8-1965

In many of William Turnbull’s paintings of the 1960s, formal considerations such as line, colour and proportion merge with memories and experiences. The composition of '8-1965' has its genesis in a flight the artist took over the jungles of South-East Asia with his Singaporean wife, artist Kim Lim. Turnbull wrote that he saw below a ’view of thick uniform single colour texture of abundant and luxuriant growth, broken only by a river’s winding course’.

Turnbull served in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War and the views he saw from aeroplanes offered him a new way of perceiving the world. He later recounted that ’the main thing about flying for me was the fact that the world didn’t any longer look like a Dutch landscape; it looked like an abstract painting’.