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

For Catalonia

 

For Catalonia

2010

67cm x 48 cm

Card, tissue paper, cord, and acrylic paint

Although the title of this piece might seem to paraphrase George Orwell’s book Homage to Catalonia,
I made it essentially as a tribute rather than a homage to the late Catalonian artist Antoni Tapies,
whose extraordinarily singular and highly distinctive, visceral work has fascinated and enthralled
me since I first encountered it in the early nineteen ‘sixties.

I was already aware of his work, but seeing five major Tapies works in the pivotal 54/64
Painting and Sculpture of a Decade exhibition at the original Tate Gallery sixty years ago, in
April/June 1964, left a profound and lasting impression on me.

Tapies demonstrated that it is possible to create complex, powerful images from ordinary
everyday materials, the detritus of human activity almost, often with a rawness and directness that underscore the physicality and temporality of human existence.

Sometimes in visual art, words serve no useful purpose, they just get in the way, and complicate
things, the work is best left to speak for itself.

George Taylor

June 2024

Flashflare

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

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

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

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

 

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