The landscapes of Bill Turner come with invitations.
Most of them follow a compositional motif of roads, often central to the image, inviting you to step onto the road and follow it into the landscape.
Turner lives and works in the Atlanta, Georgia area. His landscapes, painted in oil and acrylic, are softly rendered, at times more suggested than delineated, and frequently cloaked in soft mist or atmospheric haze.
They are usually painted with a narrow, carefully controlled palette. His compositions, however, are bold in terms of value and shapes, with large dark masses set against bright areas of hazy skies (a hazy sky is actually lighter in value than a sunny blue one).
His web site includes a multi-page gallery of paintings, as well as a selection of reproductions.
Turner started as a photographer, and continues to work in that medium, with may of his photographic compositions using the same compositional device of roads to lead your eye, and imagination, into the landscape.
I cam across Turner’s work obliquely, through an “ambient video” experiment by technology experimenter Doug Siefken and composer Tom Salvatori, in which Turner’s landscape “sewell barn” (image above, bottom) is used as the subject for a piece called The Road to Sewell’s Barn.
In it Salvatori’s painting has been digitally manipulated to an almost monochromatic state and is very gradually restored to full color (and perhaps “pushed” a bit beyond). The suggestion in this case is of dawn breaking. The changes happen so slowly as to be imperceptible, like a real dawn.
