Exhibitions Huon Mallalieu
TRAVELS THROUGH LANDSCAPES AND GARDENS Fosse Gallery, Stow-on-the-wold 4th-24th March
An ‘English garden-painter’ might suggest the rather waffly watercolours of the Edwardian Jolly Hollyhock School, but Louis Turpin’s vibrantly coloured paintings are far from that.
Turpin is very much an Oldie artist. He is not only a masterly painter of gardens, allotments, sheep and landscapes, but he enjoys a parallel career as singer-songwriter and guitarist with the Turpin Brothers Blues Band. Born in 1947 – the son of Digby Turpin, a film-maker and animator who worked on such shorts as Is this a Record? (for the Guinness Book of Records) with Willie Rushton and various Pythons – Louis was brought up in London, but has been based in Rye, East Sussex, for many years.
He intended to study architecture, but realised that he was much more attracted to two-dimensional art. All was abstract at that time, and although he soon made the unfashionable transition from abstract to figurative, his brief flirtation with it still shows in the form and texture of his work.
Thereafter Turpin turned to commissioned portraits for a living but, in 1981, his first solo show was of interiors. Visits to Sissinghurst showed him that he could also find the patterns and colours that he enjoyed out of doors, in the ‘rooms’ of walled gardens.
Turpin developed his own style, a slight Impressionism which prevents his exactitude in portraying plants from seeming obsessive. In the same way, he is a very good portraitist of trees without needing to detail every branch.
He has exhibited widely and, in 2015, his first solo show at the Fosse, Landscape Journeys, was a considerable success. I must declare an interest, in that I bought a small painting then, and I enjoy it anew every morning as I draw the curtains. It is of a pair of sheep against snowy Sussex fields, and they have presence and personality. I love the way that the earth scrapes through the light snow covering.
Turpin says that sheep pose particularly expressively in winter because they hope to be fed. There are more of them in Travels through Landscapes and Gardens, the current exhibition, both in paintings and very striking, Indian-ink landscape drawings.
Along with his staples, such as borders at Sissinghurst and Great Dixter, Turpin has found new gardens and new landscapes: Owlpen, Painswick and Rodmarton in the Cotswolds, Tremenheere and others in Cornwall and Devon, and the Edinburgh Physic Gardens with glorious mists of Himalayan Blue Poppies.
New subject matter came with a recent visit to a village in Andalucia where his parents lived for 16 years, and where he and his sons went to scatter their ashes. Artistic first fruits are Indian ink and watercolour studies of palm trees at Ronda.
In several cases, paint is more or less obviously laid on a gold ground. In some, though it may take the viewer a moment or two to realise it, the gold bursts through to make up the whole sky; in others, it glints between colours to add richness and mystery. I don’t know of anyone else working in this way. A hint of Klimt?