Immature Golden Eagle

Janet Turner

Chico, California printmaker/teacher Janet Turner began combining printmaking techniques in the mid 1950s and by the 1960s was making it integral to her images, as with this composition, done in 1975 in a variant edition of 140.

Janet Turner’s subjects were often informed by the natural world and she had an affinity for bird culture. In the composition Immature Golden Eagle, the subject stands majestically over a prairie dog, proving that he has learned the lessons of soaring, scouting and snatching his prey.

Turner commented about her work: "...My work comes from my evolving knowledge of social, biological and ecological relationships. My observations through my art have led to new awareness anc have increased my sense of amazement, wonder, my concern about man's impact on the world, a feeling perhaps imperfectly conveyed to others. I am awed by the richness of nature, interested in details of fur and feathers, which have meaning because they evolved from the relationship of one thing to another..."

Janet Turner was born in Kansas City, Missouri, on April 7, 1914. Her parents James and Hortense Turner raised Janet on a six-acre farm and sent her to a nature camp in Cape Cod during the summers, two factors that she credits with her early interest in both biology and art. She eventually pursued botany at Stanford University, while also taking courses in drawing and painting. However, the biology course was dropped and Turner switched her major to Far Eastern history, earning her BA in 1936.

She enrolled at the Kansas City Art Institute, where she studied painting under Thomas Hart Benton and earned a degree in 1941. She began exhibiting her work and took up an teaching position at Girls' Collegiate School at Claremont, working on her graduate studies in painting under fellow Missourian Henry McFee and Millard Sheets. There she earned her MFA in 1947.

After graduation she moved to Texas to work as an assistant professor in the art department of Stephen F. Austin State College, where she would remain until 1956, continuing to pursue her work as a fine artist. This was when she began experimenting with printmaking, applying her love of fine detail and methodical technique to the plates and blocks of the newfound medium.

Her entrance to the national art world was in 1955 when a tempera piece, "Pelicans", was accepted into the 50 Years of American Art show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, after which she participated in major print and watercolor biennials and annuals hosted by the Brooklyn Art Museum, the Print Club of Philadelphia, the Society of American Graphics Artists, the National Serigraph Society, the American Color Print Society, and the Library of Congress. She became a member of the National Association of Women Artists and the American Color Print Society, and was elected a member of the Audubon Artists of New York. In 1952 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, which she used to travel to the Gulf Coast to study linoleum blockprinting and serigraphy using the local flora and fauna as her subject matter. Turner returned to New York in 1956 to study at Columbia University, earning a doctorate in education in 1960.

Overlapping the end of her time at Columbia, Turner was offered a job in California at Chico State University in 1959 teaching art. She accepted and upon graduation moved to Central California. There, she would make her mark as both a professor and an advocate for fine printmaking. Over her thirty-three year career at Chico State she was pivotal in upgrading the fine arts department. She also helped to design a printmaking facility to rival those she visited throughout the U.S. and abroad. She would eventually become the first Chico State professor to be awarded the California State University's Outstanding Professor Award (1975).

In 1981 Chico State opened the Janet Turner Print Museum on the campus, which includes over 4,000 prints, formed from a donation of her personal collection as well as a selection of her own works. Janet Turner died in Chico on June 28, 1988.