3 Days in DC: A Postcard from the UK

Colin Taylor

April 9th - May 7th, 2022

Artist Statement

Back in the fall of 2021, and immediately following the restoration of flights between the UK and the US, I made a flash visit to DC to discuss options for a new project with Susan and the team at CFAC. We agreed on dates and I spent the rest of the visit sipping coffee and scribbling aimlessly in a notebook. It’s normal for me to be working on 10-20 paintings at any one time, all in various stages of development. I prefer to have them all around me and move from one to another. Some reach completion with relative speed and some take longer - years perhaps - and a few never make it that far.

For this project, that reliable conveyor belt had been paused, all unfinished work parked to one side of the studio and replaced by a set of anxious blank canvases. Progress on such a broad front felt painfully slow and for too long, there seemed little to show for the effort. On several occasions, I almost contacted Susan to suggest a postponement of the exhibition and to be honest I’m not sure why I didn’t follow through on that resolve.... Unannounced, one of the paintings just popped its head through the clouds and felt ‘finished’; the project was back on again! Although I would eventually come to re-work that same painting, it proved to be the catalyst that unlocked the problem.

For a painter, to see a body of your own work on a wall is an absolute privilege. It's only then can you see and fully understand where each image has come from and why it represents what it does in the context of the other work around it. All of the work in this exhibition has common ground in three days in DC.

Biography

Colin Taylor takes a new approach to landscapes and paints semi-abstract works, which express a personal emotional response to the natural world. According to Taylor, these paintings reflect a convergence of experiential impact where tensions and competing recollections and emotions are played out during development and in the presented image. Through the use of a combination of media (oil, pastel, and charcoal on canvas) and a rich palette, Taylor’s application of vigorous mark-making and swirling brush strokes redefines the physical space of a landscapes’ mass into the individual perception of a place.

As well as being a painter, Colin Taylor has nearly 30-years of experience climbing and working in the mountains in continental Europe, South American, and Asia. He was born in the East Midlands, England and studied art and drama at Trent Polytechnic, Nottingham in the mid-eighties. Shortly after, Taylor moved to Manchester to work for The Guardian newspaper, specializing in economic development and destination marketing.

Twenty years ago Taylor established a small climbing gym in a disused church in North West England and in addition to painting he continues to teach people to climb, often in the English Lake District. This location was the focus for a national nine-venue exhibition tour in 2008 and 2009, of Taylor's work, funded by the English Arts Council. In 2010, Taylor became the first artist-in-residence at Liverpool’s Anglican Cathedral. This culminated in a successful exhibition a year later and which subsequently transferred to Cologne cathedral in Germany. He has recently been invited to undertake a series of drawings at the National Cycling Centre in Manchester, England.