About Chris Turner

Discovery

Mr. Turner’s journey to his artistic career has followed a distinctly non-linear path. In grade school in Houston he loved to draw, and his drawings were often displayed throughout the school. In 6^th grade he was encouraged to enter a city-wide art competition sponsored by the Houston Museum of Fine Arts. He was one of 30 students selected to participate in a year long studio program housed in the Museum of Fine Arts. At the end of the program the Museum hosted an open house displaying the students work in the main gallery of the museum.

This inspired a lifelong love and study of art, and other forms of creative expression such as photography, pottery, textiles and architecture. It also led to a degree in architecture from the University of Houston, and a 10 year career in architecture. His career began at Skidmore Owings & Merrill, a world renowned firm with a strong reputation for design excellence and technological innovation. During his architectural career Mr. Turner was a lead designer responsible for managing and coordinating the planning and design process of over 5 million square feet of commercial space, primarily for national real estate developers like Gerald Hines and Trammell Crow.

He left architecture when offered the opportunity to join Trammel Crow Company. During his 30 years in real estate he traveled and worked throughout the U.S. and overseas. As a partner responsible for managing over 8 million square feet of corporate real estate portfolios, he worked with people from cultures all around the world.

His thoughts, however, were never far from art. Mr. Turner had begun collecting art while in college, and he continued this passion throughout his real estate career. so that virtually every trip included visits to galleries and museums.

The people he encountered during his travels and the cultural & geographic landscapes they inhabited influenced him profoundly. The wide variety of artistic expressions which he encountered during his wanderings have shaped him like a vessel on a potter’s wheel, and led him to where he is today.

He is a full time artist who lives and works out of his studio in the countryside outside of Houston. He is currently represented by The Gallery at Legacy West in Dallas and Jack Rabbit Gallery in Houston. He also accepts commissions, either through his galleries or directly.

I am a painter living in the countryside outside of Houston, Texas. Best known for my bold use of color and layers of paint to create expressionist abstracts, I work primarily in acrylic and mixed media on canvas. I also frequently utilize digital tools to explore color palettes, compositions and subject matter.

I am at heart an experimentalist, and I am always open to adding new creative elements and methods in pursuit of the beliefs and life experience which fuel my art.

Innovations in technology have changed the way art has been made and displayed throughout human history. Whether the changes were incremental or revolutionary, they have steadily expanded the possibilities for imagining and creating art, while also reducing barriers to presenting it to a wider audience.

One simple example, the development of the metal tube for transporting paint, liberated artists from the confining limitations of the studio and set the stage for the plein air explosion of impressionism, the reverberations of which are still being felt today. The rise of the digital age has further obliterated or blurred the lines between what can be imagined and what can be realized. It is an amazing time of creative opportunity to be an artist.

My creative process therefore employs technology, brushes. card board, palette knives, and other random implements and tools to make marks through the application or removal of paint to reveal or conceal previous layers. I have also been exploring the use of collage in my process. Many of the themes found in my work have evolved in part from my extensive travel experiences in the U.S. and overseas. The artistic expressions and impressions of the people and cultures which I encountered continue to shape and inspire my artistic vision.

My compositions usually contain loose organic backgrounds with more defined linear bars of color laid over them, sometimes with paint and sometimes with fabrics such as canvas, burlap and denim. The dichotomy between these two means of expression is a continuous thread that can be seen in most of my work, from my minimalist color field paintings and digital experiments to my more recent collage pieces, and represents my attempts to reconcile or bring a sense of unity to the contradictions between the worlds of logic/emotion, reason/faith and the natural/supernatural.

About

Artist Statement