| about
Ralph Turturro
Born in New York,
47 years ago, my two earliest memories are - first
at 2 yrs. of age; I would pull all the detergents
out from under the kitchen sink and make sculptured
pies on the living room floor -the second is of a
4 yr. old boy standing alone in a long empty driveway,
watching cats walk in and out of the backyard; the
colors were: green - gray, warm black and a very intense
Dutch yellow light.
One whisks through many crushes in their life time.
I loved ‘Claude Kirchner’s Circus’,
a T.V. program which I watched before bedtime at 7
years of age. ‘Merrie Melodies’, ‘Ignats’
and the bouncing sing-along-ball, all early morning
programs, crushes that denote fond and warm memories
of waking up with my dad, seeing him off to work while
I got to stay home, watch T.V. and dream of the things
I wanted to do in that day and then went ahead and
did them.
Of all the things that my crushes have been about
in all of these 40 some-odd years, the one thing they
have had in common is some distinct level of truth
and though this truth has evolved into something much
different than ‘Ignats’ throwing the brick
at ‘Crazy Cat’, there are still intrinsic
elements that remain the same: things that are real,
have a smell, a texture; things that are honest, clear,
straight forward, make you laugh; things that wake
you up, scare you, make you think.
That I would gravitate, as a painter, to the work
of van Gogh, Kandinsky, Pollock, deKooning, Rothko,
Twombly, Tapies is no mistake; in poetry to Poe, Whitman,
Frost, Neruda, Rilke, Stevens, Thomas, Ginsberg, Snyder;
in music to Mozart, Beethoven, Puccini, Dylan, Miles
Davis; artist’s who work from inside out.
In 1982 I Interned with George McNeil, a New York
School Painter, who was 80 years of age at the time
and warned me of the dangers of being a painter. He
said “...if there is anything else you could
do to make a living go to it.. because a painter’s
life is not an easy one.” Almost 20 years later
painting still remains my sole way to communicate
those extremely personal, in-audible, subtle nuances
of thought and emotion that have no life for me except
for on a textured, colored surface.
Through my work I am learning that the essence of
anything, any action of us as a species, is to see,
to experience, to learn. If one is to make ‘Art’
real, one must learn to be in the moment of each experience,
whether physical, mental, emotional or otherworldly.
When the logos is brought to bare, when you are alone
in the studio without having done your homework, (lived
your life) your work can not have that reality, have
that life. For one also realizes that making art in
many ways is like making your children - you have
little or nothing to do with it.
Conception is out of our hands. But oh how glorious
it is to ‘see’ your child being born,
growing before your eyes. |
