About

Michael Stuttle

I bought my first picture having just walked past it hanging in an auction house in a sleepy Lincolnshire backwater, in the middle of house clearance items and cardboard boxes filled with other peoples junk. I couldn’t then and I can’t now, some 14 years later, explain what it is about the picture that “hooked” me, other then it filled me straight away with an immense sadness. The figures in the picture were weighed down, either just coming from or going to work and they look utterly destroyed, just trapped forever on the canvas, and from a certain perspective, you could easily walk with them. I looked at it every day for a long, long time and after a while I asked myself first, “why paint this ?” and then to try and figure that out, “who painted it ?”. This blog details my journey to answer those questions. Unfortunately I started a little too late, this is then, I’m afraid, only a partial answer to trying to find out who Martin Turner was and, make some sense of this complete strangers life through his pictures.