William Turnbull died last year. And if his name is not as familiar as those of his friends Giacometti and Paolozzi, it should be: an exhibition at Chatsworth in Derbyshire may help put this right. Turnbull was born in Dundee in 1922; he left school at 15, and went to work as an illustrator for the comic-book publishers D.C. Thomson, before enlisting in the RAF in 1941. It was his experience when serving in the Far East that gave him a lifelong interest not only in Asian artefacts but also in space and spatial perspective: a pilot’s view of the landscape beneath.
Turnbull was both a painter and a sculptor, but it is for his sculptures that he is best known. Indoors at Chatsworth there is a selection of ‘head’ paintings dating from the 1950s, and a few sculptures, but it is outside that his work really comes into its own.
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