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A Modern Tradition: Striking Essex Landscapes Captured in High-Quality Prints
Spectacular images of familiar Essex countryside are included high-impact prints to be
launched by an internationally sucessful Essex based artist at Reeman’s Fine Art
Auctioneers in Colchester in November.
Stephen Taylor studied Constable a postgraduate at Essex university, and was a
visiting lecturer at Colchester School of Art and resident artist at Felsted school. He
turned professional in the early 1990’s and developed his own vision of modern
landscape painting. His paintings are now in private and corporate collections in
Britain and around the world.
His work combines traditional oil methods with digital photo analysis to create striking
contemporary images that reveal that true beauty of the Essex countryside.“ The places I paint can be found within a mile or two of almost everyone’s home in
the county.” He says, “They are ordinary places, but if you open your eyes, you can
go back again and again to such spots and nature will always have something new to
show you.”
True to his word, he spent four years painting a single farm field close to where
Constable once drew inspiration. His painter’s umbrella became a familiar sight to
local people, as he worked at different times of the year, observing day and night, to
produce a dramatic series of panoramas first shown at The Arts Centre in Kings’
College, Cambridge. He knew he’d got something right when the porters at the lodge
started telling their friends. The show attracted a wide audience from Cambridge and
beyond and people began to tell him, ‘oh, we drove through one of your landscapes
last week’ . One couple even spent an afternoon looking for the field!
Stephen then returned and spent a further three years painting a single oak tree in the
same field, in all seasons. He applied the same principle – the more you look, the
more you see. The tree changes completely, birds fly by, peope come and go, crops
and hedges are cut. This collection, called “Oak”, was shown last autumn at Vertigo
Gallery, in fashionable Shoreditch, London. In the catalogue to the show philospher
and TV presenter Alain de Botton declared that the paintings had “re-enchanted”
nature.
Early this year Stephen launched a series of limited-edition prints at Art Expo, a major
print fair in New York. With the help of the Governments “Passport to Export” scheme,
modern Essex landscape prints are now reaching a US public. This November the
prints will be given a UK launch at a party on their home ground, at Reeman’s Fine Art
auctioneers in Colchester, a stone’s throw from where the original paintings were
made.
The prints are on show in the sale room between Saturday 17th and
Wednesday 21st November (for opening times call Reeman’s on 01206 754754)
The prints are made under Stephen’s supervision and, like the paintings, there is
cutting edge digital work going on behind the scenes. The biggest are Durst lambda
prints – wonderfully accurate laser exposures on archive photographic paper. For
special commisions and public spaces they can be made up to ten feet long. At the
same time there are small prints: including a series of 20 oak trees each measuring
7in x 5in that show the same tree, differently every time.
Stephen says “ No matter how much passion you have for your art being a sucessful
artist is not that different from running any small buiness. In spite of specialist training
and time at unversity I feel I have something in common with decorators and
carpenters. After all, a picture is something you put on the wall of your home. In my
case it’s a bit of nature in the living room or office that reminds you to look twice at the
world. The fact that people put pictures in such places proves they are valued, and I
hope that by selling prints more people will be able to see what I do.”
Striking Contemporary English Landscapes Captured in High-Quality Prints
A view of modern London familiar to many American filmgoers is
included in a series of high-impact prints to be launched in the US by
a successful British landscape artist with a passion for the visual
richness of nature.
Stephen Taylor combines traditional oil painting techniques with digital
photo analysis to create contemporary pieces of striking clarity and
beauty. Many of his paintings are in private and corporate collections
in Britain and around the world. Taylor’s first collection of signed
limited-edition prints, produced under his own supervision, goes on
show at Art Expo New York from 1 to 5 March 2007.
London from Primrose Hill – a view that has inspired artists and poets,
and was the backdrop for the opening shots of the hit film “Bridget
Jones: The Edge of Reason” – is a giclée print measuring 3ft 3in x 2ft
7in and limited to 145 copies. It shows the buildings, cranes, and
spires of modern London beyond a swathe of green parkland with
changing layers of cloud overhead.
“Working outdoors saturates you with place and makes you alive to
what you do and don’t usually notice. Photographic colour is generally
a poor equivalent for how we perceive colour,” says the artist who
spent four years working in a field in the east of England, close to
where Constable painted, to produce a dramatic series of day and night panoramas he describes as “a revelation of place”. The original
paintings were first shown in 2002 at King’s College, Cambridge.
In Spring West Bergholt, a 6ft x 3ft Durst Lambda * print, limited to
95 copies, a tractor sprays winter wheat as the farm manager walks
the tramlines and planes overhead approach London. A 4ft x 3ft print,
in a run of 145, shows a full moon rising over the darkened field at
midsummer, with orange light visible from a town over the horizon.
Taylor’s latest work focuses on a single oak tree in the same field,
observed and painted over a three-year period while seasons change
and planes, wildlife, crops, and people, come and go. The collection
was unveiled in 2007 at Vertigo Gallery in fashionable Shoreditch,
London, and is now reproduced in a series of six 1ft-square giclée
images and a further series of 20 giclées, each measuring 7in x 5in. Both series are limited to 195 copies.
Taylor, a visiting lecturer at the world-renowned Inchbald School of
Design in London, expects his prints to be of special interest to interior
designers and hotel decorators.
Copies of all prints can be viewed at www.stephentaylorprints.com.
The highest quality has been secured by using source images
prepared by elite fine art photographers Prudence Cuming Associates,
together with advanced Lambda laser print technology and giclée
printing. For more on the artist, visit
www.stephentaylorpaintings.com
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