Sea Song

 

Click on the image to enlarge

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

George Taylor - Indiana

 

                                                                  Click the image to enlarge

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

Flashflare

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