Longcoast Pierpiece

 

Please click to enlarge

Mixed Media

2021

In a deep timber, white painted, custom-built frame: H 41cm W 120cm D 13cm    

This work fits within the large body of three-dimensional wall hung work that I have been engaged in for the past four years or so, it is closely related to my now extensive Elemental Series and to the pieces I have been making that are informed by direct experience of forceful, dynamic coastal interaction.

The idea of making a work from part of the neck of an old Sitar led me to think about linearity, and as the wooden remnant has some subtle decorative features, these reminded me a little of Edwardian and Victorian seaside piers, but also made me think about the meandering, convoluted, natural linearity of coastlines, and the straight and rigid linearity of the seaside pier. 

But above all, of the opposing linearities of coastline and pier, and the interactive physical dynamics that a substantial, fixed manufactured structure causes when intruding at a more or less a ninety-degree angle into a massive elemental, global liquid phenomenon – the sea.

An immersive, ever mobile, natural substance influenced by the winds and the tides, which swirls and eddies around and amongst the human-made engineered structure, that has the potential to overwhelm it – and sometimes does.

In symbolic terms, another example of liminal interaction, of the coastal interplay of hard and soft, an interpretative, three-dimensional, interfusive allusion to phenomenological experience rather than a prescriptive illusion.

George Taylor

February 2022

Seasurge Penwith

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