He’s the man in the mirror

By Cindy Landrum  

AUGUST 26, 2010 7:37 a.m. (0)

For Christopher Adam Turner, self-portraits are a form of therapy.

Some people may talk to friends about issues going on in their lives but Turner picks up a paint brush.

“Art, to me, is a way to work through things,” he said. “A lot of times people talk to somebody else to get things off their chests. Art is like that for me.”

The self-portraits are the subject of “Current Reflections of Self and Current Work,” Turner’s first solo exhibition which begins on Aug. 15 at the West Main Artist Co-op.

The exhibition, which will also feature some of Turner’s other works, will run through Aug. 29.

Turner, a senior art education major at the University of South Carolina Upstate, is the school’s first student to receive an art fellowship at the West Main Artist Co-op.

The West Main Artist Co-op is housed in the former West Main Baptist Church. Artists turned the empty church, which Howard Solomon bought with the idea of providing affordable work spaces for local artists, into studios, classrooms, exhibition and performance space.

The co-op partners with three Spartanburg colleges – USC Upstate, Wofford College and Converse College – that provide a private studio space for a semester for a student or faculty member from each school. The schools pay the studio rent and the program allows the students to work with local professional artists.

Turner was USC Upstate’s first West Main Artist Co-op fellowship recipient. Heather Mallory from Converse College and Amy Powers from Wofford are also participating in the program.

Some of the self-portraits in the exhibition were created by Turner during his time at the West Main Artist Co-op.

Turner said he wants his artwork to spark a response in its viewers.

“I think of my artwork as a means of dialogue and I want it to spark conversation about the viewer’s own emotions and experiences,” he said. “I want the viewer to have an emotional attachment to my work. The viewer having a reaction to my artwork is more important to me than selling them.”

Some of his artwork may evoke the same emotions in the viewer as he felt while he was doing the pieces, he said. Others may not. And that’s OK with him.

“I don’t label my self portraits with the emotions I think they reflect because I want the viewer to have his own emotional reaction to the art,” he said. “Some of my art might evoke the emotion of anger within the viewer or another piece might remind them of a personal experience of a trip or something. But it’s the viewer’s own experience with the art that’s important.”

Take “Self portrait 2” for instance.

Turner created this self portrait when he was in high school in 2006.

In the painting, a portion of Turner’s face is dark. Is it because Turner is depressed? Contemplative? Worried? That’s up to the viewer to decide, Turner said. All he would say about the painting is it was completed during a time when he had a lot going on in his home life.

“Most of the time my self-portraits are reflective of a moment I’m going through,” he said.

The self-portrait collection got its start in high school, he said.

Turner was taking an Advanced Placement art class at Broome High School. One of the assignments was to complete12 works of art in a concentration.

He looked around at the work he had done for other art classes he had taken. All of the classes had required he complete a self-portrait.

“I took art so much in high school I already had six or seven self portraits done so I decided to keep moving in that direction,” he said.

In college, he took a painting class and one assignment was to paint a self-portrait in the style of a famous artist. He chose Chuck Close, an artist who used a grid as the underlying basis for his photorealistic paintings.

In a printmaking class, he used the face or self portraits in all his printing.

“I didn’t want to do cookie-cutter, typical self portraits,” he said. “I kept messing around with different techniques and styles and I was able to figure out that a lot of these colors and styles I was using evoked emotion.”

And you never know what you will see when you look within, he said.

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