Abigail Turner has an artful, pert love of Montana and the prevailing natural beauty of all of the seasons. Working mostly with watercolors, her compositions seem carefully arranged for stark simplicity and contrast; shapes, colors and textures are energized with deliberate placement of subdued shades and brightly vibrant hues.
There exists a kinship and a link to the outdoors within Turner’s paintings that’s quite evident, something that helps bring out an adventurous sense of realism to her material. Indeed, she has discovered that working with watercolor gives her the ability to capture the detail and composition she appreciates in her subjects.
“Every moment and everything has its own beauty. That’s why it is hard at times to pick a subject to paint. I paint the stuff that I want to. Right now, I’ve got ten years’ worth of ideas waiting to come out,” says Turner, who hosted her first art reception on April 27 at the Frame Shop and Gallery, in Hamilton, and who’ll have more than a dozen paintings on display there until the end of May.
From her earliest artistic memories of doodling during art class as a first-grader growing up in Juneau, Alaska, straight through to today, Turner continues to be drawn in by the details of nature, humanity, life, birth and death, and she can find inspiration in anything from a seemingly simple flower to a vivaciously vast landscape.
The hidden qualities present in an object or landscape give Turner’s mind an intense artistic pleasure and deep satisfaction. These pleasures arise as sensory manifestations expressed in the form of shapes, colors, or sounds, novel designs or patterns, or something else less tangible or physical.
“There’s so much that happens over the course of the day that we take for granted or don’t appreciate. There’s beauty everywhere. Art, like beauty, is personal and individual. I want people to feel what I felt when I painted a particular piece: Joy, Sorrow. Happiness.”
Turner describes her work as gestural. She works mostly from poignant photographs that she’s taken here and there and along the way. Indeed, it appears as if she’s spent many hours traveling the back roads of the Bitterroot Valley searching out the places that are quickly succumbing to relentless progress.
“I feel as if I’ve always had the eye for painting. When painting from pictures, things usually turn out the way I want it too. Sometimes, I’ll work on certain areas first or work on the difficult stuff first – it all depends.”
Turner says that she learned to find pleasing, beautiful, and graceful attributes in ordinary objects and things, partly from watching her two children (Garrett is about to turn 4; Gavin is almost 2) – whom she credits, along with her husband Lance, as being inestimable influences on her life.
“Because my husband and I chose for me to stay at home with our children, it has slowed my life down to a gentle crawl. Because of this, my children do not allow me to miss the little things, like stopping to smell every flower, literally – or to count every leaf and pick it up to examine it.”
Turner applies her children’s world-full-of-mystery-wondrousness and natural equanimity to her own paintings.
“When you look at life through the eyes of a child everything is new and exciting. My oldest son, Garrett, who’s almost four, asks me ‘how was this leaf made, mommy?’ or ‘what kind is it?’ I always thought that a butterfly in flight was pretty. But now I get extremely excited when the boys see one, and it’s not just pretty to me – it’s beautiful and magnificent for them to watch.”
Trying to carve out a reputation as an artist can be a little bit like swimming against the current: trying and wearisome. Right now, Turner is still a tenderfoot and she’s doing her best to imagine an art world without limits, without boundaries, without prejudice and blame. To her, increased self-confidence and self-esteem are what the future holds. And, she says, she’ll continue to develop and refine the skills that she continues to rely on today in telling stories through watercolor creativity.
“I’ve grown out of worrying what people think of my art – for the most part. When people come into the gallery and look at my paintings, they may not like all my paintings, but if only one catches their eye and stands out for them, then I would feel that I did my job as an artist to provoke some feeling or emotion.”
Can Turner’s watercolor art evoke an emotion? The answer is unequivocally, yes. Perhaps one of her images, she hopes, will etch an indelible mark in the minds and impressionable retentiveness of those who glance at the artistic arrangements she’s offering with liberated demureness.
“Maybe one of my paintings will conjure up a vivid memory for some people and might even affect the viewer in some way. Some areas of my paintings have a life of their own – and people may be able to see that.”
