Page 23 - Studio International - July August 1973

he put his art together. He had no interest in
decay. The 'umbilical' cord, the emotional link
between the painter and the painting had to be
cut. Consequently there are no overworked
early canvases. His early works display the
detachment of the later ones. When Turnbull
found his 'way' it was because he needed to
keep 'time' out of the rectangle as though
it were air which left inside a container would go
foul. A skin of paint was formed that would
hermetically seal time out. Its fusion was made
through colour. The precedents for much of the
paintings he has done since are to be found in
the works of Memling, Van Eyck, Ingres, Tang
Glaze Pottery, Japanese screens and
sixteenth-century Persian carpets.
In 1955 he made a painting called Mask
which contains the basic shape of a head and
shoulders. The whole surface has been covered
with the even strokes of a heavily loaded
palette knife. The slabs of colour although
clearly defined have been randomly placed so
that only the angle of the knife defines the shape
of the head and shoulders. The mask's
characteristic covering role provided Turnbull
with the formal clues he needed. The mask
itself has been disguised by randomly placed
colour and heaped up terrain so that in a sense
it and its background has become the hidden
face. The container has been camouflaged so
that we cannot find it. Painting 1957 did not use
the image of the mask but paint has been spread
all over the surface in thick, random, clearly
defined strokes of colour that have no particular
directional pull.
Turnbull had begun to clarify his colour so
that it separated into densities, opacities and
translucencies. The greater the clarity of the
colour, the less the confusion of tone and
density, the more complete would be the
hermetic fusion of the surface. By 1959
Turnbull had started on a series of paintings
that have continued to the present time. In
them, a rectangle of the same proportions as the
canvas floats to within an inch or so of the
painting's edges. The rectangles are not
illusionistic openings, although one's eye can
sometimes penetrate to the canvas beneath, but
are sheets of colour suspended in front of the
surface of the canvas. No. 28, 1959 is a roughly
square amethyst that hovers in front of a white
ground. One can look right through the
amethyst square because the ground burns so
brightly beyond. But having got through, the
white spreads across the whole surface and
repels one back into one's own space.
In 1959 Turnbull also began a series of
(Top)
Corrugation 1967
Fibreglass, 72 x 46 x 8in.
(Centre)
Enclosure 1968
Installation shot
Galvanized steel,
18 ft10 in. x 13 ft 10 in. x 48 in.
(Bottom)
Sculpture 1971
Wood, 72 x 36 in.