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George Turner

“I have painted for over thirty years, of which over twenty-five have been spent managing a central Illinois farm. There I have observed the land in its essentials, seeing air, light and water blend with the soil in a continuous dance. I have seen a quiet power there, and I try to paint the land and sky as the wonders they are, without recognizable signs of man. There is no ‘view’, but rather a less visible, less contained landscape where natural processes function without interruption: tangible, beautiful and potent. Interacting with the changing weather and seasons, the natural landscape is more convincingly the order of things than is the brittle structure of our human scheme. Seeing the quiet power of the soil, land and sky without ‘view’, I would like to let them have back their primal-ness and give the landscape a rest from imposed responsibilities. Juxtaposing nature’s elements with the artist’s rectangle is rationalization for mixing up a marketable metaphor. A conflicted concept of ownership and naturalness emerges. The ground is soil, a dry fluid more potent than gold and less understood. Air and water beg to dance with it, move it blend with it. The weather releases its odors, folds its details and works the shape of the horizon. Ownership and development put land into convenient shapes and put recognizable things on those shapes. Architecture and the market are slapped onto a landscape left rarely to its own devices. So I try to paint a liberated, unshackled version of nature; elemental landscapes where one does not surrender to control. When I stayed at Sleeping Bear Dunes in Michigan, it rained every day I was there. I went there specifically to use the dunes in my paintings without walking away with the same old grass blades in the sand with shadows or foot prints in the sand...since my genre is landscape ‘abstracts’. Painting the skyline juxtaposed with the lake is very different at Sleeping Bear Dunes...especially when you are lying down...in the rain. The series of paintings depicting Mexican landscapes is from a more recent time in my life when I traveled regularly to the Southwest to visit my step-mother at a nursing home in Phoenix. The land is so vast and desolate that if I placed a figure in these paintings in relationship to the landscape, that figure would be ‘beyond earshot’. These landscapes were also inspired by a rusty coil of wire I picked up from the area.” George Turner is a 1967 MFA graduate from the University of Chicago and studied painting and drawing at the Akademie der Bildenden Kunste in Nurnberg, Germany. He has exhibited his paintings primarily in the Midwest and his paintings are in many collections.

Mexican Landscape: Beyond Earshot #1