April 17, 2023 |
In his eclectic and haunted home, with a miscellaneous mirage of bookshelves behind him, Anthony Turner sits soundly, his gothic portrait now in pixelated form. One of his beloved Siamese cats – either Lulu or Arlo – interrupts our video call to commandeer the artist’s laptop and pine for affection. Turner strokes the creature before removing it from the keyboard and returning his attention to the screen; his tenor is warm, sincere and debonair, like the feline.
A kind soul with legendary status in the world of session hairstyling, Turner’s talents extend far beyond primping locks. “I’ve got a wild, wild imagination,” he says. “I need to keep it fed with ghost stories and the things that go bump in the night.” And indeed, Turner does just that: nourishing his psyche with a fantastical, flamboyant nightmare of exaggerated forms crafted by his own hand and anthropomorphising his work either within the hair of fashion’s favourite faces or on the pulp of a plain page.
At his first commercial hairstyling project, a piercing, Siberian, Vogue Paris editorial spent coiffing the tresses of famed noughties Prada girl Sasha Pivovarova, Turner found a muse in the supermodel. “If you look at her features,” as ghostly and wistful as they are, “you can tell that I was fully inspired by Sasha P.” Darkened and atrophied, her dollish contours are conjured up in his beautifully macabre illustrations; her enigmatic eyes translate to something gaunt, collapsing into sunken sockets that seem to stare through you.
There’s something simultaneously adorable about Turner’s drawings, too, the skeletal statures of his subjects tendering a sense of delicacy and purity. Like the work of Roald Dahl, they are childish and uncanny, captivating and creepy. “That’s the DNA of my drawings,” he says. “They’re about this kind of childlike imagination that runs wild, because there’s nothing as powerful, special or unique.” With a focus on form, soft textures contrast sharp shapes and a juxtaposition of elegantly twisted elements seep in, producing a feeling of dreamlike unreality and psychological tension. At once, they are simple and meticulous. You need only give them a once over to fall for their macabre magnetism. Upon second glance, you’ll find they are deeply embedded with themes traversing adolescent experiences, the ever-evolving goth aesthetic and beyond, reaching into the realm of alternate realities. “They are characters in a story, not just pictures on a piece of paper. Each and every one of them has a personality and meaning in my head. The drawings you see here are just a snippet of what’s inside their intricate world.”
But while their mid-century horror aesthetic may evoke a sensation of unease, Turner explains that his supernatural sketches are anything but evil: “They’re all ghosts but there’s something quite romantic and tender about them. They’re not meant to scare you, they’re meant to be quite loving.” As he describes his creatures to me, I can see a deluge of hot blood pooling in his cheeks and a subtle smile stretching across his skin. His unfeigned enthusiasm is palpable. “It’s a very romantic and twisted world, but there’s always a happy ending.”
Turner’s childhood was a troubled one and, in response to the hardship, drawing became his only way out. “I created this safe space in my head surrounded by all of these magical creatures,” he explains. The artist compares his internal universe to Jim Henson’s 1986 cult film Labyrinth with all its grotesque goblins and nightmarish critters, and their behaviour to Lock, Shock and Barrel, the mischievous trick-or-treaters concocted by Tim Burton in 1993’s The Nightmare Before Christmas. “It was through trauma that I escaped into this fantastical world. I saw it, I lived it and I breathed it. As a kid, I’d just get lost in it for hours. I would draw on anything, on my bedroom walls even, any surface I could find, and I wouldn’t stop.” Turner describes how he incorporated the characters, explaining that each of them contains a memory which pertains to him personally. Though it may not be apparent to the viewer, Turner knows it’s there, like his own little secret to which only he is privy. “They live through me,” he says, concluding his beautiful tale of self-preservation and conquering one’s demons: the transmutation of true and tangible beings, visions anthropomorphised in a young boy’s bedroom.
Turner similarly manifested imaginary friends in his boyhood. Maybe they were ghosts or spirits in some capacity – Turner does claim to have a sensitivity to the supernatural – but whatever they were, the creatures were “very funny” to him. “I wasn’t scared of them because they seemed really friendly, so they became my friends. Together, me and my little bumbling friends would go through life.” Treating illustration as a kind of self-therapy, a meditative activity, Turner reveals that he suffers from “terrible anxiety”, but that drawing serves to pacify his restless, cerebral state. “If I’m stressed or anxious, I just pick up a pencil and go back into that world. When I’m in that moment, drawing on that piece of paper, it’s as if there’s nothing going on around me – it’s the most magical moment. Just give me a coffee, a pack of cigarettes and my pens, and I’m really happy.”
An introvert, he enjoys the comforts of home, but Turner is never alone, for he has his phantasmal friends to keep him company. And not just the chimeras he creates when putting pen to paper, but metaphysical ones, too. “I live in a haunted house now and I’m really happy about that, it doesn’t scare me at all!” When Turner first moved into the cosy, Georgian townhouse in Stoke Newington in 2017, he would frequently hear his name being called out by a disembodied voice dwelling in the dark. He would also experience taps on the shoulder, hear footsteps on the landing, see floating orbs and spectral shadows, and encounter a slew of other strange and inexplicable occurrences. While generally friendly, his unknown house inhabitants at a certain point did become “a bit too crazy”, he says, recalling Christmas just a year or two ago when “two friends ran out of the house without even putting their shoes on because they were so scared.” These bona fide supernatural beings seemed to “bumble” through his youth too. “I had always seen things as a kid, whether they were ghosts or not I don’t know, but those used to truly terrify me,” he recalls. “I remember once seeing a little girl with long black hair standing in the doorway of my bedroom with a white nightgown on. Still to this day I don’t think that was imaginary. That was definitely something real.”
Introduced to the wonderful world of illustration by his nan, a cleaner, whom he describes as a “spectacular woman”, Turner would spend his after-school hours at the office block where she worked, drawing whatever she directed in order to “stop me from getting under her feet.” That was a nightly ritual, often stretching into the weekends, and as soon as his nan clocked how much he loved to draw, she began to gift him with a new set of pencils and paper every Christmas. “She figured out that I loved it and she nurtured it,” he says. But while his nan cultivated his creativity, other authority figures were far from encouraging. “Especially at school, I was always told to suppress [my imagination],” he explains. “All the other kids were drawing swans and rainbows and I was drawing ghosts and monsters.”
Turner grew up in the “tiny town” of Cannock, a “tough” Staffordshire mining hamlet where “being gay was just a no-go”. But as he approached his teens, he learned that Birmingham, the nearest major city, was a subcultural epicentre. “There were people there that would spend all week making their costumes to go out. In these places, they could be whoever they wanted to be; they could be a man from Mars. I learned very quickly that that’s where I wanted to be.” As soon as he came of age, Turner hopped on a train straight to Birmingham and never looked back. “I was going to clubs and getting into all kinds of mischief. It’s where I found my queer family, who inspire me in the sense that they carry on my nan’s work. They allow me to be myself and they celebrate me and accept me for all of my weirdness,” he says. “They don’t ever want me to be anybody else other than the complete and utter weirdo that I am.”
Though Turner’s nan versed him in illustration and Birmingham set him free, Alexander McQueen was the one who shaped the way he looks at aesthetics. “He was my passport into fashion,” he says. Like McQueen, Turner understands the darkness. “The darkness for me is this cosy warmth; it’s a blanket, it’s a safe space,” he says. “It’s where I’m allowed to be whoever I want to be and where all of my beautiful creatures can exist in peace. It’s somewhere that anybody is allowed into, all of my beautiful, beautiful friends that I love very, very much and my little queer family – they all live there with me.” Anthony Turner’s chimerical universe is for all who dare to dig deeper and darker. “I’ll invite anybody into my little darkness, because it’s not scary at all.”
Artworks by Anthony Turner. Taken from issue 70 of 10 Magazine – ROMANCE, REBEL, RESISTANCE – out on newsstands now. Order your copy here.
