Annette Turow: Points of View

Minor shelf wear, light creasing to wraps, binding tight, pages clean and unmarked. Turow is, I think, doing something of the same sort in this new series, though she seems to refer to solitary, contemplative moments rather than social ones. One feature of the paintings is the carefully elaboration of texture. We, all of us, I think, remember places from our past with reference not simply to color and form, but to the intimate natures of their surfaces ? the cracked, sunburned paint of a particular windowsill for example. The artist is clearly very much attuned to this kind of nuance, which is something that also manifests itself in her previous work. When we look at the nature of abstract painting in general we note that it sprang originally from deliberate acts of 'not seeing'. Kandinsky, for instance, offers a famous account of coming into his studio and seeing some of the figurative works he was then produc-ing turned on their sides For a moment he was unable to recognize what they represented ? he saw them only as arrangements of form and color. Using American domestic architecture as her theme, Turow courts this kind of disconnection as a way of releasing memories and of defining the emotions these images produce.…