The image I posted with my last blog was painted by JMW Turner  1775-1851.  You might well be wondering why his work is so relevant to my own practice.  

Turner’s late style was not only in tune with the Impressionists but also with the Modernist movement.  Modernism can be described as the ascendency of form over subject matter or content, which minimizes the representational elements in a work of art and maximizes its formal elements.  

Although the threads of modernism were already being woven in the late sixteenth century, when such artists as Arcimboldi, Parmigianino, Bronzino and other painters adopted the exaggerated style of Mann erism, in fact the qualities now accepted as the cornerstones of Modernism  -  imagination, creativity, distortion, experimentation with media, emotional expressionism, individualism, maximizing of form, were beginning to be realized in the nineteenth century Romantic movement and it is to this tendency that Joseph Mallord William Turner belongs. 

The work of JMW Turner certainly influences my own work, his boldness of colour, strong colour contrasts and exaggerated brushstrokes all emphasising form over content, seen here in ‘Rain,Steam and Speed’ 1844