A compilation of editorials, short stories. Short extracts from the life of the author, and midnight musings on such topics as christmas cards, colour-blindness, and the state of the modern cafe.
Will update and add to it as I go. Cover is just a p...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
In 1775, an unusually violent monsoon season caused a typhoon to sweep part-way across the Pacific Ocean, where it hit a small island - as yet unmapped - known to its few inhabitants as Pingelap, and wiped out 87% of the population. Among the survivors was the island's chief, Nanmwarki Mwanenihsed, who carried a recessive gene for a rare genetic disorder which ordinarily only affected 2.7% of the tribe. In the same year, at their small house on Maiden Lane, Covent Gardens, a butcher's daughter named Mary Turner presented her husband with their first child, a son.
The boy's name was Joseph Mallord William Turner, and the disorder was achromatopsia, or total colourblindness.
Joseph would grow quickly, as boys from lower-middle-class families had to, showing early signs of artistic talent, and the eccentric temperament for which he would later be famous. He liked to claim - later in life - that his first published artwork was a page from Henry Boswell's Picturesque View of the Antiquities of England and Wales, which he had coloured in as a child. His proud father displayed the coloured page in his shop window, and used to inform customers, with a note of certainty in his voice; "My son, sir, is going to be a painter".
The Pingelapese would rebuild, with polygamy becoming a necessity because of the lack of surviving males. Mwanenihsed would take full advantage of the situation, sowing his wild oats amongst the available (and no doubt the unavailable) females until his eventual death. His legacy as chief would be trampled by time, memorialised primarily in the recessive gene for colorblindness that he had managed to pass on.
Quickly rising to a respectable - though not meteoric - prominence in the art scene, Turner combined his business savvy with a total mastery of colour and composition as he made a living out of architectural and topographical commissions. His paintings are glorious. They are stunning. His reds glow with a passion that burns against the effete background of 19th century European watercolour, his blues are filled with mood and atmosphere. Turner was also a fervent anti-slavery advocate, and he channeled his artistry into abolitionist evangelism, hoping to speak to minds with his words, and to souls with his art.
By 1840, the Pingelapese had mostly recouped their numbers, nearly reaching their original population of around a thousand tribe members. Mwanenihsed was long since dead, but the shadow of his life stretched across perpetuity in the form of the gene that was beginning to show itself amongst the children of Pingelap. Years of interbreeding meant that around 20% of the population were now totally colour-blind. The affected children were known as maskun - 'those who do not see'; children who had never once in their lives seen anything but a world of grey.
Switch to 1840 England, and Turner was inspired. A rumour was circulating that Prince Albert Saxe-Coburg would be attended a meeting of the British Anti-Slavery Society, and Turner was determined to incite His Serene Highness to increase national support for abolitionist efforts overseas. With that in mind, he picked his subject matter carefully; an incident that took place in the year of his birth. The horrifying account of a slaver captain, who - in response to an oncoming typhoon, and knowing that he could later claim insurance - threw half of his slave cargo overboard to lighten the ship.
The painting Turner produced was breathtaking, heartrending. Ruskin believed it to be his magnum opus, writing: "If I were reduced to rest Turner's immortality upon any single work, I should choose this." The objects and figures are shown, not by their outlines, but by a contrast, a conflict, a war of colour on colour. Two forces dominate the background; the hallelujah of a burning sky colliding with dark and swirl of the typhoon. The same typhoon that hit a tiny atoll in the Pacific and caused the propagation of an otherwise rare disorder. The same typhoon which inspired a masterpiece was also the cause of a genetic bottleneck that led to generations of children who would never see the glorious cacophony of colour that Turner blended into his work. His art - more so than that of others - was a complex negotiation of shade with shade, hue with hue, his soul bared in the subtle tints. And there lies the irony. Turner's magnum opus detailed the event that would eventually bar the children of Pingelap from ever appreciating it; from ever understanding the coloured soul of Joseph William Turner.
