In the News: International Inspiration
Read about how Turner Fine Art owner and artist Kathryn Mapes Turner found inspiration during her trek through the Peruvian Andes, as featured in the Jackson Hole News & Guide.
Read in the JH News&Guide:
"Andean trek inspired international show at Turner Fine Art"
For at least a decade, Jackson Hole painter Kathryn Mapes Turner has had a two-page magazine photo spread of Machu Picchu pinned to her studio wall.
“Every day I work, I look at that,” she said, “and over 10 years my imagination has spun Peru, Machu Picchu and the Andes into all sorts of elaborate expectations and a fantasy of what they might hold.”
This past September and October, she finally visited the landscape of her dreams. For 10 days, she backpacked from Cusco, a UNESCO World Heritage site that was the capital of the Incan Empire until the Spanish conquest, 82 miles up the sacred Urubamba River Valley, over eight mountain passes that took her as high as 16,000 feet, to the fabled “Lost City of the Incas.”
The journey filled her mind and sketchbooks with countless images and ideas — including the inspiration for the show now hanging at Turner Fine Art, “Beauty Beyond Borders.”
“I was so humbled, inspired,” she said, by the Peruvians’ millennia-old relationship with the land and its cycles. “Their whole spirituality is based around Pachamama and gratitude and reverence for what Mother Earth provides.”
Hiking eight hours a day, spending nights in small villages with Andes dwellers, seeing and touching the mountains in such an intimate and intense way, Turner came home with a “visceral” sense for the mountains, “the architecture or the bones of them … how steep they were, the angles they made, the rock formations … the rich soil in the Andes. I can’t paint things that I don’t understand,” the Teton native said.
Back home, the experience continues to fire her up — “I can’t stop painting alpacas!” — and she and her gallery’s small staff got to reflecting about travel and art and the international artists who show at Turner Fine Art.
The result is “Beauty Beyond Borders,” which until the end of the year will also highlight Gunnar Tryggmo, of Sweden, and Renso Tamse, of the Netherlands, each of whom have made many trips to the Rocky Mountains to explore, study and paint the land and its denizens.
Tryggmo, Tamse and Turner all paint in watercolors, and hanging their work in the same space illustrates the incredible versatility and range of styles a master of the medium is capable of.
“Gunnar’s [work] is loose and has a level of spontaneity,” Turner said, his depictions often floating in untouched white space. “Renso’s are very artfully crafted,” with thousands of meticulously placed brushstrokes seeking the musculature beneath the coat of a mountain lion or the feathers of an owl.
“Gunner and Renso, they both really seek to understand our landscape and wildlife,” Turner said. “They are not superficial visitors to our landscape, and their work really shows that.”
In her artwork, Turner’s strokes transform into mass and motion unique portraits and vignettes of the Teton subjects for which she is widely lauded.
Turner has spent most of her life in the Tetons, growing up across the valley from the iconic mountain range at Triangle X Ranch, which will mark its 100th anniversary in 2026.
“I really strive to never take it for granted,” she said of the splendor of her surroundings, “but we probably do.”
Turner Fine Art also currently has on display about a dozen verdant pastels by Jacob Aguiar as a selection of a few other artists in its stable.
The gallery’s winter hours are noon-5 p.m. Wednesday through Friday or by appointment.
