changed over the years, the potential of large-scale architectural and monumental art installations to encourage higher connectivity - and being present - remains the same. It stops us in our tracks.
Salon D’Hercule, Palace of Versailles. Image: wikipedia.com
If looking up had more value historically than it has today perhaps it is due to its spiritual context. Painted ceilings were considered carefully as part of, often religious, meaningful and grand interior architecture. Think of Michelangelo Buonarroti’s frescoes in the Sistine Chapel, the painted Gate of Heavens in the Hercules room at the Palace of Versailles, or the ceiling of the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. There were important stories to tell and feelings to elicit.
As an art form, fresco has held a special place in architectural art but it is seen as something from history. It should be seen as a current and powerful tool to encourage people to connect meaningfully, emotionally and spiritually to their daily environments. It has been out of fashion for hundreds of years, it is difficult in practice, and was long tied to purely religious matters; but as an art form and communicative method it is untapped and still relevant.
Gilt decoration and rounded ceilings in a Hermitage Museum hall, St. Petersburg. Photo: Jeff Heimsath via National Geographic.
Vast walls and ceilings are its canvases. It reaches out beyond the gallery. And with innovation and modernisation its important artistic, expressive, narrative and spiritual possibilities can be realised to improve people’s everyday encounters and their sense of connection to interior architecture and physical space, and to themselves.
Contemporary fresco (and art in a broader sense) has the potential to counter Overlooking; it offers meaningful, immersive and positively interruptive visual experiences to enrich people’s daily lives and to enhance their sense of well-being - be it panels, murals or ceilings. As Michelle Ogundehin, a respected authority on colour, design and interiors, says:
“The ceiling is the fifth wall, neglect it at your peril!”
Céline, Miami. Architect: Valerio Oligati. Image: Mikail Ollsson.
Looking up and all around, Swiss architect Valerio Oligati recently designed the Celine flagship store in Miami with the ground floor storey serving as an exhibition space for experimentation and changing displays. In fact, the whole interior could be an art installation in itself, with the facades, floor, walls and ceiling all clad in a pale blue veined Brazilian pinta verde marble.
Céline, Miami. Architect: Valerio Olgiati. Photo: Mikhail Olsson.
It is a celestial experience, streaked in clouds and soulful sky, a place where Oligati envisaged that an “internal universe can be imagined.” It is matched with stone-like obelisks and monumental forms, and pyramidal earth-bound shapes that draw the eye skyward as if to say ‘look up, aim high, aspire.’
In wall coverings, Fornasetti’s iconic Nuvole murals, created from etchings of clouds, are tempestuous, rolling and thundering. When applied overhead, on the ceiling, they create an immersive and atmospheric skyscape fit for contemplative experiences. The Nuvolette (‘little clouds’) design offers this celestial impression on a smaller scale. In metallic tones of giver, charcoal and pearl, the finish is shimmering and lustrous effect, almost ethereal and intangible.
Fornasetti’s ‘Nuvole’ murals via Cole and Sons
In 2016, UK artist Luke Jerram created the awesome touring exhibition Museum of the Moon. Using lunar imagery from NASA, Jerram made a 7m scale, internally-lit, spherical lunar sculpture. This fascination with the moon is not new. Throughout history, the moon has captured people’s imagination and inspired different ways of seeing, something Jerram refers to as a ‘cultural mirror.’
Our bond with the skies is age-old. Over time, the moon has featured in timekeeping, navigation, mythology, inspiring artists and scientists alike. It casts a pale light and remains full of power and mystery yet delicacy. The moon is a celestial constant which unites different cultures around the world each with their own special relationships to it. In the celestial there is common comfort. Looking skyward gives a sense of there being something greater that supersedes the chaos of earthbound living and mankind’s shortcomings. It makes us feel small. In a good way.
Similarly, David Aiu Servan-Schreiber is a French artist who is inspired by the planets as spiritual entities. He presents anonymous gold-leafed orbs against coloured backgrounds, rendering the celestial elements which stirred faith in him as an adolescent and explores infinity, divinity and mankind’s spiritual longing and celestial searching.
Finding a viewpoint, picturing things, searching, making sense and giving shape in art is part of what makes us human. In skyscapes, in stars, in planetary and lunar bodies, we find comfort, reassurance, spiritual solace, possibility, and perhaps infinity. As viewers, we need to make sure that we take the time to Look. To appreciate what is above us and around us.
Space-makers (architects, developers, interiors designers, town planners, artists) have a social and cultural responsibility to ensure that the positive power of total architectural spaces is harnessed. Here are the perfect canvases with the potential to enrich people’s daily lives with art, to improve well-being and, in changing how people feel and respond, to change the world.
We need to pause. We need to contemplate. We need nourishing visual experiences to feel good.
Patrick Heron in his studio
“One’s awareness is saturated with visual pleasure. The greater the intensity of your consciousness and visual concentration, the greater the pleasure.”
And we need hope. In Gerhard Richter’s words: ‘Art is the highest form of hope.’
American artist Stella Maria Baer via IG: @stellamariabaer