Artist
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Stephen Taylor
studied Fine Art at Leeds University and was taught observational
painting by Paul Gopal Choudhury. He then worked on technique and
perception in John Constable as a post graduate at Essex University
and visiting student at Yale.
early
Following two years as Artist in Residence at
Felsted School, over the 80's Stephen turned from theory to
practice. He became for a while part time Head of painting at The
Open College of The Arts, and developed his skill and understanding
of how people use paintings in their daily lives by painting a wide
range of subjects to commission.
change
In the 1990's Stephen rethought his career and
began to focus on observed landscape. Between 1999 and 2007 he
worked exclusively in a single field near West Bergholt, North
Essex, producing two shows, at King's College Cambridge 2002 and
Vertigo, Shoreditch, London 2006.
present
Currently painting water in a small valley in
central Wales and on the Fens, just North of Ely.
For more see exhibitions
and events and
work in progress at www.stephentaylorpaintings.com
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a catalogue foreword
by Alain de Botton
Oak
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.
August 2006
For an appreciation of the work for this show see Alain's "Pleasures and Sorrows of Work",
chapter six.