Siddhartha

Copyright © text 2026 & image 2011 by George Taylor.  All rights reserved. 
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Siddhartha
Mixed media on canvas
2011
85cm x 74cm

Siddhartha is the title of 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 wrote 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

Towards the Mountain

 

Copyright © text 2026 & image 2006 by George Taylor. All rights reserved. 

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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

A Cross in Flanders

 

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Copyright © text 2026 & image 2011 by George Taylor.  All rights reserved. 

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

Boudicca’s Territory

 

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Copyright © text 2026 & image 2012 by George Taylor.  All rights reserved. 

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