The centuries old debate over whether colour exists in our heads or out in the world can be simply and succinctly resolved.

For Turner colour is the meeting place of matter and mind.

In the words of artist Paul Cézanne, echoed later by phenomenologist Maurice Merlau-Ponty, “colour is the place where our brain and the universe meet.”

For Mazie Turner colour is form.

But far from being a formalist, Turner is fascinated in the anthropology of colour. Unlike most of us who take colour for granted in our polychrome world, Turner cherishes its history and contingency. Art is a journey of acquiring knowledge of the world.

Turner recounts with relish the tales of five hundred year old ultramarine made from lapis lazuli mined and worth more than its weight in gold in European oil painting. She continues in wonder to tell me that Buddhist mural images painted in central Afghan region dated to 650AD from caves in the Bamiyan Valley are the earliest examples of oil painting.

She fathoms the harvesting of thousands of crocus flowers to make a few grams of saffron yellow. And ponders the taste and texture of the shellfish prized by Roman emperor Diocletian and used to make Phoenician purple at the turn of the fourth century.i

In her painting practice Turner thinks through colour. She mines ancient colours by using rare pigments like cinnabar green, cadmium red and cobalt violet. Avoiding the easily obtained, generic colours that liberated painting from the easel and the studio in the nineteenth century, Turner invests in the mineral and organic history of her materials.

Colour in its many personalities - fugitive, irascible, promiscuous and mutable - is Turner’s abiding passion.

Yellow pink

Colour is Turner’s way of feeling and of preserving experience and this extends to include her own personal memories in a series titled Preserve, from this series Peacock blue-greens 2009 recreates the familiar nineteen fifties coloured cloth worn by Turner’s mother Marigold. By rather than painting textiles per se, these colour investigations entrap experience and exude an inner kind of glow.

Through intense layering and gentle stroking colour is hidden and yet never fully concealed. It works to break up pictorial space, to form compositions only to dissolve them again. Each completed painting is an archaeology of colour - an accretion over time that longs to be peeled away and revealed. Notes from Turner’s process diary such as “witness what is surfacing” help her to resist control and place her as an observer in this process akin to meditation.

Turner’s introduction of new surfaces for painting has assisted colour in finding its form. The coarse weave of Belgian linen, ascetic in its raw state, offers resistance to Turner’s honied glazes. The paint latches onto the weave, each daub is like a thread embroidered across a tambour frame. In tondo paintings such as Ruby noon 2009, the shape of the painting gently battles the geometry of the weave.

This conversation with the world of textiles can be found not only in Turner's paintings but also in her home. Swatches of tessellated fabric, hand embroidered garments and even the tatami floor mats echo the gentle patternation found in her work.

Flourish 2009 was painted after Turners' visit to India. The painting in violet and antique rose started with what Turner describes as random and eclectic patternation. The result is a fluttering of forms down the surface of the picture plane. They progress towards the ground like musical notes falling in Dorian mode.

Out of Darkness 2008-2010 was started before Turners' visit to India. Its jewel-like prisms link this expansive painting with her earlier, smaller experiments with light reflection. Turner's experience of Varanasi and its wintery violet haze however, re-enforced the painting’s direction and palette.

Out of Darkness 2008-2010 - detail

While the orientation of each work is important to Turner, paintings such as Divisble are constructed like mandalas with several entry points. Turner consciously resists total control, not only of the painting process, but also of the beholder's journey.

And it is the recalcitrance of both oil painting and of colour itself that draws Turner back to the studio. She often quotes the Irish born American painter Sean Scully on his addiction to oil painting:

"I use oil paint because it has a disobedient and mysterious nature. I use it because it is an active, volatile material that no matter how much one knows about it, it can never be known completely. Oil paint and its companion media...give painting an expressive range of possibilities (always slightly out of control) that cannot be matched by any other painting medium. It engages issues of alchemy and mystery that resist the deadening ambition of the modern world to control everything, absolutely." ii

i For more on this go to Robert Finlay "Weaving the Rainbow: Visions of Color in World History" Journal of World History volume 18, number 4, December 2007, pp 383-431 ABC News 26 Jan 2008 - Yoko Taniguchi & European and US scientists & Japan National research Institute for Culture Properties ii Sean Scully in Sean Scully: resistance and persistence: selected writings, edited by Florence Ingleby, New York, 2006, pp78

Written by Lisa Slade

Colour cones from doctorate show, December 2007.