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Course: Tate > Unit 6
Lesson 2: Turner: The Artist and His WorkCapturing Turner's colours: Olafur Eliasson's colour experiments
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Often referred to as "the painter of light," what exactly was Turner trying to do with colour and light? Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson, known for his pieces exploring elemental materials such as light and air, investigates Turner’s use of colour and light through a series of colour experiment paintings. His interest in Turner’s paintings stems from the artist’s long held interest in atmosphere and dematerialisation. Through analysing pigments, paint production, and application of colour, Eliasson has created visual spaces where the viewers can break away from traditional perspective and hierarchy and simply immerse themselves in the atmospheres of Turner’s paintings.
Often referred to as "the painter of light," what exactly was Turner trying to do with colour and light? Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson, known for his pieces exploring elemental materials such as light and air, investigates Turner’s use of colour and light through a series of colour experiment paintings. His interest in Turner’s paintings stems from the artist’s long held interest in atmosphere and dematerialisation. Through analysing pigments, paint production, and application of colour, Eliasson has created visual spaces where the viewers can break away from traditional perspective and hierarchy and simply immerse themselves in the atmospheres of Turner’s paintings.
These colour experiments demonstrate Turner’s continued relevance to and fascination for artists today. Do you get a sense of Turner’s colours and atmospheres in Eliasson’s experiments?
Video transcript
For some time now I have been interested in colour and I've done a number of colour experiments some with light and some with paint seeing if I could dematerialise colour and I, of course, looked at who has been occupied with the ephemera of colour. Of course, Turner is one of the great protagonists when it comes to ephemera, atmosphere dematerialisation. So I started trying to understand what exactly was it that Turner was working on when he was in fact working with colour and light. When I started this project I chose a group of paintings and the group of paintings for me represented a certain effort that Turner had put into it but also I, at some point had to leave let's say, Turner behind and say, okay, now we’ll focus on how to create these paintings so that they will work as a solitary statement and they can also stand alone. I set up a small analytical scheme where I said how much colour and what colour how much light and how much darkness and I sort of laid it out. I was hoping to understand the paintings from the point of view of the atmosphere, the light. Hoping to achieve, let's say a space in which the viewer can occupy themselves being busy, circulating the painting. So there is no centre, there is no vanishing point, you could say. There is no hierarchy. I've been particularly focused on the works in which Turner radicalised his idea of ephemera where it became abstract to the extent of, you really have to work should you want to create a narrative. This idea of you being put to work you have to look for something, and after a while you realise, one could argue that you are in fact looking for yourself trying to make sense. We're surrounded by things today which sort of takes that away from us that we have to work to make sense and we feel that we are more consuming things that have already been pre-digested or somehow made to work for you. I think a Turner painting is very contemporary. It really has a lot to say today. Also, and this is, I guess, why it's so amazing to see them because they don’t seem old they look like something that is very relevant today.