From the Field
The biggest works Turner Vinson has ever made, opening June 26
at Cassens Fine Art.
Some artists work from photographs. Some artists sketch on location and finish the work in the studio. And then there is a much smaller group who take their canvas into the field and don't come home until the painting is done. Turner belongs to that last group, and the work in this exhibition is what that looks like at six feet wide. Every single piece in this show is evidence of that, and Cassens Fine Art has had a front row seat to all of it. From the Field is a show we have been waiting to put on the walls for a long time.
"I'm not manufacturing. I'm not after being efficient. I don't want to be proficient. I want to be like a poet in front of a canvas in the woods." - T.V.
The body of work behind From the Field is what you get when someone with that kind of conviction actually lives it out, at a scale most plein air painters never attempt and for reasons that have nothing to do with efficiency or output. Most artists build systems to make the work more manageable. Turner has spent years building a practice that makes it the opposite, because for him the difficulty is not a problem to solve.
Turner grew up in Texas and spent the early years of his life convinced that art simply was not for him. "I grew up not doing any art. And I thought art was ridiculous." That changed on a college trip abroad, when a friend handed him a DSLR camera and something in him shifted. He spent the rest of college in a darkroom, obsessing over light and composition and the mechanics of a good photograph. He graduated with a BFA in photography, and even then, he still did not consider himself an artist. Photography felt like documentation to him, not truly making something.
After graduation, Turner and his wife applied to graduate programs across the West. She received two full-ride offers. He was not accepted anywhere. They ended up in Idaho, and it turned out to be the best thing that could have happened.
"It was meant to be. Because that's where I met Gary." - T.V.
Gary Holland taught Turner direct painting, to commit to the passion, put it down on canvas and let it live. "Gary really taught me how to feel when you load the brush up. It's just paint. And then you can put the brush strokes on with confidence." That foundation sits underneath everything Turner makes today, even as his work has pushed well past the scale and surface his teachers were working at. Holland painted portraits, still lifes, figures, and some landscapes. Turner took what he learned and carried it somewhere else entirely.
A few years ago, he tried adding more detail to his paintings. More information, more finish, more of what he thought might help the work. He rejected it almost immediately. "I would start doing it, and I'm like, screw that. No. I hate this. This isn't it." So he went the opposite direction entirely, toward texture extremes and expressive surfaces, toward canvases where the contrast between bare and loaded paint became the conversation itself. "I'm really searching for a place in every painting where there's thin, almost no paint. And then there are areas that are so thick, you wonder if it's going to come off." That tension is not decorative. It is structural, and you feel it standing in front of these paintings in a way you simply cannot get from a photograph.
The plein air world is built around small canvases. Eight by tens, nine by twelves, sizes that fit in a bag and don't draw too much attention in a public place. Six of the works in this show are 60 inches or larger on a side. Turner went the other direction entirely.
The question most people will ask is a practical one: how does a person get a canvas that size out into the wilderness? The answer is about as straightforward as Turner's entire approach to painting. He carries it. Instead of working within whatever size felt manageable, he measured his van to find the maximum canvas that would fit in the back. Then he drove to the Bitterroot and hauled it in on foot, found the right spot, and set up. "If you want to paint in the winter, you're going to be cold. If you want to paint in the summer, you're going to be hot. People kind of say those things are the downside to painting outside, but I think that's the upside." For Turner, the conditions are not something to work around. There is no shortcut in this process, and he has never gone looking for one.
Once the canvas is in the field, Turner builds the whole painting simultaneously rather than in layered stages. He is not working background to foreground, not roughing in shapes to refine later. The entire surface is moving at once. For some pieces, he will return to the same location over multiple sessions, carrying the canvas in and out until the painting has everything it needs. The West Fork looks like the West Fork because he stood there. Lake Como looks like Lake Como because the canvas sat on its shores.
Turner has painted the Bitterroot through every season since he and his family put down roots in Hamilton in 2018. Shortly after settling in, he began working with Cassens Fine Art, and we have had the privilege of watching his relationship with this valley grow ever since. "I've just been obsessed with the three to five miles from Hamilton," he says. "It's like home now." That kind of familiarity with a place shows in the work in ways that are hard to define but easy to feel. He is not visiting these locations and making something picturesque out of them. He knows them the way you know a road you have driven a hundred times, and that knowledge lives on the surface of these paintings.
It shows up on the walls in specific ways. Lake Como appears in more than one piece: The Crooked Tree and Spring Above the Lake give collectors two different relationships with the same stretch of water across two completely different seasons. Autumn on the West Fork brings one of the valley's most recognized corridors into the room. These are not generic western landscapes composed for broad appeal. These are places that people in this community will recognize from the road, the trail, or the drive home. And for those visiting from elsewhere, or those who have never set foot in Montana at all, the paintings become something else entirely, a postcard made by someone who actually lives in the artwork and has stood in every one of those spots with paint on his hands. When a collector purchases a piece from this show, they are buying a place that the painting itself has been. That is not a small thing.
For Michelle Cassens, who has watched this body of work come together from the beginning: "Plein air painters at this scale are rare for a reason. The canvas has to be in the physical place it depicts, and the environment does not negotiate. What Turner has done with this body of work is decide that the constraint is where the painting lives. The light, the weather, the hour, the cold, the wind, those are not obstacles to the practice. They are the practice. From the Field is the largest statement he has made so far."
When the Rabbitbrush Bloom is the painting this show was built around. At 70 x 92 inches after frame, it was the first of the large-scale series and the piece that set the direction for everything that followed. "The rabbitbrush in bloom is something you just can't ignore," Turner says. From across the gallery, the bloom reads as a single wall of yellow against the surrounding palette. Walk closer, and it breaks apart into individual brush decisions, open passages of canvas sitting right next to paint with real physical weight, the whole surface pulling you in to look at how it was actually made.
There is a story Turner tells about painting on the river a few years ago. A stranger approached from behind; the back of the canvas was all he could see. The man smiled, nodded, and asked if Turner was enjoying his time. Then he walked around to the front of the canvas and stopped.
"Oh," he said. "This is what you do. This is who you are."
Turner later said, "I don't know that I've ever felt that before." That moment, of being seen completely by a stranger in the middle of the woods, is the feeling he has put into every painting in this exhibition. The goal for From the Field is to bring people together who are drawn to artists completely obsessed with what they do. Come meet Turner and see the show for yourself. Opening reception Friday, June 26, 5-7 pm at Cassens Fine Art. From the Field runs through July 17. We would love to see you there.