Mixed media on deep canvas in custom built frame with museum glass.
This artwork is from my Penwith Suite, although it is non-figurative, it has its roots in the dramatic recollection of seeing marine distress flares off the Cornish coast, and witnessing the response of the lifeboat services and the coastguard.
Being a three dimensional construction, it is concerned with actual physical space, so it is actually a wall-hung sculpture which can be viewed from a variety of angles within a virtually 180 degree compass.
I have made three dimensional constructions for over sixty years, and in 1963 a large white painted construction which I made with Michael Baldwin, (later a co-founder of the influential conceptual art group Art and Language), was shown in an exhibition for the, at that time, ambitious and now archaic, sum of forty-five guineas.
In 1966, another fairly large white construction of mine was exhibited at the former Bear Lane Gallery in Oxford, then a pioneering platform for modern British art, and Terry Frost became interested in those I was making in my studio at around the same time.
Flashflare will be included in our forthcoming studio exhibition here at Charlbury from 4th to 12th May, along with the four large Big Deepcoast Suite, which comprise the culmination of my Elemental Series and other works from that series.
George Taylor
April 2024
