Roy Turlington is a painter, born in Sileby, Leicestershire, where he still lives and works. He has been exhibited nationally, on numerous occasions in London, Leicester, Nottingham, Birmingham, Manchester, Sheffield, Derby, Buxton, Stoke, and Loughborough.

His work is collected widely, both privately and publicly, in the UK and abroad, in France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Monaco, USA, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Switzerland and Belgium.

Like many artists of his generation he was seduced by the history of art and the values, qualities and emotional stimuli one can experience from studying great works of the past. He is particularly interested in cave paintings, Egyptian tomb painting and Italian Renaissance frescoes, where the weathered surfaces, patina, defects caused by accidents, graffiti and architectural changes, help to give these works a contemporary and conceptual feel of timelessness.

In the eighties he worked on large-scale paintings in techniques based on fresco, but instead of using wet plaster as a base to paint on, he transferred oil colour from paper on to wet emulsion which gave a similar effect to fresco. The imagery of this particular period concentrated on repetitious bird and fish in frieze-like formats.

Later he concentrated more on the human figure, combining some of the fresco techniques he has devised with collage taken from magazines and newspapers. He uses additional political and sexual innuendo in the form of graffiti and photographs to give a sense of scale and a little humour. There is also a series of paintings experimenting with coloured surfaces, whether they are saturated, opaque, transparent or multi-textured. On these surfaces he has etched repetitious frieze like drawings of semi-erotic figures, to assimilate them as a kind of bas-relief so that the interlocking images take on a three-dimensional, calligraphic, grid-like format like you might see on any advertisement billboard or in hieroglyphics on an ancient Egyptian wall.

MAX WYKES-JOYCE

Max Wykes-Joyce of Art Review describing one of Turlington's exhibitions: It is difficult to describe these quite remarkable, distinctive paintings without seeming excessively far-fetched. A typical Turlington might be said to resemble most a mid-XVIIIth. Dynasty Egyptian wall painting - let us say one of the great series in the burial chamber of Menna, field scribe to the Pharo Tuthmosis IV (c.1422/1411 B.C.) - painted in the manner of Piero della Francesca by a contemporary occidental with an oriental passion for nature. He takes very simple themes - swans and sedges, swimming fish, a gaggle of geese, two magpies in wintry branches, grazing deer in a wood, the trunk and leaves of silver birches against the light - and makes of them images of Eternity, pictures imbued with a spirit akin to that which led St.Francis of Assisi to invite all creatures to praise God, "…for there is no kind of creature under Heaven that is without the power and the need to praise the Creator. " These are marvellously quiet, contemplative paintings.

All works are for sale. Prices range from £100 - £1000 according to size, framed or unframed. For addresses and telephone numbers and any other details see contact below.

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