Roy Turner Durrant Art

This portrait has a naïve and gentle charm to it. To my eye it looks like a woman but it could equally be any gender or age. Perhaps this is the beauty of Turner Durrant's abstraction. The materiality is more distinct when you see the piece in the flesh. There is something endearing about being able to see the edges of the paper, torn almost in haste as if the artist just had to get the image down. Maybe it was painted on the spot or an image from the artist's imagination. Whichever, the use of minimal line and a reduced palette adds to the simplicity and thus free nature of the painting. Roy Turner Durrant Untitled (Head) Medium: Watercolour on paper Signed bottom right 1977 Image size: 31 x 26 cm - Frame size: 50.5 x 44 cm Roy Turner Durrant (1925 - 1998) A Modern British artist, Roy Turner Durrant was born in Suffolk, England in 1925. His career was long and distinguished, culminating with work in major public galleries in the UK and internationally. After the war he secured a place at Camberwell College of Arts where he was taught by amongst others by Edward Ardizzone Michael Rothenstein Keith Vaughan and John Buckland Wright and was a contemporary of Theodore Mendez. Whilst at Camberwell he was already exhibiting his paintings in London galleries. His work moved from early landscape and architectural interest to abstraction but with a great variety of style and technique. A member of the New English Art Club, from the late 1940s he exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy and in numerous commercial galleries in London. From the 1950s, his early figurative style began to change, becoming more abstract. He said of his own work in 1951 that his abstract imagery were 'by-products of an inquisition primarily concerned not with what the eye sees but with what the intellect and emotion experience’. In 1963 he moved to Cambridge to take up the post of Art Gallery Manager at Heffers at the time a well known local artists' materials and book sellers...