Newcastle-born Jimmy Turrell is a British graphic artist and video director,who studied at St Martin's and has been represented by Heart since 2005. He works with handmade collages, drawings, screen-printing and paintings alongside digital techniques. […]
Newcastle-born Jimmy Turrell is a British graphic artist and video director,who studied at St Martin’s and has been represented by Heart since 2005. He works with handmade collages, drawings, screen-printing and paintings alongside digital techniques.
A multimedia cross-pollination of reference points is at the heart of Jimmy’s work. He collects a vast amount of ephemera to create collages, buying pallets of used books to cut up and reuse. From these he creates textures, adds colour and builds his image, either physically or at the computer or a mixture of the two. Jimmy can do incredibly realistic watercolours as well as simple risograph work. He takes his own photographs and sometimes hires models to help him create the exact images he needs for a particular commission. It’s always born out of experimentation and play rather than repetition, whatever commercial project he’s working on. He’s happy to dip objects in paint and photograph them, or physically fly-post layers of paper to achieve a particular effect and show through. Jimmy constantly creates a huge amount of original source material which, if not immediately usable, can be set aside and revisited later.
While Jimmy works, music plays, setting the pace for a passionate immersion in his work. Many clients in the music industry have commissioned Jimmy’s work because of his obvious love, appreciation and eclectic knowledge of music. He has created album artwork for Capitol Records, Universal Music and SONY Records, as well as a number of independent labels. During one of his projects for SONY he worked closely with producer Paul Epworth and was subsequently commissioned by him to create artwork for Church Studios. More recently Jimmy has worked on tour merchandise and stage visuals for Beck. He also created a lyric video for his single ‘WOW’.
His tryptic collage of DONALD, TRIM, KIM is on display in the current exhibition “Talking…& Other Banana Skins“.
