Excerpt from a text on Carmen Turyn's work by Art Historian Ian Jeffrey.
"...Carmen Turyn's pictures are convincing because they have the look of what might be called natural images. Paintings often look assembled , for they have been made from accumulated brush marks. These show traces of their making too, but in general they have the abraded appearance of ancient images...
In male versions of the creative moment we are used to kinetics and to a variety of fierce mark-making, a lot of it autographic. Carmen's paintings, by contrast, are much more self-denying, as if that is really how it was when the planets passed by or when the hills took shape. It is as if this is what it was once like. Imagine your way back to the beginning.”
Ian Jeffrey is a writer and curator. He has held posts as tutor and professor at Goldsmith's' College London University; Recipient of Royal Photographic award; Exhibitions curated at Royal Academy and Hayward Gallery; Author of a series of books on photography published by Phaidon. Thames and Hudson, Arts Council, National Museum of photography.
Statement by 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 dream this an advantage. She has always produced paintings that appear at first sight to be expressionist in mood and in which colour is used emotively, playing an important role 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 discovery and frequently of self analysis and a definition of this in itself is always hollow frontiered. But this relentless search for a synthesis between the world of appearances and an interior dialogue concerning such a world is central to her concerns. For this reason her work seldom appears introverted.”