Art must mature like an apple on a tree, you cannot force the nature of time. – Pierre Bonnard All figurative paintings intrinsically engage with the theme of time. The act of representing an object fixes it before our eyes, and when we observe a work we quite naturally wonder when it was painted, which moment it depicts. Unlike a photograph, however, a painting need not be confined to the portrayal of a single instant, but can roam through time, alluding to past, present, and future at once.
When asked how long it has taken him to create a picture, Nicholas Turner lightly quotes Picasso’s reply to the same question: ‘all my life’, a statement verified by his practise of painting from memory. Sometimes images emerge directly on the canvas, at other times with preparatory thumbnail sketches, before being expanded and elaborated on from a basic composition. Colour, mark-making and shaping then become his focus. Of late detail is developed using fine drawing with brush or pencil. As he stands at the easel Turner journeys through the past, recalling experiences in Cornwall and Spain, and the landscapes observed during many hours of plein air painting, making his pictures a testament to a lifetime of memories and experiences lived.
Alongside memory, imagination has its place in his work also, and as we view his paintings we are struck by the sense that we are watching a scene from times past, populated by fishermen and flat-capped figures from a calmer age. As a painter looks, they do so not only through their own eyes, but also with those of artists who have come before, and Turner’s vision is informed primarily by the Modern British Artists of the St Ives school: Christopher Wood, Alfred Wallis, and Ben Nicholson, painters whose work he most admires, and references in his own. With them he shares a fascination for scenes of fishing boats in harbour, and table top still lifes, themes which continue to excite Turner, and in which he finds rich inspiration. Perhaps it is this fascination with and joy in his subject that makes Turner’s works so appealing, their stillness inviting us to pause, to daydream, and to enjoy the quiet beauty of the artist’s world.