Kathryn Mapes Turner
Distilling nature
Kathryn Mapes Turner grew up on her family’s Triangle X Ranch in Grand Teton National Park surrounded by the area’s mountains and wildlife. “The landscape and the wildlife shaped who I am,” she says. “It tapped into my spirit—which is what I feel art does. It affects us at a deep level. It brings us home to where we are and it can inspire us to be more than we are. My goal is to have my art transmit the energy from the landscape or the animal. I’m not a photorealist nor am I interested in that. My work is a process of distillation. How do I get down to the essential? What’s essential to include? I don’t want to paint every eyelash.”
An exhibition of her latest work will be shown at Turne Fine Art in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, August 26 through September 27.
Indigo, her watercolor portrait of a doe, is an exercise in distillation, capturing the innocent simplicity of the doe and, from the artist’s viewpoint, is an exercise in “softness, movement and soft edges…what I’m realizing is the more I leave out the more space there is for the viewer to bring their own reactions to the piece. Then a more eloquent and elegant conversation will begin.”
Turner has mastered the subtleties of the mountain and valley light and the subtleties of the animals in their natural environment. She has also learned the subtleties of her craft. She recalls spending a day in the studio of the eminent sculptor Steve Kestrel who began carving a fish from a long rock he had brought up from the river bed. He was forming the fish when the next blow of the hammer and chisel caused the top of the rock to flake off. Kestral stopped and said, calmly, “Oops! I guess that rock didn’t want to be a fish.”
She has also learned that in painting en plein air it is easy to be distracted by the wonders of the changing environment. “Don’t follow the light,” she warns. “Stick to your original concept.”
I strive to create paintings that record my
own experience of the subject’s essential spirit and energy,” she says, “not an imitation of a fixed surface reality. This process requires my presence, enthusiasm, open-minded appreciation, playfulness, courage and honesty. In this way, creating art is transformative, universal and timeless.”