Turner was a British artist who lived from 1775 to 1851. His full name is Joseph Mallord William Turner and he painted this view of the Italian city of Venice in 1834…about two hundred years ago. The painting is called “Venice: The Dogana and San Giorgio Maggiore.”
Turner had a lifelong passion for painting rivers and the sea, so it’s not suprising that his favorite foreign city was Venice, the ultimate seaside city…where the buildings are built right out into the water, and the streets are canals.
Turner carefully drew the busy scene, probably sitting all day in a boat right out in the middle of the canal. Fancy buildings tower out of the water on each side of the picture. The boats with curly ends are called gondolas. The boatmen stand and push their boats through the shallow canal water with long poles. Some of the bigger boats have sails so they are pushed through the water by the wind. You can see a white building with a dome across the busy waterway – that’s the Dogana, a busy business center when Turner painted this picture and today an art museum. San Giorgio Maggiore is the name of the island all the buildings are built upon, though they come right to the edge of the water, and very little land is seen.
Practice! The secret to making art that you really like is simply to make lots and lots of art. Draw every day. Draw with your friends. Pull out the paints and paint your ideas. Don’t worry about making beautiful pictures…just make pictures. Throw them away if you want, or cut them up and glue the pieces it into cool patterns. Do whatever is fun and do it as often as possible.
Turner was a brilliant and successful artist. In his long lifetime he created over twenty thousand paintings and drawings…hmm…so he lived to be 76 years old and if he started drawing when he was a kid, that’d be 70 years of art, 365 days a year…where’s my calculator…wow, that’s a painting or a drawing every day. This guy knew the value of practice. So to celebrate Turner, get busy and draw some pictures yourself!
