Colin Taylor: Breathing Spaces

Cityscapes & Crowds

June 19th - July 20th, 2020

BREATHING SPACES: CITYSCAPES & CROWDS relives the experiences of travel through singular images from Morocco to London all the way back to Washington DC. Breathing Spaces explores the visual sensation of emotions in a location through the use of a combination of media, a rich palette, and Taylor’s application of vigorous mark-making and swirling brush strokes.

Watch Colin Taylor in Studio - Process and Inspiration

Artist Statement: I’ve been fascinated by ‘landscape’ for a long time. Why it looks the way it does? How it has evolved, been managed, used and occasionally abused? How does my personal experience of a spatial location, add significance and meaning and somehow redefine that space as ’place’? ….and can personal experience of landscape be transferred to a single visual image?  

For a long time, it seemed enough for me to say that painting … was ‘not an optical experience but an emotional one’. That claim still seems a reasonable one to make, but its relevance is diluted because it overlooks the continual shifting philosophical, physiological, technological, environmental and economic terrain upon which the artist stands today, and is incomplete. 

Conversely, it’s certainly not enough to simply appeal to the level of similarity between a picture and that which it represents. But it is possible to see other things and so when we stand before a landscape painting, we are not so naïve that we believe ourselves to be physically there and so any likeness or resemblance to the physical world is only one explanation of representation. Looking is one thing and seeing is another; the painter can never replicate the physical world but can only imply content as some thing represented. That tension we all work with, between ‘representation’ and its push-pull twin, ‘expression’ is representative of, but not, the landscape.

But if what pictures depicts is not really there, then we cannot see the things they are pictures of. Imagine that, in the early weeks of March 2020 you were out on the streets of Manchester making drawings of the city’s landscape, you wouldn’t have known then, what those notes, dabs and dash’s  might come to represent. Days later Manchester was in lockdown and silent. So perhaps a painting works when it represents different things at different times and nothing at other times?

Bio:

Though landscape is his subject matter, Taylor paints semi-abstract works which express a personal emotional response to the natural world: “I am interested in the possibility of, and processes involved in the transfer and transformation of personal and individual experience to a visual image”. 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 Taylors 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.