William Turner

British 1920 - 2013

William Ralph Turner, born in 1920, is one of the last of the great Northern Industrial painters who belonged to the Northern School of artists who surrounded and were influenced by L.S. Lowry, Alan Lowndes, Kenneth Gribble, Theodore Major and Harold Riley. William Turner, in the fifties and sixties was a regular visitor to the exhibitions held at the Crane Kalman Gallery, Manchester, where he absorbed the works of the German Expressionists and the French Fauves particularly Beckmann, Vlaminck, Soutine, Chagall, Rouault, Segonzac. He re-interpreted their colours and techniques and applied them in a very personal way to the industrial landscapes of the N.W. of England.

For over fifty years Turner painted the industrial landscapes of the North-West, depicting images of towering cotton mills, pre-clean-air-act skies, smoking chimneys and swarming humanity struggling to survive amidst the industrial chaos. In a dark industrial valley, his mills are often painted red, yellow, blue or orange, helping to alleviate the grim reality of what he is depicting.

We also see evidence of his amazing imagination and wide-ranging subject matter distorted images of individual figures or of groups, individual images of cinemas, theatres, pub interiors, small terraces of houses, grimy northern streets, a milkman with his horse, rag and bone men, a road sweeper, two children playing, then the spectrum widens to vast panoramas of the Stockport Valley with the viaduct in the background or of the huge mills of Manchester, Stockport and Salford.

Turner's work is more and more widely collected and is in the collections of Sir Peter Ustinov, Sebastian Coe, Eddie Shah, Freddy Pye, Stockport Art Gallery, Saab Motors, Manchester Education Committee and throughout the world.

William Turner died on June 10th 2013 at the age of 93. He will be remembered as on one of the most important northern artists of the 20th Century.