still from Bill Maynes video of the artist talking about his work

Norman Turner was born in 1939, in Storm Lake Iowa, and grew up in Iowa City, where his father, a composer, was a professor of music at the University of Iowa. While in high school he wrote music that was performed by the chorus and band. At eighteen he studied music composition at the University of Colorado. At nineteen he learned to cast sculpture in bronze and was a non-matriculating undergraduate in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, studying with Vance Bourjaily, Donald Justice and Philip Roth. In 1963 he moved to New York City. As a founding student of the New York Studio School in 1964, he studied with Charles Cajori, Mercedes Matter George Spaventa and Esteban Vicente. He has had seventeen solo shows; participated in over thirty group shows; taught at the Artists for Environment Foundation, Queens College and the New York Studio School; directed a summer landscape painting program for students from nineteen colleges; and has lectured at colleges and universities around the Northeast. His work is in a number of private collections. It has been reviewed in the New York Times, Art News and Art in America. Turner’s essays on art have appeared in The Art Bulletin, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism and The Philosophical Forum. He lives in New Paltz with his wife and daughter and divides his time between the Shawangunk mountains and Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom.