Visita la galleria di Elizabeth Turnbull / Visit the gallery of Elizabeth Turnbull.

A self-taught, intuitive artist, I was born in Sydney, Australia. At school I loved painting and drawing but my interest in art was never encouraged. It was many years later, in 1972, when I was in my mid-thirties and the youngest of our four children had just started school, that I started painting, drawing and printmaking. The need to do so surfaced out of a deep and long standing depression (almost a complete breakdown). I realised that art had to come from deep inside myself , not from what others could teach me. I had to trust my own instincts - by doing so I learnt very early on to let the painting tell me when it was finished.

My early works attracted favourable critical attention and were predominantly about shape, form and especially colour - even when depressed I would paint ‘happy’ bright pictures, often inspired by organic forms and strange animal shapes. By 1976, when we set off with our four children to try our luck in Europe, strong erotic and figurative elements were emerging in my paintings. From this time also, the rainbow has threaded itself in and out of my work, an eternal symbol of the inherent goodness and truth at the heart of everyone and of nature itself. As such it embodies a spirit of hope for the whole universe in which we live.

In Europe I found inspiration in the wilder aspects of the landscape - in places like Greece, Spain and in England’s Pennines that reminded me of Australia. More exhibitions followed in Spain and the UK but I never felt entirely at home in the conventional art world. Then, in 1979, I visited the exhibition ‘Outsiders’ at London’s Hayward Gallery and was profoundly affected and excited by what I saw and experienced. I recognised in this hitherto unknown world so many aspects of my own instinctive way of painting; I felt at home at last – mine was also intuitive ‘outsider’ art… I had friends!

The revelatory power of instinctive artistic expression - in my own work and that of other ‘outsider’ artists - to open doorways to deep universal truths, has been a source of wonder to me ever since. In my own case, during long, quieter, more contemplative periods, where I painted continuously but rarely exhibited, my writing emerged and new strong themes began appearing in my painting – a deeper spirituality, the Feminine and its connection with ancient Goddess mythology and a growing interest and fascination in the role of Mary the Mother and the enigmatic Mary Magdalen.

Over the past four years, our move to Australia’s island State, Tasmania, where much more of my time is spent in closer touch with nature, has meant for me not only a heightened awareness of the beauty and wonder of the natural world and the changing seasons, but a deeper sense of our interconnectedness with every atom, past and present, of the entire universe. This inspired a body of work around the theme of ‘The Ancestors’ – an overarching view of the oneness of all humankind and nature that not only sees common ancestral ties present in all of us, in our very cells and in everything that exists, but also sees us and all of nature as being present in them - an idea that resonates for me with the concepts of both Taoism and quantum physics.

We are very, very old - the stuff of the stars and the sea - yet ever new.

Elizabeth Turnbull

www.elizabethturnbull.com.au