Ken Turner as an artist is an old campaigner, now aged 95 he gave a remarkable hour long talk, standing up throughout and making it memorable by smashing a rather nice bone china cup with a hammer to show how things have a life and change, and then making an action painting, narrowly missing splattering the audience of interested cognoscenti with paint.
Ken shook the bottle of paint up and down and squirted it out - rather an invitation to Freudian interpretation. One bottle was a bit stuck at first. However, then he made the splurges into something else with a few flourishes of a brush.
This took place in the Borlase Smart room at Porthmeor studios where Ken has a show of large abstractions until the end of July. These vigorous expressions have titles to which it is sometimes
hard to see the connections in the images.
However Ken Turner’s talk was about art and life rather than his exhibition or his lavishly illustrated available book, ‘A Life Being Ken Turner’.
He referred to Heidegger and other philosophers, to the chaotic state of the world, the art world’s deplorable market, and the need for aesthetic education to sensitise people to the forms and experiences they meet and make.
Dyhano asked if another person’s work would do just as well without the Heidegger connection?
Ken invited us to dwell on the importance of the life of things, to value feelings, to see that art can embody all that the artist has become.
The force of his conviction held us involved as participants in the event and its theatricality left an impression that I turned over in my mind as I walked home.
