28.may.08

i've always been fascinated by the use of light to create subtle impressions and dramatic force.  Hence my love for Joseph Mallard Turner (1775-1851), one of Britian's most celebrated artists. A landscape painter, renowned for his vibrant and dramatic treatment of natural light and atmospheric effects in land and marine subjects, his work had a direct influence on the development  of impressionism. Turner was the foremost English romantic painter and the most original of English landscape artists; in watercolor he is unsurpassed. The son of a barber, he received almost no general education but at 14 was already a student at the Royal Academy of Arts and three years later was making topographical drawings for magazines.  His first oils are sombre in colour but reveal his preoccupation with contrasted effects of light  and atmospheric effects such as storms and rainbows. Idyllic, dream-like landscapes, often of Venice, represented one side of Turner's late style.  The other was the increasingly direct expression of the destructiveness of nature, apparent in some of his seapieces. I feel the force of wind and water when I lose myself in his paintings. Turner's body of work includes around three hundred paintings and over twenty thousand drawings and watercolors, the majority of which were given to the English government upon his death. Most are now owned by the Tate Gallery in London.