PAINT LIKE TURNER

Want to achieve a Turner-esque seascape, full of movement, with a glowing, dramatic sky? SARAH JANE BROWN shows you how

- SARAH JANE BROWN

Joseph Mallord William Turner is revered as the master of light and atmosphere. His sublime, luminous skies, swirling seas and dramatic storm clouds can suck the viewer in and transport them through a vortex of paint to some otherworldly experience.

For me, a Turner painting can project far more than the sum of its material parts. More than any other artist of his time, he managed to communicate something ‘sensory’. Personally, this is the reason that I paint. It’s a way of expressing something emotional that I can’t adequately describe with mere words. Turner’s vast repertoire of techniques was in itself a visual vocabulary; an emotive language full of hope and fear, light and shade, complexity and subtlety.

Like Turner, I tend to make loose preliminary sketches outdoors, taking in not just the sights, but all the sensations of the experience and committing them to memory. Back in the studio I can transfer these experiences onto canvas in a more controlled environment.

As you’ll soon discover, Turner’s method of layering glazes with areas of thicker paint requires a great deal of patience. Each layer must be dry before adding the next. This is why I’m always working on several paintings simultaneously. All around my studio there are paintings at various stages, propped or hanging up to dry, waiting for the next layer. Fortunately, thanks to the properties of modern materials, we don’t have to wait quite as long as Turner did!