Ben Luke
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1,919 appearances
8 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 1 Sep
Ben Luke’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Hello, I'm Ben Luke and welcome to A Brush With, the podcast from the art newspaper in which I talk to artists about their influences from writers to musicians and of course other artists and the cultural experiences that have shaped their lives and work.
And this episode is A Brush With Cara Turing, whose paintings present fragments of images, patterns and abstraction in compositions that often upend the conventions of her medium while reaffirming its unique descriptive and poetic powers.
With motifs that appear and often reappear in morphing forms and combinations, alluding to specific moments in her life, to film or art history, her paintings are in flux, both in their structure and spatial arrangements and in their meaning.
They are propositions that cannot easily be resolved or reduced to simple or convenient narrative.
But that doesn't mean that Cara's paintings are unfocused or bloodless.
Rather, they arrest us and pull us deep into their mysteries, rewarding us as we spend more time with them and return to them.
Cara was born in Brussels in 1972 and has lived in the UK since the following year.
She grew up in western Scotland, near Holy Lock, on which she would see nuclear submarines surfacing, one of the personal memories that she's carried into her work, as we'll hear.
She studied at Nottingham Trent University, graduating in 1995, when she moved to London, where she currently lives, as well as spending some of her time in Argyll in Scotland.
After graduating, she worked in a gallery and effectively gave up painting for several years.
She returned to it with First Volcano from 2000, an appropriate title since she's returned to the volcano motif perhaps more than any other over the years.
This canvas immediately established characteristics that would remain important to her.
a range of mark and expression from the liquid burst of the volcanic lava to zigzagging pyrotechnics suggesting the explosion to the delicate lines and smudges evoking smoke the saturated thick red paint of the molten magma below ground and the woodcut like description of the volcanic peaks it established the space of a picture as a zone in which ideas and forms could be tested and improvised
Over the following years, she pushed this into ever-evolving new directions.
Desert Volcano from 2003 is one of the earliest paintings in which she depicts pyramids that appear to erupt like volcanoes, a motif that's been reimagined frequently in her compositions since.
The bricks that form the pyramids also became a significant form, with which Kara continues to literally construct shapes or to employ as an insistent gridded pattern.
She also began to leave areas of the canvas unpainted, complicating the pictorial space so that it can at once appear infinite and, because of the insistence of the picture plane, tightly contained.
Dock 1 from 2008 is typical of this approach.
It contains fragmented dockside machinery, a crane, jibs and hoists, hooks and chains, funnels and barrels, as if remembered or briefly observed in a photograph.
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