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