Paint, Emotion, Landscape, Space and Weather

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

Earthstorm 5

Earthstorm 1, 2, 3 and 5
Mixed media on board

I recently placed an image on my website of a painting that I had rediscovered in my studio store, and at about the same time, had also rediscovered in my image archive, images of three paintings of similar size which I made about fifteen years ago, which are no longer in my possession.

The discovery of these four modest paintings from my Earthstorm Series caused me to think about the relationship between the five critical components of their content and thus by extension, their meaning and how this transcends the sum of their parts and furthermore, how the paint synthesises and ameliorates all five components into a coherent whole but retains its innate qualities as material.

Earthstorm 1

It seems to me that paintings that celebrate, and do not attempt to disguise or deny the plastic qualities of the material from which they are made, are generally more potent as ‘paintings’, rather than those in which paint is utilised as a vehicle in an effort to create a simulacrum of objective reality.

Earthstorm 2

To allow the paint to live and breathe, not to stifle or to camouflage its intrinsic character or to allow it to be subsumed and merely become a vehicle for pictorial illusion, a mere means to an end, is in my view, central to the act of painting.

Earthstorm 3

Turner is perhaps, the archetypical example of a landscape painter who masterfully uses paint first and foremost to fuse emotion, landscape, space and weather in a coherent, compelling image, but the paint remains as material evidence of the act of painting, recognising, rather than denying its innate nature and physicality.

For me, some other artists from more recent times, not necessarily landscape painters, who celebrate paint per se and the physical act of painting, often via direct expressionistic gesture, include Howard Hodgkin, Frank Auerbach, Peter Lanyon, Gillian Ayres, Willem de Kooning, Nicholas de Stael, and Helen Frankenthaler- although Frankenthaler often employs staining techniques in her work, she nonetheless, emphasises the importance of material and process.

 

George Taylor

December 2021

Seasurge Penwith

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Copyright © text 2020 & images 2020 & 2009 by George Taylor.  All rights reserved.

This work is a three-dimensional visual composite of several locations on the Penwith coast where the tidal surges interact dynamically and dramatically with the hard, geological landscape.

At Gwennap Head, for example, the red and the black and white navigation markers, appear incongruous in the natural landscape and have a strange, other-worldly feel, rather like the surreal, geometric sculptural objects in some of the paintings of Paul Nash, or of Giorgio De Chirico. 

However, to describe these artefacts literally in a piece such as this would not be apposite, as the work is about extreme movement, colour and physical energy, so perhaps in the disorienting maelstrom of a coastal storm, the red cone becomes less distinct and more blurred.

My painting from 2009, titled Wild Sea Rising, (in Gallery 1 of my web site) is concerned with the natural power and uncontrollable force of the ocean expressed in a painterly expressionistic manner, whilst in Seasurge Penwith the interaction between water, wind and coast is described using three dimensional materials.

Wild Sea Rising by George Taylor

In his work, the late Cornish-born painter Peter Lanyon, often depicts a complex version of landscape from multiple angles, rather than from the conventional single ‘window’ viewpoint, thus the image becomes an all-encompassing expression of experience, albeit in two dimensions. Lanyon also made three-dimensional constructions in order to translate into visual terms complex phenomenological interaction.


George Taylor

December 2020