Paint

I was in London again today. A team from Clearleft have their sprint playbacks every second Tuesday at the client’s offices on The Strand. I tag along for the ride, and to marvel at the quality of the work being produced in each sprint. Then I duck out when it’s time for them to plan the next sprint—I don’t want to be the extra cook that spoils that particular broth.

Usually I would just head straight back to Brighton, nice and early, avoiding the after-work rush. But today was such a beautiful, crisp, clear winter’s day that I tarried a while. Instead of hopping on the tube back to Victoria, I perambulated.

At Trafalgar Square, I marvelled at the fact that the National Gallery is right there, free to the public. I could just walk right in and admire one of the world’s finest collections of art. So I did.

One minute I was on a typical London street, complete with obligatory Pret a Manger and Costa Coffee. The next I was standing in front of a Caravaggio, marvelling once again at his use of light—like Renaissance film noir.

Turner, Van Gogh, Seurat, Cézanne; all there for everybody to enjoy. As I stood in front of the Holbein—stepping between the school children to find just the right spot for the skull’s optical illusion—I remembered a conversation I had with Alla just last week.

We were discussing responsive design. I was making the case that there should be parity between small screens and large when it came to accessing content. “But”, said Alla, “what about the emotional impact?” Is it even possible to get the same “wow” factor on a handheld screen that you can get with a wider canvas? She asked me if I had ever had an emotional response to seeing something in an art gallery. I smiled, because her question made her point perfectly. Then I told her about the first time I ever went to the Louvre.

It was my first time ever being in Paris. I wasn’t even supposed to be there. It was the early nineties and I was hitch-hiking around Europe, trying my best to avoid big cities—they’re less than ideal when you have no place to sleep. But through a series of circumstances that probably involved too much wine, I found myself taking a ride into the capital and getting dropped in the middle of the city.

It all worked out okay though. Through an astronomical coincidence, I met someone I knew who put me up for a few nights.

I was standing in Châtelet metro station in the middle of rush hour. Whatever effect that wine had on me was wearing off, and I was beginning to realise what a terrible mistake I had made in coming to Paris. I was studying a city map on the wall, looking for areas of green where I might unroll a sleeping bag in peace, when I heard someone shout “Jeremy!” It was a girl from back home in Cork that I knew through a mutual friend in art college. She was working at Euro Disney for the summer and having finished her day’s work, she missed her metro stop and was switching trains. She just happened to be there at just the right time to take me in.

But that’s not the story I told Alla. I told Alla about what happened during that time in Paris when I busked up enough money to go the Louvre.

I walked in and saw Géricault’s The Raft Of The Medusa. I felt like somebody had punched me in the chest. I was genuinely winded. It was one thing to see a reproduction in a book, but the sheer scale of the thing …I had no idea.

I’ve never had quite the same physical reaction to a piece of art since, but I sometimes feel echoes of it. I think that’s probably one of the reasons why I stepped into the National Gallery today. I was trying to recapture a fragment of that feeling.

Well, that and the fact that it’s free …which really is quite amazing in a city as expensive as London.