George Taylor Art Blog: art

Showing posts with label art. Show all posts

Sunday, 28 December 2025

Ageless Rhythms

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Ageless Rhythms

Mixed media on heavyweight paper

81cm x 63cm

2010

Whilst it could be argued that the Universe is indifferent to our human presence our place within time and space is influenced, if not determined, by its perpetual movement.

From our anthropocentric viewpoint on this small planet, apart from the weather and the chaotic and destructive nature of much human interaction, our limited experience of what is happening around us in our immediate vicinity, appears to indicate a kind of day-to-day reassuring stability.

But, in cosmic terms, our necessarily limited but expanding, scientific investigations show that the reality is vastly different.

The earth spins on its axis at about 1,000 miles per hour at the equator, but this speed decreases with latitude becoming close to zero at the poles. We are not aware of this sensation though, as not only are we as individuals spinning at this speed but so is everything we perceive around us.

Similarly, the planet revolves around the sun at a speed of around 18.5 miles a second but again, we are not conscious of this happening. Past cosmic events have literally shaped the planet together with human life and its flora and fauna, it is quite possible that a future event might eliminate all life, or its atmosphere and possibly the planet itself or at least, disrupt its orbit.

So here we are, as Carl Sagan so eloquently wrote: ‘on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam’ and ‘in our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.’ *

George Taylor

December 2025

Reference: * ‘The Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space’ by Carl Sagan (Random House 1994)

Monday, 30 June 2025

Penwith Headland

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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

Wednesday, 30 April 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

Saturday, 1 March 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

Sunday, 19 January 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

Saturday, 14 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

Friday, 1 November 2024

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

An abstract mixed media painting by George Taylor

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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."

Friday, 30 August 2024

George Taylor - Indiana

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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."

Tuesday, 30 April 2024

Flashflare

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Flashflare

2023

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

Friday, 1 March 2024

The Air’s Buoyancy and the Sun’s Ray

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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

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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

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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

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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

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Two separate deep canvases 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

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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

Monday, 31 October 2022

Deepseaswell

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2022

Acrylic, painted cardboard and timber dowel rods on canvas
Image size: 120cms x 100cms x 20cms, eventually to be housed in slightly larger clear acrylic case

This three-dimensional wall hung work, one of the four largest pieces from the Large Elemental Series and part of the Big Deepcoast Suite, incorporates a technique I have evolved whereby significant areas of white primed canvas are left exposed to form fluid, relatively amorphic shapes that are defined by the surrounding blue rather than being innate in themselves.

These irregular shapes contrast and interact with the more angular, applied sculptural elements that are formed from carefully tearing and manipulating several types of heavy duty cardboard, and then painting these in ultramarine with the edges picked out in white and with the intersecting, painted dowel rods.

This suggests the natural large scale juxtaposition between hard and soft elements, as in the complex dynamic interactions of coastal forces and as is usual in this series, the content and colour range are deliberately restricted to achieve maximum compositional impact and to minimise unnecessary detraction.

As with the other works in the series, the piece can be viewed from varying frontal angles to emphasise and to some extent simulate, the phenomenological experience that influenced its making.

Essentially though, the piece is a self-contained three dimensional abstract construct, an aesthetic expression that broadly alludes to formidable elemental agencies.

George Taylor

October 2022

Tuesday, 23 August 2022

Twisttide and Longshore Drift

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2022

99cms x 74cms x 13cms and 96cms x 74cms x 13cms

Wood, cardboard, paper and acrylic paint on board into deep, matt white painted frames.

Twisttide and Longshore Drift are from the Large Elemental Series.

This series, whilst being wall hung, have actual elements of the third dimension, and quite literally explore the space between painting and sculpture.

These works, having a degree of physical protrusion from the wall plane are intended to be viewed from a radius of approximately 180 degrees rather than from a fixed standpoint, thus offering something of the complex physical dynamic of the constantly changing coastal/spatial interaction observed on my many journeys around the British coastline and especially in relation to my much earlier Flamborough Series.

I am reluctant to mention perceived influences, as these are never overt, plagiaristic or obvious, but subtle, nuanced, sometimes subliminal and processed through ones’ consciousness over prolonged periods of time and often, not at all evident or discernible in the finished work.

For example, Leonardo’s exquisitely observed studies of moving water or Turner’s powerful atmospheric paintings of natural forces may be assimilated, but not graphically re-presented in what is essentially an attempt to pare down to primary, fundamental elements and thus to leave out the detractive and unnecessary.

However, in this series, I would acknowledge, amongst others, a long-time respect for the work of the painter Peter Lanyon and the sculptor Anthony Caro, both of whom I regard as important British artists of the twentieth century.

George Taylor

August 2022

Tuesday, 28 June 2022

Girisha and Indira

Click on the image to enlarge.

Collage

Each measuring: 62cms x 45cms (framed size)

2010

These minimalist collages, made from fabric, paint and paper, form part of a series having broad allusions to the culture and traditions of the Indian sub-continent and particularly to Indian miniature painting.

Whilst I was strenuously resisting direct figurative, narrative, symbolic or mythical references, I was nonetheless striving to achieve a ‘simple,’ economic synthesis of form and colour that referenced these influences without being in any way descriptive, ‘pinned down’, appropriative or literal.

George Taylor

June 2022

These framed pieces are available to purchase at ex-studio prices: £495.00 each or £925.00 for the pair plus carriage and packing.

Please contact George should you be interested.

Thursday, 28 April 2022

Wreckpiece

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Wreckpiece

Metal, dowel rods, cardboard and acrylic on canvas in deep, white painted timber frame

64cms x 64cms

2022

The coast of the British Isles is littered with shipwrecks of almost every type, and the coast of Cornwall because of its location and topography, inevitably has its fair share.

Although born in Devonport, the untutored painter Alfred Wallis is often considered as ‘Cornish,’ as for most of his life he lived in St Ives, the fact that he lived in St Ives was fortuitous, as it was there in 1928 that the painters Ben Nicholson and Cristopher Wood ‘discovered’ him – had he been living elsewhere, it is quite possible that he might have remained unknown.

His various paintings on the theme of the Wreck of the Alba, graphically depict that eponymous steam propelled vessel as it was quite literally being overwhelmed by massive waves at Porthmeor Beach on 31^st January 1938. Despite the valiant efforts of the St Ives lifeboat, which itself capsized and was washed on to the rocks, five members of Alba’s crew were lost. Most of the remains of the vessel have been washed away, but the boiler is still discernible at exceptionally low tides.

Vastly different, from Wallis’ powerful and expressive painterly recollections of an event, the aftermath of which, he almost certainly witnessed, are the incisive, mostly black and white photographs of wrecks of mainly, but not exclusively, sailing craft around the coast of Devon and Cornwall taken since 1869 by successive generations of the Gibson family of the Scilly Isles.

Wreckpiece, is different again, and although essentially an abstraction, allows for an imaginative response in the viewer, the various elements of its composition perhaps ‘standing in’ for objects, rather than imitating them in meticulous detail. The piece of found, weathered metal, for example, is visually interesting and plays a key part in the composition, but at the same time may serve to represent a piece of marine wreckage – possibly a remnant of a boiler, or a prow and the broken cylinder, possibly a funnel.

The intersecting rods are essentially an abstract, sculptural construct, serving to hold the image firmly in place, but may also serve as co-ordinates, indicating the location of a shipwreck.

George Taylor

April 2022