Zane Turner
Zane, an identical twin, was born in Toronto in 1982 to Canadian and Jamaican parents. In 2002, he undertook a Bachelor of Fine Arts, studying under Montreal artists Susan G. Scott and Marion Wagschal. In his fourth year, he received an honourable mention in the Kingston Prize for Contemporary Canadian Portraiture for his hyper-realistic Painting, Mark Ainslie. In June 2006, he received his Bachelors Degree in painting and drawing, and is now working primarily with encaustic wax, creating hyper-realistic portraits. While Zane continues to work with portraiture, he has also branched off into a new series of representational façades called Rusty Boat Side. Since 2008, Zane lives and works in Mont-St-Hilaire, Quebec.
PORTRAIT SERIES:
The face is the fundamental canvas for communicating expression; sometimes it needs a little paint to be objectively bold. To native tribes, painting the face was a ritual for awakening one’s personal power, which would amplify their inner spirit and was an element of valour in the celebration of life. The act is ancient but this idea of puissance in a facial paint job is the primal concept in this body of wax portraits. These images exist in the context of the modern portrait. Painting the face is just one way of braking down that barrier of fear that inhibits us from being ourselves. Metaphorically, the painted face ends up looking like a deconstruction of the masks that make up who we are revealing a truer intimate personage. In each portrait, the face painting is perfunctory in its application, yet relevant for taking on the contemporary jamboree of the everyday quest- to find out who we are in life. These works drip with modern rhetoric; they are the tribal masks of today’s fashionable fellow. At the soul of these portraits shouts an empirical motivation to augment our appearance and express ourselves with passion.
RUSTY BOAT SIDES:
It’s a spectacle of painterly corrosion, a vicious yet beautiful dance of creation between the wooden structure, the painted surface, and the elements. The Rusty Boat Side series is an ongoing body of work created to escape from the literal and float between abstraction and realism. The clutter of tarnished paint on wood panels and metal culminates into a composition that is ambiguous, an abstraction of the vessel. Thematically, these works exude an impression of great experiences. They tell of someone who has gone on great adventures, one who has experienced long departures and many awaited returns. The subject matter is tired, a bit broken, but rich with experiences. The idea of a boat ridden by time denotes thoughts of subsistence, endurance, privilege, transportation, and freedom. These unique creations are inspired by imagery from Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, as well as from personal memories of boats swaying while moored to beach watersides. Their painterly beauty and untold story transcend the material surface to evoke the sentiment of many journeys. These deteriorating façades pay homage to time passing and comment on our society that promotes eternal youth. It is a body of work that significantly represents its life story and the story of life. |
