The Oberlin Review
<< Front page Arts November 11, 2005

Turovsky Art Challenges Eyes and Ears as Backdrop

Unlike most artists of her fame and stature, painter Natasha Turovsky usually does not have the time to work out of a studio space. So she toils while traveling, painting on busses and airplanes, often slaving away in hotel rooms to perfect her pieces — many of which have re-defined the landscape of contemporary art — while striving to “start at least one painting every day.”

But as hundreds found out at Finney Chapel this weekend, Turovsky is not just a prolific artist. She also leads a dual life as a concert violinist, a calling that requires her to juggle both bow and brush, devoting every possible minute of her incredibly multi-faceted, versatile life to both music and art.

Turovsky performed this Sunday with I Musici de Montréal, a 15-member chamber orchestra that she helped found, alongside an on-stage display of her paintings. A larger collection of her artwork currently hangs in the Conservatory’s lounge and hallways, a continuing exhibition of more than 20 pieces that presents some of Turovsky’s most celebrated works.

The exhibition, though, was not accidentally placed in the Conservatory instead of the Allen Art Museum. One of the most distinctive facets of Turovsky’s work is her use of Western Classical music as inspiration for her art, as she attempts to re-interpret and transpose musical feelings, ideas, movements and rhythms onto the visual space of her canvas.

Many of her best paintings are also directly based on certain musical pieces, such as her “Pictures at an Exhibition” series drawn from Mussorgsky’s works, and her “Songs of the Earth” series, a part of the Conservatory exhibition, based on Gustav Mahler’s symphony of the same name.

Drawing her inspiration from classical music, Turovsky suggests, can be a challenge.

“When I’m working on specific musical projects, I listen over and over again to each movement of the piece,” she said. “Sometimes I simply look for the colors and atmosphere and other times I try to get the rhythm or movement from the music onto my canvas.”

Turovsky says that the nature of the music she works with also influences her artistic process.

“Sometimes a vision comes instantly,” she said. “Other times I feel something, but it takes time to be translated into an idea.”

Turovsky’s paintings, though, often reinterpret their musical roots through a new, surrealistic lens.

Starting to paint from a young age, Turovsky feels that her earliest and biggest artistic influences come from European modernists such as Marc Chagall, Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele. Her style, though, appears to be distinctively surrealist and somewhat Dalí-esque, her paintings created through a strange blend of ghostly ephemeral figures, subtly expressive color schemes, quirky symbolic repertoires and an unreal, but mysteriously uplifting sense of space.

Turovsky suggests that working in the realm of abstraction and surrealism allows her to explore new grounds.

“[I am] more attracted to absurdity than normality, and more to dreams than reality,” she said. “It gives me freedom. Realism is limiting.”

This freedom allows Turovsky to pursue forms and compositions that are truly sublime and engagingly mysterious.

Her “Songs of the Earth” series, made up of six different pieces that represent each separate movement in Mahler’s symphony, is particularly evocative. Its elongated, faceless figures float while lying bathed in delicate hues, emanating an eerie luminescence as the painting’s faded edges seem to dissolve into infinite space.

Turovsky’s paintings also make prominent use of puzzling symbolism, including recurrent wheel-footed birds, centaurs and certain Christian imagery, alongside more traditional elements such as clocks, candles and staircases.

Symbolism for Turovsky, though, is hugely important because of its subjective nature.

“I think symbolism is a very personal thing,” she said. “It could mean one thing to me and it will appear different to another viewer. Actually, this is what I enjoy most [about painting] — to hear completely different reactions to my works.”

In addition to her acclaimed Mahler series, some of Turovsky’s other favorite pieces, including “Mozart,” “Audition of the muses by an uninspired artist” and “Night at the Opera,” which she considers to be one of her most challenging works, are also hanging in the Conservatory.

But while Turovsky admits that devoting herself to both music and painting can certainly be a challenge, she continues to be inspired by all forms of art which enrich her life.

“Art is definitely not a form of relaxation,” she said. “But it is a part of me which I don’t think I could live without.”
 
 

   

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