Every Home Should Have One

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Every Home Should Have One

2010

Bread board, galvanised gate fittings, ceramic egg cup and paint encrusted screwdriver.

Approximate dimensions: 45cms x 30cms x 15cms


Whilst he was working on a former home, I noticed that the painter and decorator was stirring his paint with a strange, heavy looking white coloured object which he explained was comprised of multiple layers of house paint. The man further explained that the device had started out as a simple screwdriver, and that he had used it to stir his paint pots for many years, before commencing work.

This object took on an immediate fascination for me, as it comprised a physical record in multiple incremental accretions of paint of the man’s work activity over a long period of time, but this could only be revealed by cutting through the object and thus destroying it, in order to reveal the numerous layers of paint hidden within - somewhat akin to the annular rings of a tree.

In a real sense it was a positive physical record of chronological human activity, in a similar, but opposite way to how a stone step becomes gradually, incrementally worn away as a result of human activity over an exceedingly long time.

The object merely looks like a nebulous blob of hard matter until its original purpose and history are explained, but the evidence of its true use over time remains hidden within.

I assumed that the object held at least some personal resonance for him, but on enquiring he said that if I wished to have it, I could, and that he would replace it with a new screwdriver. In effect it was merely a tool that he had used out of habit for a lengthy period of time, that he had no particular attachment to it, and it didn’t seem to matter to him that the device had become increasingly heavier and more unwieldly to use over time.

So, I juxtaposed this with other incongruous objects to create an assemblage that, at first sight at least, appears to possibly have a practical purpose, but on closer examination manifestly does not.

It therefore self-categorizes as a sculpture of sorts.

The title of course, is ironic, but derives from the 1970 film in which Marty Feldman devises an advertising campaign for frozen porridge.


George Taylor

December 2022


This piece is for sale at the studio price of £425.00

Further images of this piece can be seen on Gallery 9 of my website.

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

Twisttide and Longshore Drift

 

  

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

Girisha and Indira

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.

Wreckpiece

 

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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

Longcoast Pierpiece

 

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Mixed Media

2021

In a deep timber, white painted, custom-built frame: H 41cm W 120cm D 13cm    

This work fits within the large body of three-dimensional wall hung work that I have been engaged in for the past four years or so, it is closely related to my now extensive Elemental Series and to the pieces I have been making that are informed by direct experience of forceful, dynamic coastal interaction.

The idea of making a work from part of the neck of an old Sitar led me to think about linearity, and as the wooden remnant has some subtle decorative features, these reminded me a little of Edwardian and Victorian seaside piers, but also made me think about the meandering, convoluted, natural linearity of coastlines, and the straight and rigid linearity of the seaside pier. 

But above all, of the opposing linearities of coastline and pier, and the interactive physical dynamics that a substantial, fixed manufactured structure causes when intruding at a more or less a ninety-degree angle into a massive elemental, global liquid phenomenon – the sea.

An immersive, ever mobile, natural substance influenced by the winds and the tides, which swirls and eddies around and amongst the human-made engineered structure, that has the potential to overwhelm it – and sometimes does.

In symbolic terms, another example of liminal interaction, of the coastal interplay of hard and soft, an interpretative, three-dimensional, interfusive allusion to phenomenological experience rather than a prescriptive illusion.

George Taylor

February 2022