Twisttide and Longshore Drift

 

  

2022

99cms x 74cms x 13cms and 96cms x 74cms x 13cms

Wood, cardboard, paper and acrylic paint on board into deep, matt white painted frames.

 

Twisttide and Longshore Drift are from the Large Elemental Series.

This series, whilst being wall hung, have actual elements of the third dimension, and quite literally explore the space between painting and sculpture.

These works, having a degree of physical protrusion from the wall plane are intended to be viewed from a radius of approximately 180 degrees rather than from a fixed standpoint, thus offering something of the complex physical dynamic of the constantly changing coastal/spatial interaction observed on my many journeys around the British coastline and especially in relation to my much earlier Flamborough Series.

I am reluctant to mention perceived influences, as these are never overt, plagiaristic or obvious, but subtle, nuanced, sometimes subliminal and processed through ones’ consciousness over prolonged periods of time and often, not at all evident or discernible in the finished work.

For example, Leonardo’s exquisitely observed studies of moving water or Turner’s powerful atmospheric paintings of natural forces may be assimilated, but not graphically re-presented in what is essentially an attempt to pare down to primary, fundamental elements and thus to leave out the detractive and unnecessary. 

However, in this series, I would acknowledge, amongst others, a long-time respect for the work of the painter Peter Lanyon and the sculptor Anthony Caro, both of whom I regard as important British artists of the twentieth century.

 

George Taylor

August 2022

Girisha and Indira

Collage

Each measuring: 62cms x 45cms (framed size)

2010

These minimalist collages, made from fabric, paint and paper, form part of a series having broad allusions to the culture and traditions of the Indian sub-continent and particularly to Indian miniature painting.

Whilst I was strenuously resisting direct figurative, narrative, symbolic or mythical references, I was nonetheless striving to achieve a ‘simple,’ economic synthesis of form and colour that referenced these influences without being in any way descriptive, ‘pinned down’, appropriative or literal.

George Taylor

June 2022

These framed pieces are available to purchase at ex-studio prices: £495.00 each or £925.00 for the pair plus carriage and packing.

Please contact George should you be interested.

Wreckpiece

 

Please click to enlarge

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

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

Paint, Emotion, Landscape, Space and Weather

Click on an image 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

Rain, Sea and Wind

 

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

Fjordpiece

 

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