 Alan Taylor was born in 1942 in that part of England affectionately known as 'Metroland', a vast swathe of Middlesex, Berks and Bucks, GB which lost its rurality to the Metropolitan Railway in the late 19th Century. When 12, he moved with his parents to Vange, a little known village on the Thames estuary where, on the Essex Marshes, his first attempts at painting began.
After leaving school at sixteen, he began a gap "year" that included several jobs, part-time study and a spell in the Merchant Navy. It lasted five years. At 21 he went to Colchester School of Art followed by Stourbridge College of Art where he gained an Upper Second Class Honours Degree in Art & Design.
Living in Wivenhoe, and a member of the Wivenhoe Artists Group, he exhibited extensively in London and East Anglia before returning to full-time studies and gaining a Post Graduate Art Teachers Certificate from the University of Sussex. His first full-time Art post was back in Essex at a Comprehensive School where he taught for three years. He then moved to Devon, opting for part-time art teaching and part-time painting alongside his wife Jo's graphic design agency.
In a search for space and tranquillity, the couple moved to France in 1988 where he became a temporary Barn Converter and Amateur Builder. The painting did, however, continue with commissions, exhibitions, submissions to open competitions and personal research. A fairly recent - May 2006 - invitation to hold a solo show at the University of Caen resulted in a burst of creative activity and the end of further barn converting - the latter hastened by a broken hip after tripping over one of the two large and heavy dogs with whom he and Jo share their stone-floored living room. More recently, in August 2009, he held a solo exhibition at the Chateau de Balleroy. In December 2010 he was invited to participate in a group show at the chateau in Torigni - 'Salon d'Hiver' - where he showed three of his latest works. Sporadic forays into music and collectables have done nothing to quell his fascination for paint and colour and the painting, which began at the age of fourteen, continues to this day.
Married to Jo Taylor, a graphic designer and illustrator, they live in an 18th Century farmhouse near Bayeux, Calvados, France with the two large dogs and a lot of unfinished jobs.
STATEMENT: My paintings are mainly the material manifestations resulting from impressions of places, events or moments that simply affected me, caused me to stop and think or just happened to be interesting. The smaller, more recent paintings, are the result of a request for such objects for an online shop. These are mainly decorative pieces and are priced accordingly on my website - www.paintingstore.net. The larger pieces are mostly commissions or exhibition and competition pieces.
I am not too concerned with making accurate pictorial records but if a particular place, building, event, object, etc. sets me thinking I do like to investigate further. Having found a subject of interest, I like to explore it in visual terms, especially those of colour, composition and perspective. I find the aesthetic far more challenging than the reality.
Nowadays, most of the paintings are acrylic on cotton canvas although I have painted on composite and wooden panels as well as sheet steel (car panels) in the past. Whilst I admire the painterly qualities of traditional oil paintings - particularly the Newlyn School - I have no desire to emulate them. I usually work in thin transparent glazes, layering several coats of different colours to create the desired hue and leave little in the way of texture. Recently, however, I have returned to opaque colours and am enjoying a new field of exploration linked to HDR photography .
The first painting I ever exhibited, a view towards the distant cranes over the Vange marshes (house and Airfix kit paints on hardboard, 36" x 24", unsold) won a half - crown prize in a local competition, I was about fourteen at the time. Since then, my work has been exhibited in London and the USA as well as East Anglia, the Midlands and the South West in GB and lately in France. Many of the paintings on my website are now in private collections in Europe, the USA and Australia.
I work mainly towards open exhibitions and competitions but welcome commissions.
I hope you enjoy viewing the paintings on this site as much as I enjoyed painting them.
| | 12 artworks.
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Size: 24.00" x 24.00"
Price: £400.00
