Howard
Taylor : Paintings | Maquettes | Drawings
Galerie Düsseldorf : 1 September - 6 October 2002
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
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Howard Riley, Perception - Surface - Contrast: Recent Paintings
by Howard Taylor, Object - Space - Figure - Ground, Galerie
Düsseldorf, Perth, 1988
I think Ive 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)
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.
. The masters 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 Taylors tiny exercises stress
both the structure and material perfection
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
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