Howard TAYLOR

Australian 1918–2001

Throughout his distinguished career that spanned more than fifty years, Howard Taylor’s commitment to and fascination with the Australian landscape never wavered. Taylor’s sustained observation of the bush, and his deep knowledge of the areas surrounding Northcliffe, his Western Australian home, lay at the heart of his practice, and drove him to strive to create an equivalence of the experience of the natural world through the viewing of his paintings and sculpture.

The physical act of seeing is vital to Taylor’s practice and in attempting to re-present a visual sensation through his work (in the case of Landscape unfolding, 1984, the experience of the vagaries of light in the Australian bush), the artists highlights the important role of visual and emotional perception in looking at art. By placing a rectangle within the square of the canvas, Taylor immediately establishes an opposition in the natural environment, and the manner in which both colour and light can change in relation to these objects, altering our perception of them as a result. Taylor’s adept manipulation of his materials and his related understanding of the properties of paint and their own relation to light–the fact that a surface can shift, change and be read so differently in varied conditions– similarly extends the experience of the work, just as the restrained palette and very considered nature of its construction both create, and indeed demand, a kind of meditative viewing. The role of the audience remained a primary motivation being the painstaking planning and creation of a work such as Landscape unfolding, and through the artist’s own investigation of the role of sight and its relation to painting, looking, perceiving and importantly, feeling become of the viewer a self-conscious act

Kelly A. Gellatly