Information and resources on "Drawing from Turner" at Tate Online.
Drawing from Turner
6 November 2006  –  20 May 2007

Drawings -  view by artist  or view by turner work

Marcus Wood, University of Sussex  
About the artist:

Marcus Wood is a painter, performance artist and art-film maker. He is also currently Professor of Diaspora Studies, at the Unviersity of Sussex. He studied English at St Catherine’s college taking his BA in 1981. He then studied painting at the Royal College of Art, and as a Henry Fellow at Harvard University, gaining his Masters in 1986. He then returned to Oxford studying for a D.Phil in English which he gained in 1990. From 1991-4 he was Michael Bromberg Fellow at Worcester College, Oxford and remained at Worcester as a British Academy postdoctoral fellow. Marcus has published widely on slavery, race and the visual arts (Blind Memory 2000, High Tar Babies 2001, Slavery, Empathy and Pornography 2002) yet has also kept up an active career as artist and film-maker with work in many international collections. A complete biography is available on the Sussex University website.

After Turner
from Dort Sketchbook [Finberg CLXII], Figures, with Vessels 1817
Turner, from Dort Sketchbook [Finberg CLXII], Figures, with Vessels 1817
After Turner
from Dort Sketchbook [Finberg CLXII], A Bridge at Amsterdam 1817
Turner, from Dort Sketchbook [Finberg CLXII], A Bridge at Amsterdam 1817
After Turner
from Dort Sketchbook [Finberg CLXII], A Bridge at Amsterdam 1817
Turner, from Dort Sketchbook [Finberg CLXII], A Bridge at Amsterdam 1817

I chose to take pages from one of the sketchbooks that showed Turner at his most ephemeral and economic. His processes of visual shorthand fascinate me, especially when they get to a point where conventional visual communication has almost disappeared. I decided to attempt firstly to mimic Turner's marks, to scale, using a sharpened piece of roofing lead, which would be close to the lead pencils the master used. I then created larger scale dialogues with these small works using bamboo pen and ink. I liked the idea of taking Turner's extraordinary graphic energy and scaling it up. I wondered if things would still hold together. The small drawings were done laboriously and took about an hour each, the large drawings I did in approximately ten minutes each.