Seattle Artist Terry Turrell Took A Long, Winding Path To Creating Direct Art

Terry Turrell can't remember a time when he wasn't making art. As a kid growing up in Spokane and Coeur d'Alene, he'd whittle away at bits of wood to make pocket-sized sculptures. Instead of writing letters, he'd send drawings.

The pleasure he got out of drawing and carving stuck with him into high school. But in the early '60s, when Turrell was in high school, it wasn't cool for a tall, strapping kid like him to be interested in art, so he says he "kind of kept it on the back burner. I was a little shy about it."

After high school, he drifted around the West doing odd jobs, landing for a few years in San Francisco. It was the '60s, and there were plenty of self-styled artisans wandering the streets of San Francisco. Turrell met some leatherworkers, picked up a few techniques from them, and was soon supporting himself by selling tooled leather bags and belts in bars. "They were real intricate," he says. "Kind of like African masks, but not exactly."

In the '70s he moved to Seattle, made some batik paintings, wrote music (and was good enough at it to sell a song to the Jefferson Starship) and supported himself selling hand-painted T-shirts at the Public Market, an activity he has on temporary hold. Even people who may not have seen his paintings often recognize his T-shirts. He uses their big, flat fronts as canvases for enigmatic images of people and animals, scenes that sometimes look like sophisticated children's drawings.

Turrell, 51, doesn't keep much of his work around the West Seattle house he shares with his partner, Lonni McIntosh, despite his growing reputation as an artist. In the past 10 years his quietly compelling paintings and spare sculptures have caught the eye of several of the nation's best-known dealers of "outsider" or "visionary" art, as well as numerous collectors who respond to the gently emotional tone of his work. His work is shown at American Primitive in New York, and Modern Primitive in Atlanta.

In Seattle, Turrell's work is shown at the Grover / Thurston Gallery, where his current show is on view through Aug. 15. The show includes a large number of his trademark figurative paintings on plywood, and folk-artish mixed-media sculptures. Before showing at Grover / Thurston, he was represented for many years at the former MIA Gallery, which was the closest thing Seattle had to a gallery devoted to folk art and outsider art.

A modest man who would rather talk about nearly anything other than his own artwork, Turrell says that the few paintings and small carved pieces around the house are there "because Lonni wants them. She picks out some that she wants to keep. I'd rather look at other people's work."

Indeed, the couple's neat-as-a-pin rambler is filled with artwork by Southern "outsider" artists whom Turrell admires; turn-of-the-century whirligigs, weather vanes and other anonymously made folk art they've collected on their travels; and Mexican tin ex-votos, which are small paintings made as offerings to God. The raw, unpolished spirit of folk art appeals to Turrell. Though he dislikes art-world labels and describes himself simply as "an artist," it doesn't take long to realize that he has, in some ways, been a kind of folk artist his whole life.

"I never think about what my art means. I just think about what I do as making things," said Turrell. "It's relaxing to me. I enjoy doing it. I'm pretty prolific and I work at it all the time."

His paintings, which he makes with enamel, house paint, sign paint and oil paint, often show tenderly androgynous people and animals in little scenes that could be from everyday life, or from dreams. The faces of the people and the animals are often similar, with large, squarish heads, tiny eyes, cat-like little mouths. Their noses are usually reduced to a pair of flared nostrils.

Because he goes back to each painting again and again to smear paint on with his fingers, then swipe it away with a rag, leaving an intricate patina of shadows and smudges, the paintings have remarkable, burnished surface texture. Turrell also gouges the paintings with screwdrivers and other tools, scarifying the surfaces into complex systems of tracks and fissures.

His sculpture is equally compelling and bewilderingly tender. Mostly he makes little figures carved out of wood, then paints them, a process that makes the wood look like smooth, much-stroked antique porcelain. The bodies of his people are made of cast-off wood splinters connected at the joints with baling wire. They look like the bleached skeletons of 19th-century children's dolls.

Turrell is especially noted for his small "heads," tangerine-sized wooden heads that open like books to reveal another little sculpture inside, perhaps a demon, muse or ghost. His work ranges in price from about $600 for small sculptures to $3,600 for large paintings.

Because Turrell has had little formal art training - he took a course at Cornish College of the Arts years ago but decided art school wasn't for him - Turrell is largely "self-taught," a term that has special cachet in the current art world. "Outsider," "visionary," and to a slightly lesser degree "self-taught" are descriptions used by art dealers to describe artworks made by supposedly unschooled artists whose inspirations come not from university art educations or visits to museums and galleries, but from their own life experiences and "visions."

The "outsider" art market has become a hot one in the past decade. Some collectors and dealers, turned off by the highly conceptual, ironic and emotionally cool art championed in recent years as the vanguard art of the '80s and '90s, have turned to artwork that is theoretically more accessible and more honest. "Outsider art" comes from the heart, according to its proponents, not from the intellect.

Certainly Turrell's work comes from his life and the world he sees around him. "Some of my work in spirit comes from old toys, dolls, religious icons, even though I don't take the religious references as relating to any particular religion."

In his current show, for instance, he has included a group of small tin-painted ex-votos which he says are inspired by the collection of Mexican ex-votos on his living-room wall. "I like the idea of little, small house protectors. They're a little like good-luck charms," he said.

Like the Mexican ones he owns, the ex-votos he made for his show are crafted of cut and sutured bits of colored tin cans and cast-off wire. His, however, also include small versions of his own paintings, images of people and animals that are at once poignant and emotionally direct.

Turrell says he's never had any trouble getting ideas for art. "My dad has a wrecking yard, and growing up there were always a lot of trucks and cars around. So sometimes I look at my sculpture and I see that, oh, that's a truck, or something from the yard."

Richard Thurston, of Grover / Thurston Gallery, says that people confronted for the first time by Turrell's work are often caught off guard by its subtle emotionality.

"I like the way his simple hand-hewn forms convey human emotions," said Thurston. "they're very genuine emotions, and the simplicity of them is sort of deceiving. "