Sunlight on Turner’s Stairs

Oil on board

51 x 41 cm

A recent visit to Turner’s House museum in Twickenham — the home that J.M.W. Turner designed for himself and his father — gave me plenty of inspiration. Turner has long been one of my artistic heroes, and there was something rather special about walking through the rooms in which he actually lived.

It’s a wonderful little museum, full of small details that somehow bring him closer. One that particularly stayed with me was in the kitchen, where the shadow of Turner’s father is projected sitting quietly in his chair in the corner. A simple, rather haunting reminder of the life that once occupied these rooms.

But inevitably, it was the light that caught me.

Turner once wrote, “Light is therefore colour, and shadow the privation of it.”

Looking through this half-open door towards the staircase, with the daylight flooding down from the window above and dissolving the steps into almost nothing, I could understand exactly why light became such an obsession for him.

And perhaps why it continues to obsess me too.