Friday 1 March 2024

The Air’s Buoyancy and the Sun’s Ray

The Air’s Buoyancy and the Sun’s Ray

2009

Framed dimensions: 81cms x 100cms

Mixed media on Waterford 300lbs heavyweight paper in deep mount within white painted timber frame.


‘We see nothing till we completely understand it’: John Constable.


This image on paper is not a pictorial illusion, it is the opposite of that, as it does not employ clever techniques such as vanishing point perspective to deceive the eye and the brain in order to offer a constructed illusion of physical space.

It is though a complex image and is intensely physical, but not in the sense of looking at a scenic view or a landscape through a window, but it is made from physical matter, and is about the energy of the physical world, the world of the natural elements and of physical sensation, of the overwhelming universal forces which are largely beyond human influence, those of air, space and light.

As in life, it is often not easy to pin things down or to define them in absolute terms, there is no particular focal point for the eye to rest upon, the vaguely referential, incisions, shapes, marks and colours take one on a dynamic visual journey from right to left, but there is no set route or roadmap.

The carefully delineated pencil lines provide a framework for, and underpin the abstracted gestural marks which may be metaphors for atmosphere, sensation, context and feeling. You may go on a different journey each and every time you choose to engage, it’s entirely up to you, there is no prescribed entry or exit point.

George Taylor

February 2024

Sunday 31 December 2023

Of Wingbones and Talons


Of Wingbones and Talons

2009

Framed Size: 81cms x 63cms Approximate revealed image size: 54cms x 36.5cms

Mixed Media on heavyweight handmade paper, within white painted timber frame and wide white mount

Sometimes, a title can provide a portal for access to an idea or an ‘understanding ‘of an artwork, without being overly descriptive or subjective. Possibly in the viewers mind, moving the image from perceived abstract towards an abstracted thematic.

This though does not suggest or imply a literal interpretation, which might be counterproductive.

A painting or construction is an assemblage of individual component parts, like words in a poem, or sounds in a piece of music, or the various natural or human-caused elements that make up a landscape painting.

But a landscape does not have to be viewed from a single fixed viewpoint, it can be explored in multiple ways, as a journey or a memory for example. The sum of the parts can become more than the whole, the subject need not be described literally in precise hard-won detail, but may be suggested as an encompassing, holistic experience, and in the process becomes new and different.

A flash of beak, or the blur of a wing, a roughly hewn nest or the wayward dynamic of flight, a momentary streak of light or the nerve-piercing pitch of a bird call, may be evoked as a mark or a colour - a fragment, indicated, rather than unequivocally and rigidly delineated – more about feeling and experience than prescription or description.

 

George Taylor

December 2023

Tuesday 31 October 2023

What Strange Things Are These

 

Click the image to enlarge

What Strange Things Are These

2021

Overall size including frame: 80cms x 100cms

Acrylic paint, coloured pencil and balsa wood on heavyweight handmade paper set in a wide white mount and enclosed in a white painted timber frame.

This is entirely of itself, and there is no deliberate or conscious external reference, so it may be considered ‘abstract' by definition.

It is concerned with surface dynamics, and two-dimensional tensions within a rectangle, and has much to do with a sense of ambiguity and asymmetry.

As is increasingly the case these days, visual art is becoming preoccupied with often transient, circumscribed political and ideological issues.

I have no interest in these things - for me, the formal challenges of image making are sufficient and enduring.

 

I think the essential nature of modern art is it’s being secular, it’s being done by an individual to satisfy his own inner deepest sense of integrity.

It’s the first art that doesn’t work on tribal understanding.’ 

Robert Motherwell 1915-1991


George Taylor

October 2023

 


Friday 1 September 2023

Idiot Wind

 

Click the image to enlarge

Idiot Wind

2016

Framed dimensions 79cms x 98cms

Acrylic with mixed media on Saunders Waterford 300lbs Heavyweight Paper in deep mount within a white painted timber frame.

I borrowed this title from a song by the inimitable Bob Dylan, there are a few recorded versions, probably the best-known being a track from one of his most influential albums Blood on the Tracks. In the song, Dylan uses the natural phenomenon of the wind as a metaphor for tangled and tortuous inter-personal experience, but also possibly, as an analogy for human existence or the human condition.

The painting is really a paradox, as it’s about nothing that we can see, as the wind is innately invisible, but leaves a memory in its wake, sometimes hardly discernible, but at other times, utterly devastating.

A mindless natural energy whose influence can be discerned and felt, but is often defined only by its aftereffects, which when intelligently harnessed can be positive and productive, but in its unfettered natural state, can cause indiscriminate destruction and indescribable chaos.

In the painting, the brain, the eye, and the hand conspire to convert a vivid phenomenological experience, a veritable maelstrom in fact, into an expression in a variety of fluid plastic materials that, if it were not for a semblance of an horizon and an indication of the sky, becomes almost completely abstract.

The title is essentially a hook for a complex visual metaphor for unbridled physical energy, expressed in a semi-liquid plastic material, constructed with constrained human energy and with considered orchestration. The objective being to create an image that for some, (but manifestly not for all) has dynamic pictorial coherence, rather than, as with the wind, the effect of a disorganised chaotic muddle.

It is the challenge to, and the inevitable burden of the non-figurative painter, that he or she must accept that their work is at best, only of interest to a small minority.

George Taylor

August 2023 


Saturday 1 July 2023

North Atlantic Diptych

 



Two separate deep canvasses mounted in white box frames in museum quality glazing.

Acrylic with collaged elements

Each piece measures 77cms x 62cms overall and together comprise an unattached diptych

2012

Although essentially abstract, these two canvasses are intended to be viewed together as complementary images.

At one level they may be regarded as combinations of colours, textures, marks and shapes, hopefully with a degree of pictorial coherence.

At another level, with a degree of engagement they, at least symbolically, may evoke a recollection of a 20th century drama that reflected the best – and the worst in humankind.

They have a strong physical dynamic, possibly evoking physical movement and the wind, the blues, the sea and the sky and the jagged whites, ice.

The warmer reds and oranges possibly represent fire and heat, whilst the reds, in paint poured directly on to the surfaces – blood.

The North Atlantic is a formidable natural phenomenon.

In World War Two, many lives were lost there, as a consequence of attacks by German U boats and aircraft when the Allies were trying to ship essential supplies to the Soviet Union/Russia.

There are many Memorials beneath the waves.

George Taylor

June 2023

Sunday 30 April 2023

When we got There

 


Click on the image to enlarge


When we got There
Private Collection
Mixed Media and Acrylic on Board
Image size: 35cms x 45cms

This piece essentially is about the plastic qualities of paint and colour.

The paint is applied with a certain gestural immediacy, but most definitely not unthinkingly, and with an energy and passion that hopefully, is reflected in the dynamic of the composition which in turn, hopefully also, reflects a kind of restrained exuberance.

It may be construed as a kind of landscape, (or a map) or more likely a seascape, but more of a Seascape of the Mind than a specific physical location. Maybe a recollection of an early journey to the seaside, and that small bay or cove that suddenly comes into view as one passes that last headland.

That special emotional feeling that one gets at the end of a long, sometimes tedious journey by car or train, especially as a child, when the pent-up feelings of excitement and expectation are relieved by that particular sort of euphoria one experiences immediately upon reaching a coastal destination, and experiencing that first glimpse of the sea and breathing the first wafts of ozone into our lungs.

We feel a profound, almost primeval sense of connection, and often cannot wait to engage with the waves as they break onto the shore.

Is this connection so deep and enduring as to be an echo of our early amphibian ancestors emergence from the ocean some 375 million years ago in evolutionary time?

In effect, a sub-conscious memory of our Inner Fish, as palaeontologist Neil Shubin calls it, that almost literally, surfaces at such moments.

The relatively primitive creature that came out of the water, and on to the land all those years ago whose limbs and organs were the evolutionary precursors to our own.

George Taylor
April 2023


Tuesday 28 February 2023

Matter of Time

 


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Matter of Time

2006

Mixed media and acrylic on board.

Image size: 51cms x 61cms in wide white coloured mount and natural hardwood frame.

This painting was made via the technique I evolved over thirty years ago, whereby a ground of hard and soft pastel is built up in layers using generous amounts of fixative, sometimes to the point of liquidity. When dry, the ground can then be reduced or cut back into using sharp instruments to reveal the previously hidden layers of colours and textures.

The use of fixative throughout the process, allows acrylic paint to adhere to the surface, which when dry, can, if desired, be cut away and removed and other shapes left in place, thus producing an impression of shapes suspended or floating in a pictorial space.

The title is essentially, non-descriptive, but alludes to Quantum Mechanics, and the continuing quest to unify the four fundamental components of the Universe: Space -Time - Matter and Energy into a single theory, the so-called ‘Theory of Everything.’

Quantum Move Image size 50.5cms x 76.00cms also from 2006, on Gallery 4 of my website explores the same theme, but is deliberately less structured, less earthbound, more nebulous, and more akin possibly, to the unimaginably vast Universe science tells us, exists out there, way beyond our relatively insignificant, as Carl Sagan put it, ‘Pale Blue Dot’ of a planet.

As with all painting, the image must be viewed at first hand to be fully assimilated, so possibly contrary to the impression given in the photographic image, there are no elements of collage in the painting.

George Taylor

February 2023