George Taylor Art Blog: artblog

Showing posts with label artblog. 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, 29 April 2026

A Cross in Flanders

Click on the image to enlarge.

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

Friday, 31 October 2025

Spacetime

Click on the image to enlarge.

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

Monday, 30 June 2025

Penwith Headland

Click on the image to enlarge.

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

Sunday, 30 April 2023

When we got There

Click on the image to enlarge.

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

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