Towards the Mountain

 

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

Click on the image to enlarge.

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

Ageless Rhythms

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Copyright © text 2025 & image 2010 by George Taylor.  All rights reserved. 

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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Copyright © text 2025 & image 2017 by George Taylor.  All rights reserved. 

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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Copyright © text 2025 & image 2014 by George Taylor.  All rights reserved. 

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

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

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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Copyright © text 2025 & image 2006 by George Taylor.  All rights reserved. 

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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Copyright © text 2025 & image 2017 by George Taylor.  All rights reserved. 

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 

Nearing, oil on board

 

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Copyright © text 2024 & image 1963 by George Taylor.  All rights reserved. 

Nearing
Oil on board
71.50cm x 82.00cm
1963 

I made this painting extra curricular, over sixty one years ago, when I was eighteen years of age, in an art school atmosphere that was definitely not conducive to such things, and sometimes was actively hostile, but mostly just indifferent. The primary objective being, at that time, to train students for formal examinations in another tradition with different values. I had made a number of non-figurative paintings by this time, and these early works were the precursors to many more in an abstract genre I have made subsequently, over a period in excess of sixty years. Originally the painting was titled Grey Composition 1, but I grew tired of titling my paintings solely by reference to the dominant colours and Nearing seemed compositionally more apposite. 

It is not a self consciously minimalistic piece, but essentially is an exercise in including only what is necessary and thus, of excluding the extraneous, this approach applied to the deliberately restrained colour range used in the painting, as well as to the forms.

At that time, together with a passionate interest in the work of a number of other, then living painters, I was especially interested in the work of the late William Scott, and to those who know this artist’s work, his influence may be vaguely discernible, especially in the suspended box shape to the left with the circular form to the top, although this is more abstracted than Scott’s forms which were sometimes directly derived from household objects. 

I was particularly interested in the sense of ‘balanced tension’ created by the circular form suspended within the square form at the top left, which itself ‘hangs’ from the top of the painting, and the red coloured quarter arc shape which intrudes from the right. 

In 1964 I was able to afford the first monograph on Scott by Alan Bowness, I was fascinated to discover that Scott had quoted a passage by Michael Rothenstein from: Looking at Pictures, which has subsequently lodged firmly in my consciousness: 

‘I find beauty in plainness, in a conception which is precise... A simple idea which to the observer in its intensity must inevitably shock and leave a concrete image in the mind.’

This tenet has endured, and has influenced much of my work since, but unfortunately, time and regular ongoing reference, has left my Scott monograph very much the worse for wear – I would not want to be without it though, even given its dilapidated state.

George Taylor

December 2024  

George Taylor Art at the RBSA

 

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Copyright © text 2025 & image 2021 by George Taylor.  All rights reserved. 

'This year, thanks to valued assistance with the logistics from RBSA President Viv Astling, I have included three of my pictures in the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists, Members, Associates and Graduates Exhibition.'
George Taylor.

Link to exhibition details from RBSA website 

Near Noon, that Day, a mixed media artwork by George Taylor.

 

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Copyright © text 2008 by David Phillips & image 2006 by George Taylor.  All rights reserved. 

Near Noon, that Day 

Circa 2006 

Image size 46cm x 70cm 

Mixed media on board 

“When you look at the paintings, you notice that your eyes become activated. You are confronted by patches and areas of colour and coloured lines, splashes of paint and crosses. There's a sense of push and pull, distance and nearness.

The mark-making creates a busy surface. Your mind is taken up with reading one part and then looking at another that is different in character, and so on. The paintings do have something in common. They have a restless, agitated air about them with sometimes a predominant yellow, red or black and occasional flicks of white.

These works are not dull. They have balance and unity in spite of the variations of surface, shape, colour, line and space. They satisfy the eye and with more prolonged viewing, the need for an aesthetic experience. They are also coherent but they represent a challenge to the sensibility of the viewer as there is no narrative that might help to sidestep the issue of meaning. 

 Works such as these provide a satisfying aesthetic experience and are complete in themselves."

© David Phillips. Artspace May '08

George Taylor - Indiana

 

                                                               Click on the image to enlarge.

Copyright © text 2010 by Patricia Preece & image 2010 by George Taylor.  All rights reserved. 

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

 

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Copyright © text 2024 & image 2010 by George Taylor.  All rights reserved. 

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

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Copyright © text 2024 & image 2023 by George Taylor.  All rights reserved. 

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

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Copyright © text 2024 & image 2009 by George Taylor.  All rights reserved. 

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

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Copyright © text 2023 & image 2009 by George Taylor.  All rights reserved. 

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

 

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Copyright © text 2023 & image 2021 by George Taylor.  All rights reserved.

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

 

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Copyright © text 2023 & image 2016 by George Taylor.  All rights reserved.

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 

North Atlantic Diptych

 

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Copyright © text 2023 & image 2012 by George Taylor.  All rights reserved.

Two separate deep canvases mounted in white box frames in museum-quality glazing.

Acrylic with collaged elements

Each piece measures 77cms x 62cms overall and together comprise an unattached diptych

2012

Although essentially abstract, these two canvasses are intended to be viewed together as complementary images.

At one level they may be regarded as combinations of colours, textures, marks and shapes, hopefully with a degree of pictorial coherence.

At another level, with a degree of engagement they, at least symbolically, may evoke a recollection of a 20th century drama that reflected the best – and the worst in humankind.

They have a strong physical dynamic, possibly evoking physical movement and the wind, the blues, the sea and the sky and the jagged whites, ice.

The warmer reds and oranges possibly represent fire and heat, whilst the reds, in paint poured directly on to the surfaces – blood.

The North Atlantic is a formidable natural phenomenon.

In World War Two, many lives were lost there, as a consequence of attacks by German U boats and aircraft when the Allies were trying to ship essential supplies to the Soviet Union/Russia.

There are many Memorials beneath the waves.

George Taylor

June 2023