Paintings, Travel, and Stuff: Other Connections

I am currently in a show in Houston, Terra Infirma. The title refers to a group of watery landscapes by Dixie Friend Gay and swampy landscapes by Ruben Coy. My landscapes are bombscapes.

The co-director of the gallery wrote the following about my recent work for the press release for the show.

"Scott Winterrowd makes atmospheric watercolors of atomic bomb test sites. These drawings explode with color. Winterrowd’s drawings are like Turner’s, that is if Turner was plagued by the thought that the world could go up in smoke at any moment due to nuclear fallout."

I found it funny that although Volker and I had not actually met or talked that he picked up on the Turner influence in my work. Actually I have never been a great Turner fan, although there are certain works that speak to me. I was fortunate to see the large Turner exhibition, and there were a number of great watercolors. I have always marveled at how Ruskin called Turner's abstract atmospheric paintings "True to Nature."

My influence from Turner comes via Moran. Below one of Moran's many Cliffs on the Green River paintings, and below that Turner's Burning of the Houses of Parliament.

Even more than Moran, Frederic Church has been a major influence, plus I have spent a lot of time with one of Church's great pictures, Icebergs, at the Dallas Museum of Art. Church was hailed as the American Turner after the display of his first great picture, Niagara, in London in 1857, the same year it was completed.

This work is 5 x 7 feet, and it hangs in the Corcoran Gallery in DC today. I tend to think that Church and his reference for the sublime in nature was a factor in my paintings of Nuclear tests. I was not thinking consciously about it, but there are some definite parallels.

A nice Church and Turner paring below. Top Cotopaxi, 1862, with Turner's, The Fighting Temeraire, 1838.