Adelaide Turnbull
Adelaide Turnbull’s abstract paintings are built through color, gesture, layering, and an attentive response to the natural world. Working primarily in oil, with additional experiments in acrylic, ink, monoprint, charcoal, and collage, she creates compositions that draw from remembered environments rather than direct description. An ocean may become layers of blue; the accumulated experience of nature may emerge as movement, texture, and shifting color.
Turnbull’s earliest memories of art involve a wooden easel in the breakfast room, powder tempera mixed with water, and paper barely strong enough to hold the paint. The drips were part of the appeal. Her mother supported an early interest in making art at a time when children’s classes were less readily available, persuading a local university to let Turnbull take painting and drawing courses at thirteen.
She later studied fine art, with a concentration in painting, at James Madison University, and earned a master’s degree in art therapy from Eastern Virginia Medical School. College established the technical fundamentals of composition, balance, perspective, value, form, color, light, and shading, but it also introduced the importance of critique. Today, Turnbull works in a studio building alongside two other artists, where ongoing conversations and informal critiques help clarify when a work needs revision and when it has reached completion.
About a decade ago, Turnbull made a conscious shift away from representational painting. Her first abstract works felt rigid and flat, but continued experimentation gradually opened a more intuitive approach. Without the obligation to reproduce appearances, she found greater room for spontaneity, expression, and uncertainty. She compares the transition to finding the right frequency on a radio.
Color and gestural movement remain the constants in the work. Nature continues to recur, though Turnbull avoids painting directly from photographs or attempting literal representation. The source is memory, sensation, and the visual residue of long observation. Viewers often respond by finding their own narratives in the work, a process she compares to a Rorschach test. Rather than directing a fixed interpretation, the paintings leave room for a personal encounter.
Henri Matisse, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler are significant influences. Turnbull first encountered Matisse’s work on a middle-school art-club trip to New York and remains drawn to his pattern and use of color. Mitchell and Frankenthaler are important both for their bold approaches to abstraction and for the discipline of their sustained practices.
The studio is central to Turnbull’s process. Once there, she turns on music, sets a phone alarm, and begins by looking carefully at the works in progress. The alarm is necessary because painting can produce a focused state in which time becomes elastic. She generally works on two to five paintings at once, allowing one to dry while another continues and reducing the temptation to overwork a single surface.
Her paintings begin with loose, gestural marks made with as little judgment as possible. Layers accumulate, are edited, covered, and sometimes removed. A work may develop over days or months, while others sit unresolved until she can return with fresh eyes and less attachment to what they were supposed to become. “I have to be willing to radically alter a painting that has been a struggle to find resolution,” she says.
Turnbull describes the act of painting, rather than the finished object, as sometimes spiritual. It is a state of full concentration and openness, one that offers constancy amid difficult personal and public circumstances. The response of viewers is particularly meaningful to her, especially when a painting brings joy in someone else’s home. Her advice to emerging artists is equally direct: protect creative time, show up, and keep working.
