|
Michael Taylor is a figurative painter who has been producing his carefully and thoughtfully composed oil paintings more or less without a break for 35 years. While the majority of his output is non-commissioned work, portraits have always been an important element which when undertaken are given the same attention and commitment as the rest of his paintings.
In 1983 he won the National Portrait Gallery John Player Award (now the B.P.Award) and was subsequently commissioned by the gallery to paint Julien Bream as well as crime fiction writer Baroness P.D. James, in 1996, for the permanent collection. His portrait of composer Sir John Tavener (2002) won the R.P. Changing Faces prize and, in 2003, Taylor won the Holburne Contemporary Portrait Prize.
Other commissioned portraits include:-
▪ Sir Robert Bellinger, Lord Mayor of London
▪ Dr. John Roberts, Historian and Vice Chancellor of Southampton University
▪ Professor Charles Brink, Robinson College, Cambridge
▪ The Very Rev. Eric Heaton, Dean of Christchurch, Oxford
▪ Bishop Patrick, Bishop of Oxford
Michael has two children, and lives with his wife in an old Pub in the Dorset village of Child Okeford. His chosen way of working inevitably leads to a certain complexity of content that only reveals itself with time and familiarity. As Mary Rose Beaumont wrote in the catalogue introduction to his first one-man exhibition at Beaux Arts:
"Because he works slowly and concentrates on a single picture at a time, the paintings mark the passage of time within themselves and are a record of the infinitesimal changes in the artist himself who is, as are we all, subject to change and decay.
Moreover, the paintings do not record what is seen, but also what might be seen with the inner eye. They represent thoughts and feelings that are not visible...
Taylor's paintings are not for the ten second viewer. They are for the individual who is prepared to let them enter the bloodstream, who will return again and again to savour the slow release quality of these remarkable paintings." |
