Carmen Turyn is an artist specialising in gouache, pastel,
and black pen and ink drawings.
Carmen Turyn is an artist specialising in gouache, pastel,
and black pen and ink drawings.
About CARMEN TURYN
All paintings, gouache and pastel; all drawings, felt tip pen, charcoal or gouache.
Mounted paintings come in 3 sizes: 89 x 59cm, 56 x 47cm, 42 x 51cm
Drawings of all shapes and sizes starting from 1½ cm x 2 cm to 2¼ cm x 3½ cm.
I use black brush pen and blue watercolour pencil on white and off-white paper. The light-coloured paper gives a sense of space which I like. The drawings can change radically from beginning to end. I believe that the living in a particularly dangerous and uncertain world is mirrored in some of my drawings.
"Paintings are layered with gouache & pastel, starting with and ending with gouache. The colours are from memories of my early life in South Africa.
WORKS IN THE COLLECTION OF
Judge Albie Sachs, Cape Town.
Former Wolpe Gallery,Cape Town.
Former Argos Gallerist,Cape Town.
The late Ellizabeh Lutyens
London.
Pauline Podbrey, Former gallerist,London.
Mrs. Sidney Buckland, Translator,London.
Mrs. Anthea Yamey, PR Consultant, London.
Joe Finkelstone OBE,
Journalist,London.
Ronson family, London .
Jobst Grapow Former film editor and co-author of a book on Pasolini, Rome.
Jordan Murray,Events Coordinator,Kilburn Good Neighbours London
Craig Yamey, Graphic Design Artist, London.
work (Coloured)
Drawing
Testimonials
Peter de Francia, Former Professor of Painting, Royal College of Art.
". As a creative artist Carmen Turyn is difficult to classify and within the current cultural climate I would deem this an advantage. She has always produced paintings that at first sight would appear to be expressionist in mood, in which colour is used emotively playing an important part in her visual imagery. But the designation of her work as stemming from expressionism would be to use the term in a singularly restrictive way. For the basis of all she does consists of a process of self disc
Professor Ian Jeffrey, Art History Dept. Goldsmith's College
Carmen Turyns works are visionary pictures in which the vision is reduced as the work progresses. In these works space is squeezed as if it were a fluid substance between solids, themselves organic
Artist statement
My work...
My work stems from a childhood spent in a small town in the Western Transvaal, South Africa, a place of vast hypnotic space and magnificent landscape.
The small multi-cultural White population, far from their own roots, seemed unaware of living in a Continent of thousands of years of Art History, and amongst Mankind's oldest living inhabitants - the San Bushmen.
When, as a young adult, I emigrated to the United Kingdom, I had, like my Lithuanian parents before me, to reinvent myself in a strange new culture.
It took some years for me to understand the need, in my paintings, to return to my roots. I found my influences then changing to Ancient Arts and those Arts made specifically for religious or magical purposes.
An important recent influence on my work has been that of San Rock Art.
Working from reproductions of their paintings has demonstrated to me that the San understood form through movement. This results perhaps not only from their knowledge, as hunters, of animal movement, but also from their close association with Nature.
Their images were made in trance-state, bringing them ever closer to a Supernatural element.
This powerful community of daily life, religion, and art, connects with a fundamental thinking, one in which here are no opposites, only interdependence. San Art therefore, thousands of years away from me and far from their perceptions and values, speaks to me on a profound level.
My work is impelled by movement. Movement = breath = life.
In these changing and turbulent times, I reach out as much as ever to that ancient art which accords with the innermost depths of my being.
I am, however, a modern Dadaist. Dada was a term coined after the 1st World War when trust was lost in leadership and the word Dada was used as a nonsensical one.
Artist's Cv
Carmen Turyn
Lives in London, UK
Education
Goldsmiths’ College of Art:
BA painting & Art Teachers’ certificate 1969 - 1974
Awards
Thames & Hudson Prize – final year Art History thesis 1974
Goldsmiths’ Prize 1974
Gestetner Award 1982
Anglo-Jewish Grant 1984
Referees
Mrs. Sarah Breitberg-Semel, Curator, Israeli Art, Tel Aviv Museum
Professor Peter de Francia, former Head of Painting School,
Royal College of Art, London
Professor Ian Jeffrey (Goldsmith's College)
Exhibitions
South Africa:
Argos Galleries, Cape Town
South African Artists under 30 1959, 1960, 1961
One-woman show 1960
Lidchi Gallery, Johannesburg 1965
Wolpe Gallery, Cape Town 1964 - 1968
Invited visit to South Africa to see San Rock Art 2018
Israel:
Galleria Hakibbutzim, Tel Aviv 1982
Jerusalem Artists’ House 1982 - 1983
Museum of the Holocaust, Herzliyah
South African Painters in Israel 1984
Wizo - Cerami jewellery Tel Aviv & Haifa 1986 - 19901992
Italy:
Studio Aperto, Rome
Solo and group exhibits 1996 - 2005
United Kingdom
London:
Whitechapel Gallery, London Group 1972
Mall Galleries, UK Art Students
Representing Goldsmiths College 1973
ICA Gallery, London Group 1973
Podbrey Gallery 1985 - 1990
Balfour Trust, Group Show 2005
Zebra Gallery, Hampstead 2007 - 2008
British Musem AUK calendar 2011
Ben Uri Gallery
International Jewish Artists of the Year 2012
BURU data base of immigrant Artists in the UK
Teaching
Hammersmith Art College, London 1974 - 1975
Urdang School of Dance, Art Department, London 1973, 1976
Beaufoy School, Art & Remedial Department, London 1975 - 1981
Haifa University, Israel 1982 - 1984
1 year visiting lectureship
Ort Herzliyah, Israel 1983 - 1984
Tel Aviv Museum, Israel 1984 - 1986
Spiro Institute, London 1994
Millfield Art Centre, London 1994 - 1996
Contact me
To discuss commissions, exhibitions, or to purchase any work contact:
Carmen Turyn
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