Howard Taylor : Paintings | Maquettes | Drawings
Galerie Düsseldorf : 1 September - 6 October 2002


  • EXTRACTS


Visual perception does not begin with an inverted retinal image composed of ‘an arrangment of paths of different colours variously shaded’ (pace Ruskin via Helmholtz) but rather with the direct picking up of invariant features from the very structure of light reflected and refracted from and through surfaces, edges and media that constitute our material world….(Howard Taylor 1988)
Howard Taylor Forest Figure by Ted Snell p 121 ref 37


  • Howard Riley, ‘Perception - Surface - Contrast: Recent Paintings by Howard Taylor’, Object - Space - Figure - Ground, Galerie Düsseldorf, Perth, 1988


… I think I’ve been approaching the landscape in a direct, almost naturalistic way with my spontaneous drawings and little paintings… You can also come in the other side and start off with a few geometric shapes, get some interest going in the way of movement, contradiction … and lead it towards landscape. To go back to the other one, you can also come in from a naturalistic way and refine it and reduce it and end up with an abstract work, but you can start with an abstract work….. (Howard Taylor 1988)


  • Howard Taylor Forest Figure by Ted Snell p 126 ref 41
    Gary Dufour, Exhibition Catalogue Howard Taylor: Sculptures - Paintings - Drawings 1942 - 1984 , Art Gallery of Western Australia pp 25-26


The simple geometric forms of horizontal line and circle embrace landscape in the most obvious sense; vibrating horizon, glowing sun, illusory light, while also engaging the realm of abstract sacred geometry. Line and circle embody ancient symbols of life force; finitude, the precipice of the horizon, organic fruition, the sun and the planets.


  • Howard Taylor Forest Figure by Ted Snell p 128 ref 44
    Anna Johnson ‘Howard Taylor’ Interior Architecture and Design Issue 23, 1990, p 172-177


…. The master’s remarkable sensitivity to scale, since even in their preliminary diminutive form the maquettes have a monumental quality, making them easy to envisage as enlargements … Simplified and analytical in design, most of Taylor’s tiny exercises stress both the structure and material perfection …


  • Howard Taylor Forest Figure by Ted Snell p 132 ref 51
    John Stringer, Howard Taylor Maquettes, Studies and Finished Works 1970’s - 1980’s
    Art Gallery of Western Australia 13 March - 26 April 1993

Taylor has never felt a need for a myth of the outback. For Taylor, the bush is neither the location of the possible birth of a white Australian identity, nor of a threatening, all pervasive curse, to which white Australia is bound by its guilty struggle for dominance over the land and its people. Rather, it is part of a material practice, giving rise to a unique perception and poetry. His art lacks the problems, the ideological baggage, which goes with the well known ‘Australians’ of the fifties

  • Howard Taylor Forest Figure by Ted Snell p 117/118 ref 33
    David Bromfield

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