David Turner
David Turner is a private practice psychotherapist living in Richmond. He was born in New York City in 1939, six months after Kristallnacht, Germany's massive pogrom against the Jews, and six months before the SS issued and executed the first orders singling out Polish Jewry for death. The gates of Auschwitz yawned open.
Of the more than six million Jews murdered by Europe in the years 1939-45, more than one million were children. Had the parents or grandparents of Jews surviving today not fled Europe before the war; had Germany won the war it came so close to winning; had Hitler's idol and American industrialist Henry Ford won his anti-Semitic populist campaign and become president of the United States, would even a single Jew be alive in the world today?
For David Turner, Auschwitz is ever present. He does not consider himself just another American artist who matured in the shadow of The New York School; nor just an artist who happens to have been born a Jew. He sees himself, as every Jew alive in the wake of the Holocaust a child of Shoah. It is this awareness that defines his life and drives his work.
Artist's statement: Off the Rectangle!
Painting in the past represented the world to canvas; it told stories. In the mid-19th Century painters, inspired by the new medium photography, began exploring the limits of their art and craft. Taking their cue from the photographic image, the result of adjoining spots of varying contrast from black to white, the Impressionists created paintings by placing adjoining spots of color to create the final image. Thus was the foundation for 20th Century "abstract art" born. The next generation of artists, the Post-impressionists, blurred further the boundary between representational and abstract painting and they in turn were followed by Braque and Picasso. Today's art is an adventure in the New, a relentless effort to continue to expand the limits of creativity both aesthetically and technically. Which is not to say that Modern Art has thrown away the rule book; the same rules govern good art today as in past centuries. Composition and technical facility are as important today as for past generations of artists. But replacing a recognizable final image with something entirely unrelated to prior visual experience does challenge the viewer. What after all does "what does it mean" mean when the image the observer stands before holds little relationship to prior visual experience?
Among their contributions to the emerging new standard of abstraction, Picasso and Braque introduced "found" objects, newspaper and other refuse, onto their painted canvases. Eventually they began creating images composed entirely of found objects. So was born the art and craft of a totally new and unique art form, collage.
As with the audience, so also the artist only reluctantly moves away from the familiar. Still steeped in tradition, most artists today who work in collage continue to approach collage as an extension of painting, using the canvas or some other two-dimensional platform, possibly combining found materials with paint following in the steps of the earlier painter-explorers. But since the materials of collage are typically found or collected, each object possessing its own inherent shape and volume, why restrict the final image of collage to the rules of painting, to two-dimension and regularity in outline?
Freeform Collage respects the identity of the objects used in their construction and allows the materials themselves to define the dimensions and outline of the completed image. For the unaccustomed eye such works may seem strange, garbage thrown together in an unfamiliar manner. But familiarity comes with patience and study which, if the observer allows, results in expanding the limits of understanding and appreciation. In fact the observer who studies the images will see that, outline borders notwithstanding, the freeform images DO comply with the rules of composition developed over generations of art and artists.
All art has much to offer, to expand life experience and understanding for both artist and audience. We need only open ourselves to the possibility. Enjoy the experience!