Stephen Taylor Paintings

Eight paintings made over four years of a single field near West Bergholt. The countryside nearby was made famous by the painter John Constable, whose images became icons of rural England for two hundred years. I wanted to make fresh contact with this countryside as a modern painter in a contemporary landscape. 

By limiting myself to a single field I noticed many things I would never have seen had I spent my time travelling from one place to another. And opening my eyes and working in one place helped to ground me at a difficult time in my life. Attention and growing contentment went together. 

My basic method is to combine traditional wet on dry oil technique with digital colour-texture analysis. I try to make clear, harmonic images from small windows of time. Aesthetic unity comes from unities of light, place and execution; but observation also recognises facts of contemporary land use not all of which are comfortable. 

These pictures were first shown as New Paintings at King's College, Cambridge in 2002. There followed a show about a single tree from the same field, Oak, at Vertigo in Shoreditch, London. The two groups of paintings represent seven years visual exploration in one place. 

An account of this experience can be found in James Canton's The Oak Papers, 2020.

 ...the end of all our exploring
 Will be to arrive where we started
 And know the place for the first time.

T.S.Eliot