Marilyn Turtz

Marilyn Turtz’s paintings offer glimpses of the landscape and are a response to visual perception. She paints en plein aire, grappling with weather, light and paint as she works to capture the essence of the scene with sensitivity to time, atmosphere and the immediacy of visual sensation. The images are about frozen moments and speak with quiet intimacy of the iconic nature of the every day.

Turtz thinks of each oil painting as a portrait of a place at a particular moment. The places are not, in themselves, remarkable nor are they the subject of the painting. The actual subject is the moment in which light reveals the arrangement of forms, gestures and tonalities in a way that speaks to her. Responding in paint, she experiences herself as bearing witness to the presence of the sublime in ordinary visual reality.

Marilyn Turtz received her MFA from Brooklyn College in 1985, where she studied with such notable artists as Lois Dodd, Phillip Pearlstein and Lennart Anderson. Her BFA, from Pratt Institute was awarded in 1978. Her paintings have been shown in New York City, Long Island, Maine and California. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Heckscher Museum in Huntington, the Long Island Museum in Stony Brook and represented in the Artists Inventory at Dowling Walsh Gallery in Rockland, Maine.

Ms. Turtz has been Artist in Residence at The Heliker-LaHotan Foundation on Great Cranberry Island, Maine, Weir Farm Trust in Wilton, Ct. and Cummington Community for the Arts in Cummington, Ma. She has received public and corporate commissions from such organizations as Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, the City of Glen Cove and the New York City Arts for Transit, Metropolitan Transit Authority. She is included in many private and corporate collections and has appeared in a number of books and articles.