George Taylor Art Blog: abstract painting

Showing posts with label abstract painting. Show all posts

Sunday, 30 August 2026

Siddhartha

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

Wednesday, 27 August 2025

Sea Song

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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.

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

Sunday, 19 January 2025

Nearing, oil on board

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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

Friday, 30 August 2024

George Taylor - Indiana

Click on 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."

Friday, 1 March 2024

The Air’s Buoyancy and the Sun’s Ray

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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

Sunday, 31 December 2023

Of Wingbones and Talons

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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

Friday, 1 September 2023

Idiot Wind

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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

Sunday, 30 April 2023

When we got There

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When we got There
Private Collection
Mixed Media and Acrylic on Board
Image size: 35cms x 45cms

This piece essentially is about the plastic qualities of paint and colour.

The paint is applied with a certain gestural immediacy, but most definitely not unthinkingly, and with an energy and passion that hopefully, is reflected in the dynamic of the composition which in turn, hopefully also, reflects a kind of restrained exuberance.

It may be construed as a kind of landscape, (or a map) or more likely a seascape, but more of a Seascape of the Mind than a specific physical location. Maybe a recollection of an early journey to the seaside, and that small bay or cove that suddenly comes into view as one passes that last headland.

That special emotional feeling that one gets at the end of a long, sometimes tedious journey by car or train, especially as a child, when the pent-up feelings of excitement and expectation are relieved by that particular sort of euphoria one experiences immediately upon reaching a coastal destination, and experiencing that first glimpse of the sea and breathing the first wafts of ozone into our lungs.

We feel a profound, almost primeval sense of connection, and often cannot wait to engage with the waves as they break onto the shore.

Is this connection so deep and enduring as to be an echo of our early amphibian ancestors emergence from the ocean some 375 million years ago in evolutionary time?

In effect, a sub-conscious memory of our Inner Fish, as palaeontologist Neil Shubin calls it, that almost literally, surfaces at such moments.

The relatively primitive creature that came out of the water, and on to the land all those years ago whose limbs and organs were the evolutionary precursors to our own.

George Taylor
April 2023

Tuesday, 28 February 2023

Matter of Time

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Matter of Time

2006

Mixed media and acrylic on board.

Image size: 51cms x 61cms in wide white coloured mount and natural hardwood frame.

This painting was made via the technique I evolved over thirty years ago, whereby a ground of hard and soft pastel is built up in layers using generous amounts of fixative, sometimes to the point of liquidity. When dry, the ground can then be reduced or cut back into using sharp instruments to reveal the previously hidden layers of colours and textures.

The use of fixative throughout the process, allows acrylic paint to adhere to the surface, which when dry, can, if desired, be cut away and removed and other shapes left in place, thus producing an impression of shapes suspended or floating in a pictorial space.

The title is essentially, non-descriptive, but alludes to Quantum Mechanics, and the continuing quest to unify the four fundamental components of the Universe: Space -Time - Matter and Energy into a single theory, the so-called ‘Theory of Everything.’

Quantum Move Image size 50.5cms x 76.00cms also from 2006, on Gallery 4 of my website explores the same theme, but is deliberately less structured, less earthbound, more nebulous, and more akin possibly, to the unimaginably vast Universe science tells us, exists out there, way beyond our relatively insignificant, as Carl Sagan put it, ‘Pale Blue Dot’ of a planet.

As with all painting, the image must be viewed at first hand to be fully assimilated, so possibly contrary to the impression given in the photographic image, there are no elements of collage in the painting.

George Taylor

February 2023

Thursday, 28 April 2022

Wreckpiece

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Wreckpiece

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

Wednesday, 29 December 2021

Paint, Emotion, Landscape, Space and Weather

Click on the images to enlarge.

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

Monday, 30 August 2021

Rain, Sea and Wind

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Rain, Sea and Wind

Pastel, Pencil and Acrylic on Board

This mixed media painting emanated from the extensive series of works I made for my ‘Flamborough Series’ in the late ‘eighties. I had spent a considerable amount of time exploring and experiencing the coastal landscape around Flamborough Head in preparation for an exhibition organised by the former Humberside County Council in 1991. The exhibition took place at two venues, the gallery at Bridlington Library and fittingly, at Flamborough Library.

(Since 1996 Flamborough Head has been administratively within the remit of the East Riding of Yorkshire Council)

I deliberately made the subjects comprising most of the pictures recognisable as distinctive features of this incredibly visually stimulating coastal landscape, as in 'Eve Rock'. But some of the pieces, I later reworked to emphasise, not so much, the distinctive physical topography, but the all-consuming impact of the immersive coastal weather, the dramatic light and the complexity of seabird flight that I had experienced during my walks amongst and around that remarkably singular coastal location. ‘Rain, Sea and Wind’ was one of these reworked pieces, as was ‘White Rock’.

Eve Rock
Pastel and Pencil on Board

White Rock
Pastel, Pencil and Acrylic on Board

I had also walked the coast path to observe the Old Harry Rocks formation in Dorset, and had taken a boat from Swanage to view these stunning, naturally sculpted rock formations from the sea and course, the well known Needles outcrop off the Isle of Wight, which is punctuated by the red and white banded, man made lighthouse, like a full stop, whereas the lighthouse at Flamborough is set back on the headland.

These formations are mainland chalk promontories, but on the west coast of Scotland we had driven across Mull, taken the ferry from Fionnphort to Iona, and then on by small boat to Staffa, as it happened, in spectacular, squally weather conditions, to experience at first hand the approach to that small, remote island, up to and into the imposing Fingal’s Cave, with its architectonic hexagonal volcanically formed basalt columns. This small landmass was possibly, long ago in geological time, a part of a much larger island which included Mull and Iona.

There is something intensely dramatic about approaching these massive geological configurations, formed by the erosive action of wind and wave over countless millennia, from the seaward aspect, but Flamborough Head offered such a wide range of visual interpretations, that I decided to make most of the topographical paintings from the landward view, but sometimes, also from the shore margins between tides.

George Taylor

August 2021

Wednesday, 30 June 2021

Fjordpiece

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Fjordpiece 2021

A wall hung multi-dimensional work.

Image size: 55cms X 75cms

Paper, acrylic paint, cardboard, and balsa wood on heavyweight paper mounted on to board.

For the past few years, I have been exploring the colour blue, not entirely for its own sake, but also in relation to white.

Blue and white have a natural affinity and attract us at a subliminal elemental level, possibly because they are the colours of the space immediately above our heads and of the waters that surround us.

The blue affects and influences the white and vice versa.

Much of my recent work has a marine, oceanic feel, and this is far from accidental.

As a species, at a critical point in our evolution we emerged from the waters and began the long transition to becoming land creatures.

The constantly changing liminal space, between hard and soft, the sea and the land, the deep blue of the waves and the white spume as they break against the land, fascinates us and we are drawn to it inexorably.

Following yet another unimaginable passage of time, the continents will have shifted and the sea/shores we are familiar with will be elsewhere.

Where will our species be then?

George Taylor

June 2021

Friday, 30 April 2021

Voyager

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Voyager

Mixed media on canvas

Image size 94cms x 94cms Framed size 115cms x 115cms

This work, made in 2010, explores, amongst other things, the two dimensional ‘spatial’ phenomenon which occurs in painting and, especially in abstraction. Obviously, it is not possible to create an actual, third physical dimension from a flat, usually wall hung, two-dimensional object, having only height and width, so this work explores pictorial space on a two-dimensional plane, bounded by distinctly defined perimeters or edges.

As some elements are collaged, literally, stuck to the surface, these do have an actual, albeit minimal, third dimension, but this is a projection forward from the picture plane, not, as it were, behind it.

This is not a constructed illusion or representation, achieved traditionally, for example, via the application of the principles of vanishing point perspective, conventional composition, or the prescriptive use of colour, formulaic modelling and tone to describe and allude to three-dimensional form. These techniques have been prevalent throughout the history of painting to represent, illustrate, stand in for, serve as, or be a proxy for recognisable objects or entities in what may be described as the real world.

But rather, it is the consequence of the juxtaposition and interaction, of a variety of often ambiguous, incongruous, and sometimes, vaguely symbolic coloured marks, shapes and gestures within a given flat surface area. The intention being to produce an image that is intrinsic and self-contained, and which contains no intended narrative, ‘subject’, comment or message.

The title, which is essentially a referential device, may refer to the Voyager space mission, or to a voyage or a journey, or to none of these things.

……………………………………………………………..

The poet and writer John Updike said: ‘What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.’

Updike, on hearing a comment made by Patrick Heron, about the paintings of Terry Frost, to the effect that ’Frost’s space is deeper than Poliakoff’s and, not as deep as that of Soulage’s,’ also authored a poem called ‘The Moderate,’ which in a light hearted manner, comprises a short, comparative essay on ‘space’ in abstract painting.

George Taylor

April 2021

The Moderate
‘Soulage’s space is deep and wide –
Beware!’ they said. ‘Beware,’ they cried,
‘The yawning gap, the black abyss
That closes with a dreadful hiss!

‘That shallow space by Poliakoff,’
They added, is a wretched trough.
It wrinkles, splinters, shreds and fades;
It wouldn’t hold the Jack of Spades.’

‘But where?’ I asked, bewildered, lost.
‘Go seek, ‘they said, ‘the space of Frost;
It’s not too bonny, not too braw –
The nicest space you ever saw.’

I harked, and heard, and here I live,
Delighted to be relative.

John Updike.