Ray Turner
Brad, 2010
Oil on glass Collection of the artist
Brad, 2010
Oil on glass Collection of the artist
Artist Ray Turner lives in Pasadena, CA, where he received his BFA from Art Center College of Design. Post graduation, he became a professor of painting at his alma mater. Turner's work has been exhibited in museums and galleries throughout the United States. Turner began painting portraits for the current body of work and traveling museum exhibition called Population in 2007. The idea was to paint portraits of the uncelebrated to the celebrated people from a cross section of the populace in communities across America. The subjects would then become part of the growing body of work that represented their communities and respective museums.
The exhibition is which currently touring the United States and abroad, and began at the Pasadena Museum of California Art. It has shown in eight museums and Turner’s work is in many permanent and private collections. Still growing in number the body of work has currently has over 500 portraits. Population is an installation based body of work, painted on 12 inch squares of sapphire glass, which are then displayed on a color field grid that becomes their back ground.
Described recently by acclaimed writer and critic Michael Duncan, “Applied like slathered tattoos, Turner's portraits reside on slick square skins that are transparent, with the fields behind the figures left empty of paint. The blank glass fields reveal various colored wall panels that set off the images and enhance their floating spectral presence.” Like Lucien Freud, there is an “Overturning the spontaneity of abstract expressionism, Turner creates slow boiled stews of troweled paint, bringing the aesthetic decision-making process to a crawl so that a composition gradually reveals itself.” The transparent thickness of the glass causes the figures' silhouettes to form thin shadows that seem to shimmer. The slight distance from the wallemphasizes the film of paint that embodies each human image. Close likeness of his subjects is for Turner, as he calls it, only a "byproduct;" indulging his own emotional response to a painting as he makes it, he explains that a kind of "capturing can't not happen." But always the independent life of the painting takes precedence over the capturing. This is Ray Turner’s first exhibition in Maryland.
Academy Art Museum - Ray Turner: Population - 25.04.2015 - 05.07.2015
Website & source : Academy Art Museum
Website : Easton
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