Penwith Headland

Copyright © text 2025 & image 2019 by George Taylor.  All rights reserved. 

Penwith Headland 

2019

72cms x 54cms with forward projection

Wood, hand made paper, cardboard and acrylic paint, in clear acrylic case.

My Flamborough Series was shown at Bridlington and Flamborough in 1991, under the auspices of the former Humberside County Council.

Prior to commencing work on the paintings, I had, in the latter half of the nineteen eighties, spent a considerable amount of time walking the Flamborough headlands in order to familiarize myself with the character and nature of the location.

The dramatic, sculptural coastal topography of both Flamborough Head and the West Penwith peninsula are broadly similar, but beyond that, there are distinct regional differences in terms of geology, of historical land use and of flora and fauna.

For me, the chief and most obvious difference, is the fact that at Flamborough Head the cliffs are white chalk, interspersed at times with soft clay, discoloured by the effects of wind and weather, whilst at West Penwith, the cliffs are of a much harder, generally grey/pink, sometimes brownish granite, albeit disguised where the sea is physically unable to reach, by a cover of coastal grasses and plants.

I had though, systematically explored the Penwith peninsula on foot many years earlier than my mid-eighties explorations at Flamborough.

Sometimes, the impetus for making an artwork can be fairly immediate, it’s making can happen quite soon after the initial experience or concept occurs. Conversely, there can be a long gestation period when overt and nuanced, subliminal experiences coalesce, before one begins to make the experience manifest.

It was important that I expressed this three dimensional coastal Odyssey in similarly concrete terms.

So, this construction is an experiential amalgam of a variety of the dramatic coastal locations that I encountered on my Cornish expeditions in the nineteen sixties and seventies, but especially in the long, exceptionally dry summer of 1976 when familiar places sometimes, temporarily adopted a more parched and arid character.

George Taylor

June 2025

Unnamed Landscape

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Unnamed Landscape

2006

Pastel, acrylic and collage

Overall framed size: 52cm x 60cm

Deliberately, this image has a shallow depth of field, there is no illusion of constructed perspective, and the forms are close to the picture plane.

Whilst nominally in a landscape format, when making this painting I was primarily concerned with the texture of the paint, and the abstract juxtaposition of the painted shapes and colours.

The lower half of the composition is intentionally akin to a ‘vertical terrain.’

The relatively more loosely worked sky acts as an aerial foil to the solidly painted forms indicating the land mass.

Just as music is essentially about sound, this piece is essentially about paint.

George Taylor

April  2025

Silent Motto, mixed media artwork by George Taylor

 

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Silent Motto

Mixed media

2017

60cm x 60cm in clear acrylic case, with forward projection

“In my beginning is my end. In succession

Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended, 

Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place 

Is an open field, or a factory, or a by- pass. 

Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires, 

Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth

Which is already flesh, fur and faeces,

Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.

Houses live and die: there is a time for building

And a time for living and for generation

And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane

And to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots

And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.”

T.S.Eliot

East Coker from The Four Quartets (extract)

George Taylor 

February 2025 

Nearing, oil on board

 

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Nearing
Oil on board
71.50cm x 82.00cm
1963 

I made this painting extra curricular, over sixty one years ago, when I was eighteen years of age, in an art school atmosphere that was definitely not conducive to such things, and sometimes was actively hostile, but mostly just indifferent. The primary objective being, at that time, to train students for formal examinations in another tradition with different values. I had made a number of non-figurative paintings by this time, and these early works were the precursors to many more in an abstract genre I have made subsequently, over a period in excess of sixty years. Originally the painting was titled Grey Composition 1, but I grew tired of titling my paintings solely by reference to the dominant colours and Nearing seemed compositionally more apposite. 

It is not a self consciously minimalistic piece, but essentially is an exercise in including only what is necessary and thus, of excluding the extraneous, this approach applied to the deliberately restrained colour range used in the painting, as well as to the forms.

At that time, together with a passionate interest in the work of a number of other, then living painters, I was especially interested in the work of the late William Scott, and to those who know this artist’s work, his influence may be vaguely discernible, especially in the suspended box shape to the left with the circular form to the top, although this is more abstracted than Scott’s forms which were sometimes directly derived from household objects. 

I was particularly interested in the sense of ‘balanced tension’ created by the circular form suspended within the square form at the top left, which itself ‘hangs’ from the top of the painting, and the red coloured quarter arc shape which intrudes from the right. 

In 1964 I was able to afford the first monograph on Scott by Alan Bowness, I was fascinated to discover that Scott had quoted a passage by Michael Rothenstein from: Looking at Pictures, which has subsequently lodged firmly in my consciousness: 

‘I find beauty in plainness, in a conception which is precise... A simple idea which to the observer in its intensity must inevitably shock and leave a concrete image in the mind.’

This tenet has endured, and has influenced much of my work since, but unfortunately, time and regular ongoing reference, has left my Scott monograph very much the worse for wear – I would not want to be without it though, even given its dilapidated state.

George Taylor

December 2024  

George Taylor Art at the RBSA

 

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'This year, thanks to valued assistance with the logistics from RBSA President Viv Astling, I have included three of my pictures in the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists, Members, Associates and Graduates Exhibition.'
George Taylor.

Link to exhibition details from RBSA website 

Near Noon, that Day, a mixed media artwork by George Taylor.

 

Near Noon, that Day 

Circa 2006 

Image size 46cm x 70cm 

Mixed media on board 

“When you look at the paintings, you notice that your eyes become activated. You are confronted by patches and areas of colour and coloured lines, splashes of paint and crosses. There's a sense of push and pull, distance and nearness.

The mark-making creates a busy surface. Your mind is taken up with reading one part and then looking at another that is different in character, and so on. The paintings do have something in common. They have a restless, agitated air about them with sometimes a predominant yellow, red or black and occasional flicks of white.

These works are not dull. They have balance and unity in spite of the variations of surface, shape, colour, line and space. They satisfy the eye and with more prolonged viewing, the need for an aesthetic experience. They are also coherent but they represent a challenge to the sensibility of the viewer as there is no narrative that might help to sidestep the issue of meaning. 

 Works such as these provide a satisfying aesthetic experience and are complete in themselves."

© David Phillips. Artspace May '08

George Taylor - Indiana

 

                                                                  Click the image to enlarge

2010
115cm x 115cm
Acrylic and mixed media on canvas 

Patricia Preece writing in the Leamington Studio Artists, Autumn/Winter 2010 edition of 'Artspace' journal, on the LSA Summer Show 2010. 

"Here, as always, George explores what is felt rather than what is seen - he is not concerned with the surface of things. His art tries to take his sensed world and commit it to canvas so that it can be communicated to the viewer as a feeling. His exhibited work, Indiana, is a vivid splash of yellow populated with symbols that hint at meaning. It is common in George's work to see the abstraction played out within the context of a physical landscape but, what is interesting here is that there is little evidence of any physical context. Wonderfully, he has created an abstract work with few clues to interfere with the sense that the painting should be felt rather than interpreted and understood. Seen in that context, I believe that this is an incredibly successful piece that has the power to excite." 

© Patricia Preece