Shinji Turner-Yamamoto fills his studio with treasures. There’s his art, of course, but also troves of his fascinations: a box of Japanese silk trimmings, a book with found objects (bits of sheep’s wool entwined with bits of earth, sections of dried plants) between its pages. Along his studio walls slump sacks of natural pigments – ash and soot, powdered oyster shells and slate, coarse shards of gesso he’ll grind up to use. He burns clay and peat to make the ash, and the colors of his palette depend on the minerals and imperfections the fire happens to find.
The Japanese-born, Arlington-based artist, who is 43, copies and reinvents the balanced, scattered symmetry of patterns seen in nature. Growing up in Osaka, he says, he “couldn’t see stars,” and when he finally got a clear look at them, their beauty affected him profoundly. So gold and silver leaf discs dot many of his canvases, mimicking constellations. Pinned up in his studio are several takes on the sun – a wash of Indian yellow in the center of a page; a translucent, colored mist set in glass. And his latest work, a group of paintings depicting rainbows and moonbows, further shows his reverence for nature’s hues, forms, and rhythms.
It’s more than reverence, too. The rainbow series, at the Embassy of Japan this spring, was created during a fellowship in southwest Ireland during heavy rainfall. He used a Morris Louis-inspired technique (curtains of overlapping, muted colors) for one layer, over which he placed acetate covered in peat or ash that he left out in the rain. So it’s collaboration of sorts – there’s his own painting and the “painting” done by the rain, layered to produce a single image. The pairing is elegant: An artist and the elements working in sequence to devise one whole, fine thing.
