Plunging into the "cool" waters of the contemporary art scene, Don LaViere Turner still burns with his passionate struggle for existence. Draftsman, printmaker, sculptor and poet, he overflows with imagination and energy. His work is intemperate, immodest, egocentric and violent - completely at odds with the sophisticated detachment of the Pop and Optical painters currently so in vogue. Gifted with extraordinary skill, he creates visions of incredible, wild beauty. If he is romantic, he is not naively so, for his works burst with a desperate awareness of man’s isolation and bestiality. His humor, and there is a good deal of it in his drawings, is sharp but not sardonic, directed against the basic foibles of the race of which he is quite consciously a member.

The breadth of Turner’s imagery is somewhat disturbing, for an artist is usually identified by one style which he has developed more or less consistently over a period of years. Turner seems to have evolved several styles concurrently, normally a suspicious sign of commercialism. His diversity, however, is not for the marketplace, but for the most effective expression of his complex feeling for life. Common to all his ways of working are almost overpowering vitality and tension. Only in a large exhibition such as this can one fully comprehend the richness and depth of his personality.

In many ways Turner seems an anachronism - the lone individualist in an age of pluralism, the traditional craftsman in an age of acquiescence. Even so, it is difficult to view his work without realizing afresh some of the profound implications of being alive - today and always.

From: "Don LaViere Turner" catalog; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, August 28-September 22, 1965

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