'Painting #2 'Static in Dusseldorf' Painting

Painter, born and lives in the U.K. who uses the physical gesture to explore the possibilities of painting with computer mixed paints and modern engineering plastic materials.The artist describes his 'Shiny Paintings' as a critical exploration of the space between the act of painting and the photographic/computer generated image.

Essay by Wendy Osgerby, Senior Lecturer Art History, University College
Northampton.

It has been said that it is not possible to paint like Jackson Pollock any more.
Steve Turner's work, in a very real sense, is a response to that statement.

Pollock offered painters new possibilities by using industrial paints from a can and working on the horizontal. In 1951 Hans Namuth filmed Pollock from beneath glass as he dripped and splashed the paint onto the surface. In this instance the glass was used as a vehicle in a study of process.

Although Steve Turner's paintings are not on glass but cast acrylic (a transparent plastic) there is a connection. He, however, paints on both sides of transparent
ground - the cast acrylic. That and the other materials, computer mixed gloss, and fluorescent paints, are more technologically advanced than those used by Pollock.
The resulting paintings are described by the artist as shiny.

A turning point came when Turner began to understand why photographs of his earlier work appeared far more aesthetically pleasing than the actual paintings themselves.
The photograph seemed to enhance the light, space, and colour of the paint and contained an extra quality - that of the smooth shiny or glossy surface. This aesthetic also seemed to distance the painter from the painting. This is also seen in Untitled VI
(1997) by German photographer Andreas Gursky. It is a photograph of Pollock's One, Number 31 and could be viewed as a homage to Pollock; however a more theoretically informed postmodern view might read it as celebrating the quality of the photograph over that of the original painting.

The challenge now was to make paintings that were already embodied within this aesthetic - a painting that looked like a glossy photograph of a painting, or a detail of a painting, but which was in fact a painting made as directly as a Pollock.

In the last 50 years since Pollock, advances in visual technological reproduction such as television and computer generated virtual imagery have (arguably) enriched our lives.