George Taylor Art Blog

Sunday, 30 August 2026

Siddhartha

Siddartha
Mixed media on canvas
2011
85cm x 74cm

Siddartha is the title a 1922 philosophical novel by the German - Swiss author Hermann Hesse, that explains a spiritual journey of self-discovery.

It is set in ancient India during the time of Gautama Buddha.

The singer-songwriter Ralph McTell has a song titled ‘The Ferryman’ on his 1971 album You Well-Meaning Brought Me Here which was inspired by Hesse’s book, I have a fifty- five years old vinyl copy of the album ‘under the stairs’.

McTell’s mother lived in Banbury with her sister Olive, during the second World War, before moving to Croydon, McTell was born in Farnborough on 3^rd December 1944. I was born in Banbury on 25^th August of that same year.

McTell continued to visit his aunt at Banbury, spending childhood summers by the Oxford Canal which runs through the town and writing the song ‘Barges’, which recalls his experiences on that canal. This song was recorded on his 1972 album Not till Tomorrow, a first copy of which I also have.

(The Oxford was an early narrow canal, so barges, by definition, would not have been used there, but rather so-called narrowboats. McTell almost certainly would have used the term ‘Barges’ for poetic/rhythmic reasons)

I too, spent many hours of my childhood by that canal and was possibly, one of the ‘country-boys’ that Ralph encountered on the canal, but I have no express recollection of that.

In 2007, Mc Tell had a special homecoming gala concert at St Mary’s, Banbury Parish Church, where I was christened in September 1944. I was in the audience, for that concert.

The bringing together of these two very different, exquisitely crafted and exceptionally sensitive songs - one about a metaphorical, mythical river and the other, as Ralph explains in ‘Barges’, ‘that was by man begun’; in fact, an actual engineered waterway - in that environment, had an especially poignant and powerful resonance for me.

George Taylor

August 2026

George Taylor Website - Gallery 3

Tuesday, 30 June 2026

Towards the Mountain

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Towards the Mountain
2006
30cm x 40cm
Acrylic paint and pastel

Cezanne painted mountains a lot, and one in particular.

He knew a great deal about mountains, he really understood them, and I think he loved Montagne Sainte-Victoire in Southern France as much as he loved oil paint. That had to be so, otherwise the marriage would not have worked as completely in accord as it evidently did.

The Dutch/American painter Willem de Kooning said that ‘Content is a glimpse’, and of course, it is. So had he painted mountains, the outcome would have been different.

My image of the mountain is more of a glimpse, always moving, always changing and thus, hard to pin down.

Therefore, it is rendered in fragments of form against a background of hard and soft pastel, sometimes made almost liquid with fixative, so that when dry, acrylic paint is laid over it, the paint can be cut and manipulated and anything superfluous removed.

This gives an effect of shapes and colours floating in pictorial space, within a deep, layered background, but as innate parts of the whole, not stuck on to the surface like collage.

It took a long time to work out how to achieve this, a lot of trial and error in fact, as it seems counterintuitive and demands a great deal of control, but also, requires the confidence of considered spontaneity.

So, my painting is flatter, there is little illusion of perspective, it’s more in the nature of a journey, we’re heading towards the mountain, but we’re not there yet.

Maybe, that’s it, just emerging in the ‘distance’?

George Taylor
June 2026

George Taylor Website - Gallery 4

Wednesday, 29 April 2026

A Cross in Flanders

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A Cross in Flanders
2011
67cm x 48cm
Paper, acrylic paint, pencil and cord

At Passchendaele and Ypres, when I went there, quite literally, I was lost for words.

Owen, Graves, Sassoon and Brooke et al had already said it all – they were there at the time, and at the Somme and other places, I was only an interested party who arrived on a bus, a visitor for a day, so many decades later.

It was the topography that got to me, that oppressive, unrelenting terrain, that eventually had the upper hand.

And the serried ranks of chiselled, stone memorials, innumerable, far too many to even begin to count.

Each one signifying a life lost in the mud and the mayhem.

It brought to mind Stanley Spencer’s, although very different - poignant, powerful and poetic tangle of crosses in his Resurrection of the Soldiers, from that same War.

So, mine is just a single cross, left to speak for itself.

George Taylor

April 2026

George Taylor Website - Gallery 8

Wednesday, 18 February 2026

Boudicca’s Territory

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Boudicca’s Territory
Mixed media on canvas
115cms x 115cms
2012

A definition of the word territory is of knowledge, an area of activity or experience.

A painting is essentially a territory within which events have occurred.

A painting is also a wall hung terrain over which the eye travels and hopefully, the brain, the nervous system and the emotions respond.

The title is nominal but may allude to a specific geographical or historical location.

(According to history, Boudicca was an ancient Queen, a leader of the Iceni tribe which was largely located in the part of England now known as East Anglia.)

George Taylor.

February 2026

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)

Friday, 31 October 2025

Spacetime

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Spacetime

2017

Mixed media on canvas
115cms x 115cms

This is an image about no thing, in the sense that it deliberately has no recognisable subject, so ostensibly is entirely about itself.

So, it’s a thing, not an illusion of some thing.

It is though, concerned with colour, shape, pictorial space, surface texture, a physical hint of the third dimension, line, and the pictorial dynamics that arise from arranging these in a way that may appear to be random, but most definitely is extremely considered.

When one makes a figurative image, usually all the information required is in front of you, or in a mental recollection or a memory or in a physical or digital reference of some kind, but true abstraction requires all the information to come from within, beginning with no thing.

So, Spacetime is self-referential.

It is an entity in its own right, not a constructed allusion to some thing.

Link to Gallery 7 of George's website.

George Taylor

October 2025

Wednesday, 27 August 2025

Sea Song

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Sea Song

2014

Acrylic paint, canvas, collage, pencil, cardboard and paper

83cm x 127cm

Terry Frost, in a lecture at Warwick University, repeated in the Banbury Museum film of 2015, said that ‘when he got into abstract painting, it was like writing poetry’, and in many ways that is true.

A poem made from words and the spaces between, becomes an entity in its own right, as does an image made from visual elements and the spaces between.

The spaces between can be vital as the words and the visual elements, but the words and the shapes and colours dictate the spaces, and in abstract art it is possible to create an interactive pictorial space on a physically flat surface that does not depend on illusory perspective.

In Sea Song, I wanted the colours, and the straight and torn edges to just touch and to almost touch, in a kind of ariel ballet, circumscribed with looping arcs of graphite, freely and confidently drawn, but located precisely to dynamically activate the coloured forms.

The surface area is large, so I wished to give the image a visually homogenous quality, but also to have numerous points of visual interest within it, like words, or groups of words within a poem or notes or successions of notes within a musical composition.

So, as Terry rightly said, whilst making a painting can be akin to making poetry, and possibly, complimentary to it, visual art per se is unique and particular, and its essential character is manifestly and fundamentally different from the oral or the aural or the written word and thus, is definitively noninterchangeable.

George Taylor

August 2025