Art - Helen Turner

“I can draw and paint figuratively if I want to”, says Helen Turner, our cover artist this week, who is exhibiting at the HQ Gallery as part of their Summer Show. “I can give everything its right measurement, and make an object realistic. But I don’t want to. Because I want to interpret what I see, rather than represent it. It’s important to bring something to a painting, so it is a combination of the artist and the subject matter”.
Helen paints in broad brushstrokes, using glossy household paints. It looks at first like she might have completed each painting in a couple of minutes, after summoning up a child-like intuition that is blissfully ignorant of draftsman’s conventions such as perspective and scale. “That’s the trick to it: to make it look like it is effortless. But believe me, it isn’t effortless. Each decision is made carefully. The painting process is the third element of any image, along with the artist and subject. You have to work with that, too. It’s like a game of tennis: sometimes you keep with the play for a long time, before you see the opportunity of a winning shot”.

We stand in front of the painting that we have used as our cover image this week, in which a white flowery plant on a black background is juxtaposed next to a spiky black plant on a pink background. “This took me months before I got it right,” she says. “Originally I wanted three versions of the plant on the right. I did that, but it didn’t work, so I painted over. Then I painted a rose. I loved the rose, but that didn’t work either. So I painted the plant over it, from a drawing of a drawing I had done in Cyprus twenty years ago. Finally it all fitted together”.