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Another aspect of Turner that now seems so prophetic was his freedom of technique. There were witnesses to it, for Turner was apt to leave his big Academy pieces unfinished until varnishing day and then, hunched close in a trance of concentration for hours at a time like a stumpy, irritable macaw, would complete them in the gallery where they hung. One colleague remembered how "the picture when sent in was a mere dab of several colors, and 'without form and void,' like chaos before the creation." The handling of paint, the stuff itself—squidgy or crumbly or liquid, applied with every instrument from the finest sable brush to his own horny thumb—was of immense importance to Turner. The structure of paint in his mature work, the gouts of impasto overlaid by veil upon veil of glazes, transparencies and flecks, is not merely a description of the movement of wind, light and water: it becomes an equivalent to that movement translated into the motions of the hand.
With Turner, for the first time since Leonardo, movement becomes a painter's primary subject. Turner was the first painter of landscape to perceive—and find a visual language to embody his perception—that nature is composed not of objects acting upon one another in a mechanical way but of fields of force. The earth's atmosphere, which earlier painters had treated as a limpid and neutral fluid, was now endowed with an awesome particularity—swaths of energy, turbulence and vibrating light, arches of cloud and rain, endless halls of vapor and transparency. The sea for centuries had been conventionalized as a flat sheet or, when shown in a storm, with generally stylized patterns of movement; yet to Turner it revealed equally vast and specific structures, sucking and toppling. By 1803, when he came to paint Calais Pier, Turner possessed an insight into the real motions and energies of water whose only parallel was in Leonardo.
Grand Catastrophes. Why no landscapist had done this before is a mystery. It may be that land and vegetation came to be perceived before either sky or sea because land can be possessed, but air and water were (at the time) dangerous, beyond ownership. In any event, Turner's claim to originality of vision is absolute. Furthermore, it was based on his experience. But Turner had a leather belly and, blessed with immunity to seasickness, he endured all weathers. In one terrible storm off Harwich, he recalled, "I got the sailors to lash me to the mast to observe it. I was lashed for four hours, and I did not expect to escape; but I felt bound to record it if I did." The result was Snowstorm—Steamboat off a Harbor's Mouth: that devouring vortex of exquisitely modulated energy which, seen at the Royal Academy in 1842, was derided by critics as "soapsuds and whitewash."