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

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)

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 

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.

Read more: Frost, Family and Friends. The Banbury Years.

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

Penwith Headland

Copyright © text 2025 & image 2019 by George Taylor.  All rights reserved. 
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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

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