EXHIBITION
Subject – May 23 to July 6, 2019
Ray Turner
Ray Turner, an interpretive artist of landscapes and portraiture, refers to the works he is currently making as “Head Paintings.” When he began this series, he seized this exacting format with his customary scope of detail and sweeping brushwork. His investigation of this genre’s potential for permutation and variation is comprised of the sitter’s image rendered with tonal washes of oil on glass. HIs choice of this fragile material juxtaposed with his tactile and plush application of paint makes for a resonant, seductive surface. For Turner, the paint is always the most important element, and his customarily striking use of color is fully evident here. Traditionally in portrait painting, color is the equivalent for emotion and mood, providing its visual vocabulary. These works are rendered with a broad spectrum of tints, with interchangeable store sample swatches as background, fanning out a wide range of color values. Capturing a likeness is not Turner’s particular intention, but rather a contemplation and exploration defining the issues of art and artifice.
Born in Stockton, California, Ray Turner lives and works in Los Angeles. Turner received his BFA from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, where he later taught for many years. Known for developing strong thematic series, Turner has worked in a variety of genres with an array of subjects ranging from landscapes to abstracts, including his Good Man Bad Man series and Population. Inspired by the 19th century American romantic landscape painters and their quest for the sublime, he explores man’s domination of nature or absence from it as if both occupied a dimension beyond the constraints of time and space. His paintings become metaphors for the voyage that moves us through life, while the scenes they depict exist in a state of suspended animation, poised in a balance of poetic tensions signifying the cosmic conflict of the ephemeral versus permanence. His figurative work is some of his most ambitious of all his genres numbering over two thousand works, and has been exhibited in a number of museums across the USA.
