Stephen Taylor Paintings

oil on canvas, 52ins x 30ins, 1320mm x 760mm.

Following a trickling sound I found a small overgrown gorge where obviously no one had ventured for years. I used a rope to get down. To steady myself I reached out for a fallen branch but grasped only an empty tube of wet moss - the wood inside had completely rotted away. An event from a dream. Looking up, splashing water seemed to spring out of the sky.

composition : photo distorted in Photo Shop
to match spatial emphases in studies

composition on canvas

A badger blender used to lay an even glaze. The glaze contains stand oil, a type of linseed oil that creates particularly flat, flexible layers.

For some reason the uncomfortableness and privacy of this spot brought scraps of poetry to mind. So when I got home I looked them up. I had picked out lines remembered from school:

Sweet are the uses of adversity,
Which, like a toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head;
And this our life, exempt from human haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.
I would not change it.
                            As You Like It, The Duke, II.i.

                                       .... clear rills
That for themselves a cooling covert make
'Gainst the hot season...
All lovely tales that we have heard or read:
An endless fountain of immortal drink,
Pouring unto us from the heaven's brink. 
                             Endymion, John Keats

I also knew of Henry Vaughn's poem The Waterfall  but not read it; so I looked that up too, and was struck by these lines:

Why, since each drop of thy quick store
Runs thither whence it flow'd before,
Should poor souls fear a shade or night,
Who came, sure, from a sea of light?

Driving home, I couldn't quite work out why this damp little gorge had been so moving, or why I'd thought of poetry... But on seeing the printed lines together I really did feel that I'd sensed something from each passage. And somehow the detail of the place made these feelings substantial to me. I had felt a particular book in a particular running brook. It was my job to paint it.