I have spent most of my life as an engineer and plein air painter. Analysis, control, technique ... engineering background, I’m sorry. Not really. All my analog days I have been trying to make things like they should be, or should look like; as the world should be or wants to be. It’s taken its toll on me. But as I have gotten older the mind cannot keep up with the imagination. Reality is in question. So what is reality anyway? The very depth of the art consciousness is to express other realities.
Imagination is hard to understand - with the mind anyway - but the heart and soul understand. I have always been a dreamer, lucidly in technicolor; with memory, but images go beyond dreams. The funniest bring the best memories; and images that are funny and crazy catch me up the best.
Interesting enough after a couple of years of painting my fantasy work, my plein air work tends to have strange things happen. It is hard to be straight anymore. Some of my students now have picked it up too. The so called ‘real’ world now looks wilder and spooky and funnier. Things that happen around me have more humor in them, or at least I think so. Others might not agree. Ha.

Jerrold Turner
Works of Fantasy
January 2013