Support Your Local Mormon Artist: Kent L. Turner

There have been a lot of posts recently regarding Mormon Artists. I just happen to be related to Kent L. Turner (my wife's brother) who was recently awarded an Artists Choice Award at ebay. You can view some of his stuff here and here. He is a very talented guy. Feel free to leave comments for him here if you like. He is aware of my blog, but has never commented yet. Or better yet bid on some of his art.

He has expressed his approach to art and I am going to cut and paste it for your enjoyment.

The Art of K. L. Turner


I am an active artist whose mediums include, but are not limited to, oil and acrylic painting, pencil, pen and ink, oil pastel and sculpture. My chosen genres are very broad, from fantasy and abstract to landscape, impressionism, and nature.

My ID reflects the many different genres of art that I like to create. Although most artists by necessity develop a single style that their clients can look forward to seeing from them, or even have different "periods" where their style evolves over time, I choose to express all of my creativity and not chain it to a single genre or style. I create whatever the mood strikes me to create- sometimes it is light and inspiring, sometimes it is dark and disturbing and sometimes it is just plain whimsy. Although the genres and mediums vary widely, to the observant viewer there are subtle yet powerful cohesive elements to all of my works. Hopefully at least one person will appreciate each piece I have to offer.

How can I create art that covers such a wide range of emotion and style? In order for me to answer this, consider first this quandary:
There is a perception in the art world that an artist must specialize in a style or genre of art in order to portray it well. How can an artist really represent truly beautiful, inspirational pieces if they also offer dark and disturbing work? Is it possible for them to really know beauty if they have such darkness in their soul?

Human experience is a lesson in pain, pleasure, joy, agony, peace, and strife. We cannot experience gain without first having loss. I would further submit that nobody can truly appreciate joy without knowing the feeling of grief.

Therefore it is not a hindrance, but actually a requirement for an artist to understand calm in order to accurately represent vitality, darkness for light, chaos for order, death for life and grief for joy. My works represent the broad range of experiences that I have learned and grown from. If I were to limit my artistic creations only to the light or only to the dark, then my work as a whole would suffer.