Stephen Taylor Paintings

Photographic space can be unlike our actual experience of space, so I'm happy to adjust digital photos to try to get a bit closer to what I saw. Here, there were texture-planes not expressed by my 22mm lense. For example, the river bed to the right looked like an independent plane of pebbles that tipped towards me, but my photo tended to pull the plane up at the front and push the eye back and over it. So I made this on the spot sketch to set out the pebbles and other texture-planes as I saw them on the spot as a reminder in the studio. Photos were then digitally adjusted to make a 'better' space which was was then used for the painting.

I prefer this way of 'combining views' to making a visible collage of separate photographs, for example. For although its quite easy to read and combine multiple rectangular photos in this way, the picture becomes a kind of demonstration piece. However nature does seem continuous -  its part part of our experience. Or to put it grandly like Stephen Daedelus in Ulysees, the continuity of vision is part of its 'ineluctable modality' -  something we can't escape.

I also like the idea of a connection between painting methods and how we think about visual processing by the eye and brain. We do not process 'complete' little pictures; images are built up from different 'channels' of information, many of which we can attend to separately. So by selecting the kind of information I want to bring out, and at the same time keeping a sense of the continuity of things, I have a parallel with this new understanding of vision.

Nature is not a series of snap shots but a continuous and many-layered storehouse that we interact with. A new old way of seeing.