artist
Stephen Taylor combines traditional oil painting techniques with digital photo analysis to make English paintings of striking clarity and modernity. His art is a revelation of ordinary nature. He spent four years in a farm field near where Constable drew his inspiration, producing a series of day and night panoramas first exhibited at King’s College, Cambridge. He returned to paint a single oak tree in the same field over a period of three years in all seasons, a collection first shown at Vertigo, Shoreditch, London.
The paintings are in private and corporate collections world wide, and are now made more widely available as limited edition prints, first shown in New York, 2007.
Fore more information go to artist / exhibitions / insight at www.stephentaylorpaintings.com
Oak
Vertigo, Great Eastern Street, Shoreditch, London
Foreword to the catalogue
For the last few years, in a field in south eastern England, a man has been sitting with an
easel, looking up at an oak tree. He has sacrificed himself in the name of an
extraordinary act of homage to a part of the natural world we see regularly but almost
never notice. Stephen Taylor has been teaching us how to look.
Taylor’s attention is a symptom of our inattention. In his essay ‘On Naïve and
Sentimental Poetry’ (1796), Friedrich Schiller observed that the Ancient Greeks, who
had spent most of their time outdoors, whose cities were small and ringed by forests and
seas, had only rarely felt the need to celebrate the natural world in their art. ‘Since the
Greeks had not lost nature in themselves’, he explained, ‘they had no great desire to
create objects external to them in which they could recover it.’ And then, turning to his
own day, Schiller drove home his message: ‘However, as nature begins gradually to
vanish from human life as a direct experience, so we see it emerge in the world of the
artist as an idea’. In the age of concrete and steel, Taylor’s work brings us back into
contact with what we needed, but had forgotten we even loved.
Taylor has admirably fulfilled that most ancient task of the painter: to re-enchant the
world.
Alain de Botton, August 2006