Park City-based visual artist Nick Turner crouches in front of a large ink painting of a horse he is working on in his studio. Turner, whose abstract paintings are showing at the Lodge at Blue Sky, Auberge Resorts Collection, is also a photographer. Credit: Jonathan Herrera/Park Record Renowned visual artist Nick Turner visited Park City last autumn for an exhibit and decided to call it home. “I stayed because other other things kept popping up,” said the artist, who is known for his ink paintings, photography and collages. Those things Turner referred to include other exhibits and events, including a current showing of his ink works at The Lodge at Blue Sky, Auberge Resorts Collection. Those works are reminiscent of the Japanese art known as sumi-e, which means ink pictures. “All the black I use in these pieces is ink because I like monochromatic paintings,” he said. “I went to Japan and studied Japanese for a while, and I found all the calligraphy fascinating. I will use bits of color here and there but very rarely.” Turner’s upbringing steered him toward art.  “My grandmother was a painter, and I was homeschooled until I was 14,” he said. “Then I attended a French high school.” Turner’s family traveled all the time while he lived between the United States and Europe.  “We would go visit the things I was studying in person,” he said.  After graduating high school, Turner studied at Parsons Paris. The school was established in 1921 as the first American art and design school in France and has a campus in New York City.  Ink painter and photographer Nick Turner, who lives in Park City, points out some images he created for an art book he hopes to publish. Turner’s first art book is a collaboration between him and iconic fashion company, Yves Saint Laurent. Credit: Jonathan Herrera/Park Record “I transferred to New York and finished my studies there in the early 2000s,” he said. “I stayed for 12 years trying to climb the Chelsea-gallery world.”  Turner returned to Europe in 2015. “I spent winters in Europe and summers in Jackson Hole, Wyoming,” he said. “Since I had grown up riding horses, I started working on a ranch up there.” Turner kept painting but also decided to focus on photography while working on the Diamond Cross Ranch, owned by his mentors — author, horse trainer, public speaker Grant Golliher and his wife Jane, a third-generation rancher. “I took a lot of photos from living out West,” he said. “I always had film cameras when I was growing up. My mom would give me cameras when we’d travel. So I’d always shoot rolls of film.” Although Turner attended school for painting, he would pull out his camera to shoot photos of his friends in front of his paintings.  “I had this series of people who would come through my studio,” he said. “I shot a lot in New York but nothing particularly that serious.” The photographs Turner liked while working on the ranch aligned with his aesthetic of spontaneity.   “I don’t like inauthentic things, and if something is too set up and too perfect, it bothers me,” he said. “The ranch held a lot of photo camps because people like to go out West to shoot. I did shoot some of those staged things, but I never used them. Art to me is not about perfection or everything being clean.” That thought process is why Turner doesn’t do a lot of photoshopping.  “The photographs are usually in color, and those are the more colorful aspects of the work I do,” he said. In 2022, Turner hooked up with Yves Saint Laruent (YSL), the French fashion brand. “One of the designers knew me from my horse stuff and asked if I wanted to work with them on a project,” he said. “I ended up shooting their advertising with horses in Paris, and I did all of their clothing.” The contract wasn’t for a typical commercial photographer, according to Turner. Park City-based artist Nick Turner’s abstract horse art is inspired by sumi-e, Japanese ink painting, and his time working on ranches in Wyoming. Credit: Jonathan Herrera/Park Record “They let me do what I was basically doing with horses on the ranch, so, it wasn’t like they had these specific looks that I had to shoot a certain way,” he said. “It was basically about what I liked, and they liked it.” Yves Saint Laurent and Turner published an art book, “State of Nature,” which is still available for purchase. “That was kind of the launch of me taking this sort of work more seriously,” he said. In addition to Yves Saint Laurent, Turner has photographed other brands such as Vogue, Stetson and Ron Herman, but the photography work is more sporadic than his paintings. “I’ll do some projects, and then I’ll go back to painting,” he said. “I have been painting horses forever, and then things started to get more abstract.” Turner did paint portraits of people for a while, but didn’t feel the personal attachments he felt when painting horses. “So, the art I do now is not observation, but basically all the stuff I’m involved in,” he said. That art also features his love of surfing through photographs of oceans in Europe and around the world — Easter Island, Fiji and Portugal, to name a few locations. “I’ll shoot tons and tons of images because a lot of it is about dynamics,” he said. “Then I’ll go and find things I like. Usually I’ll look for stories. I’ll find one image that is interesting, and then look to see what’s happening around it.” When Turner decides to paint on canvas, he usually starts with small, ink studies on paper. “It’s just like playing with ink and water,” he said. “After I find one that I really like, I’ll do a pencil outline on the canvas and then go in with ink. Sometimes I won’t put ink on the pencil, and sometimes I’ll put some colored paint on top of the ink.” Turner said the challenge of creating art doesn’t happen while he’s creating works. “It comes after I know I’m going to show something,” he said. “I become very self aware of what I’m hanging on the wall because it’s personal to me. It speaks in my language, and I start to think about the people who may not speak the same language.”  One way Turner overcomes that insecurity is to make sure the work he creates is authentic. “I realize the more authentic you are as an artist, the more receptive the art is,” he said. “If you want to control things you put out, you lose the freedom that art is supposed to be about.” Turner carries that philosophy over to his photography. Visual artist Nick Turner thumbs through some of his ocean photography in an art book while discussing his work at his home studio near Trailside. He arrived in Park City last autumn to show at an art exhibit and decided to stay. Credit: Jonathan Herrera/Park Record “There are a million people learning how to mix and light photos, so you need to find your own language and subject matter,” he said. “You have to create your own world.” Although Turner continues to paint, he is working on a few ideas for a new art book. “I don’t know if I’m going to self-publish or not, but it’s basically about living out West and the stuff I’ve collected,” he said. “I want it to be published in a way that it’s like a huge journal from an art perspective.” Turner considers himself lucky he can create art for a living. “There’s this freedom of being in control of your own time and what you’re doing — if it works,” he said. “If it doesn’t work, then it’s not fun at all. But I enjoy doing work that I want to do and not thinking about what will sell.” For information about Nick Turner and his art, visit nickturnerstudio.com or follow @nickturnerstudio. Ink paintings of horses by Park City-based artist Nick Turner are currently showing at the Lodge at Blue Sky. Credit: Jonathan Herrera/Park Record The post Turf and surf inspire ink painter and photographer Nick Turner appeared first on Park Record. ...read more read less