Idiot Wind

 

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Copyright © text 2023 & image 2016 by George Taylor.  All rights reserved.

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 

The Wind Grabs the Whisper

 

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Copyright © text 2020 & image 2010 by George Taylor.  All rights reserved.

The Wind Grabs the Whisper

This work is mixed media on oil board, and is set within a hardwood frame.

All the pictures one makes have a strong emotional self connection, that almost goes without saying, otherwise what is the point of making them, but some have an especially deep bond, and for that reason one would be reluctant to let them go; this, for me, is one of those pictures, and although it has been shown a number of times, I would miss its presence in our home.

It is mixed media on board, made in 2010, and although it has the appearance of being heavily collaged, as well as painted, there are in fact only a few collaged elements, in the sense that they originally were once discrete elements which later have been adhered to the picture surface.

The technique, which I have developed myself over many years, involves creating a complex ground of largely pastel, carefully fixed in numerous layers and, then cut back into using sharp blades whilst adding gestural and considered marks in acrylic and pencil. It is very much a process of building up colour shape and texture and then removing some of the previous layers, over and over again, until one arrives at a resolved image.

There is an indication of an horizon line, so most people construe it as a kind of landscape, albeit a very abstracted one, but it is a ‘landscape’ that has pictorial movement and energy, rather than a literal rendering of a landscape that is fixed and static. The shapes and marks move with and against each other to create a restless dynamic that although made of fixed materials, like paint and canvas remnants, is visually not ‘still’ at all.

Essentially, non figurative pictures don’t need descriptive titles, as they have no obligation to describe, or to refer to anything beyond themselves, let alone to offer some kind of narrative, but often a carefully considered title can add something to the impact of an image, without detraction; sometimes in a lyrical, poetical sense.

This image operates somewhere in the place between experience and imagination, so in the interaction of visual energy, in the marks, colours and textures, made in a great variety of ways, maybe one can at least symbolically, given a degree of engagement, discern how the wind may have ‘grabbed the whisper’?

George Taylor
August 2020

Taylor-Thwaites Studios, Stonewalls, Sturt Road, Charlbury, Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire, OX7 3EP
Tel: 01608 810174
Email: gtaylor44@aol.com  
Web: www.georgetaylorart.com/gallery1