Sandburg Alum Turner Captures ‘Stages of Quarantine’ on Canvas
Aaron Frey
Friday, April 9, 2021 2:46 PM
Campus News
Galesburg, IL
As the world went into quarantine last spring, Madelyn Turner put paintbrush to canvas.
Turner, a 2019 Carl Sandburg College graduate, was nearing the end of her spring term at Knox College last year as COVID-19 began to spread, and the school had switched to online instruction. As the final assignment for her studio art class, Turner’s professor challenged the students to work with their feeling of being isolated.
“And this piece,” Turner said, “really just kind of came out by itself.”
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The finished product, “Stages of Quarantine,” depicts a young man alone in a bedroom, going through three phases of continued isolation. At first, he sits up straight on the corner of the bed near a window on a bright day. His right foot is propped up on the bed with his knee tucked against his chest and an unknowing smile spread across his face.
As your eyes move to the center of the painting, he’s now lying on the bed, curled up on his left side. His eyes are shut, with his feet and right arm dangling off the edge of the mattress. Finally, near the right edge of the frame, we see the young man sitting on the floor up against the bed. His knees are tucked against him as he stares blankly off into the distance, wondering what lies ahead.
The hues of the piece also transition from a soft yellow curtain and light red walls near the window to a deep blue sheet on the bed to a dark corner of the room, highlighting the loneliness so many experienced as the world around them came to a virtual halt.
“I think the colors in that piece really show the moodiness of this stressed environment, of being stuck at home,” said Turner, who graduated from Bushnell-Prairie City High School and now lives in Peoria. “We just have this one space that we’re confined to for a long time.
Turner, who will graduate from Knox in June and plans to become a college art instructor, created it with acrylic paint on a 36-inch-by- 38-inch frame. She used her boyfriend, fellow Sandburg alumnus Dalton Havens, as the subject for the painting. Turner took photos of him posing on the bed, then created a composite of the poses in Photoshop and went to work, needing just three days to complete it in late May.
“I thought the scale for this was very important because the bigger it is, the more confrontational it is. I wanted people to become confronted with this and like have to sit with it,” Turner said. “It’s really easy when you get into these pieces — this one, specifically — when it has such charged emotions. You can really get stuck in there and forget what time it is, forget to eat and drink your water. You don’t know what else is going on around you.”
“Stages of Quarantine” was featured in an online exhibit at the Galesburg Civic Art Center last summer, and it was part of a show in Sandburg’s Lonnie Eugene Stewart Art Gallery for a short time in October before the exhibit was interrupted because of an increase in COVID cases. A year after creating her painting and a year into the pandemic, Turner believes her work has stood the test of time to this point.
“I think it’s aging perfectly, honestly, because the last figure is still how I feel right now. We’re able to go out more and it’s still loose, but it’s still this fear of what’s going to happen next,” Turner said. “I feel like this is going to be a really representative piece of this time. And my hope is years in the future, maybe someone will see it and be like, ‘What do they mean?’ and look up the history and learn about COVID.”
To view “Stages of Quarantine” and other works by Turner, visit madelynturner.art
