Stephen Taylor Paintings

Photographic space is unlike our real experience of space, so I'm happy to manipulate digital photos to get closer to what I see. All round this pool I saw texture-planes that were not expressed by my 22mm lense, For example, the river bed combined several views across a wide angle that made it feel like a plane rolling steeply down towards me, but the photo tended to lift the front of the plane and send the eye back, creating a smoother less contradictory effect. So I made this sketch on the spot to set out the texture-planes as I saw them, and later combined and adjusted the photos towards the drawing, making a less photographic space, that I then used for the painting.

This method of combining multiple views in a unified image preserves a sense of nature's continuity, which is as much part of our experience as the separateness of different glances. Stephen Daedelus in Ulysees calls the continuity of vision an 'ineluctable modality', something we can't escape. A curious but somehow grounding idea.

Painting can engage the fragmentary nature of seeing and our sense of continuity at the same time.