Nick Turner - Surf Journal

Nick Turner is an American multidisciplinary artist born in Boston and raised in the rural landscapes of Maine. His practice spans painting, photography, and collage, exploring the relationship between landscape and the human condition. Drawing from a lifelong engagement with horses, the American West, the ocean, and the natural world, Turner’s work considers memory, scale, belonging, and humanity’s place within the landscape.

Turner’s expansive, often solitary landscapes are interwoven with motifs drawn from personal and familial histories. His images move between observation and recollection, intimacy and monumentality, creating visual narratives in which physical terrain becomes a psychological space. Rather than treating landscape as mere setting, Turner approaches it as a repository of memory and experience—a place through which questions of identity, mortality, freedom, and humanity’s enduring relationship with nature can be explored.

In 2023, Yves Saint Laurent published State of Nature, a monograph surveying selected works from across Turner’s career. The publication traces the development of a practice grounded in the American West, horses, the ocean, and the continuing dialogue between landscape, memory, and the human condition.