Michael Turrell Artworks

I've been here before
At the end of the world
In the quivering mist

They watched storms out there so distant they could not be heard, the silent lightning flaring sheetwise and the thin black spine of the mountain chain fluttering and sucked away again in the dark. They saw wild horses racing on the plain, pounding their shadows down the night and leaving in the moonlight a vaporous dust like the palest stain of their passing.”
― Cormac McCarthy

“By early evening all the sky to the north had darkened and the spare terrain they trod had turned a neuter gray as far as the eye could see. They grouped in the road at the top of a rise and looked back. The storm front towered above them and the wind was cool on their sweating faces. They slumped bleary-eyed in their saddles and looked at one another. Shrouded in the black thunderheads the distant lightning glowed mutely like welding seen through foundry smoke. As if repairs were under way at some flawed place n the iron dark of the world.” - Cormac McCarthy

Calm Before

He camped on the plain and made a small fire that seethed in the wind like a forgefire and swallowed up his meager hoard of sticks and limbs. He watched it burn and watched it burn. The rags of the flame that fled downcountry broke and vanished like a shout in the darkness. - Cormac McCarthy

“He slept that night in a field far from any town. He built no fire. He lay listening to the horse crop the grass at his stakerope and he listened to the wind in the emptiness and watched stars trace the arc of the hemisphere and die in the darkness at the edge of the world and as he lay there the agony in his heart was like a stake.”

― Cormac McCarthy

He rode on, the two horses following, riding doves up out of the pools of standing water and the sun descending out of the dark discolored overcast to the west where it's redness ran down the narrow band of sky above the mountains like blood falling through water and the desert fresh from the rain turning gold in the evening light and then deepening to dark. - Cormac McCarthy

I notice, for the first time, the frozen smile on the dreamer's face. And I wonder: in how many infinite sets of worlds will I take one more step? And how many countless versions of me will turn around instead, and walk out of this room? - Greg Egan

“The breath of life is in the sunlight and the hand of life is in the wind.”
― Kahlil Gibran

Your imagination, my dear fellow, is worth more than you imagine. ~Louis Aragon

Remnants

I studied the smiles in the picture.
Something passed close to me then, a feeling or piece of knowledge, but I couldn't quite get it. A sense of something I'd once known or felt, a memory that wouldn't come into the light. I kept reaching, but I couldn't grasp the thing.
It felt near though. - Nic Pizzolatto

How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof,thinking of home. - William Faulkner.

“War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.” - Cormac McCarthy

"The shadows of the smallest stones lay like pencil lines across the sand and the shapes of the men and their mounts advanced elongate before them like strands of the night from which they’d ridden, like tentacles to bind them to the darkness yet to come.” - Cormac McCarthy

Daughter

She read no more that day. The hand holding up the paper to her eyes fell slowly, and her slender figure in a plain black dress walked rigidly to the window.

There had been whole days when she had not thought of him at all - had no time. But she had loved him, she felt she had loved him after all.
- Joseph Conrad, The End of the Tether

Its as if the light were ebbing out of the world, withdrawing farther and farther away from you, its as if the sun were growing smaller, the stars going out one by one. There can't be many left now that I can see by this. But I havent had the courage to look of late...
- Joseph Conrad

He walked out into the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it. - Cormac McCarthy, The Road.

And then, they see these spots of light in the sky.
They don't know what they are.
They don't have a clue about space or stars or light waves.
They just figure they look a hell of a lot like campfires.
"Who must these people be," they wonder.
"Lightin' their campfires way up there?"
So they start telling each other stories.

- Mike Flanagan, Midnight Mass.

Light came out of this river since—you say Knights? Yes; but it is like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker—may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday. - Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness.

Your Hand In Mine.

Had dreams… Two of ’em. Both had my father in ’em. It’s peculiar. I’m older now then he ever was by twenty years. So, in a sense, he’s the younger man. -- He rode past me and in the dream I knew that he was goin' on ahead and he was fixin' to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold, and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there.... And then I woke up.
- Cormac McCarthy

Hero.

Goodbye.

Little Light.

Against The White.

The Flow In Between.

Giant.

Shot.

Sketches 01

Some practice sketches and messing around with watercolour brushes from the last week.

Blackbird