On a Thin Crust, 1996

  — Donny O’Rourke ¹

John Taylor is an important, as opposed to a self-important artist and the hype and tripe that have boosted some careers is entirely absent from the C.V. of this adept and committed colourist.

His life didn’t quite flash before my eyes when I saw his retrospective exhibition at The Third Eye Centre in 1982, but I got a powerful sense of a big talent deliberately confining itself to comparatively small spaces; and had an opportunity too, to see how that talent had evolved — attained its poise.

With greedy sophistication John has looked at the Abstract Expressionists, at twentieth-century European art and at his colourist predecessors in Scotland. He’s also looked around at the lie if this an other lands. And looked pretty deeply within too, without ever indulging that introspection.

I’m proud to have an oil of his from the early 60’s on my living room wall and I peer into the calm depths of his abstract prints nearly every day. It was a pleasure to make a file about him: it is a pleasure still to drink and think with him, to prowl the top floor of the East End building where he has his studio. There, or on another top floor (that of a West End tenement with views across the city), John moves with spare sure-footed grace. Just like he does in the mountains. But if he loves high places, he never looks down. His is a humane, profoundly egalitarian vision. These are pictures modest enough in scale to grace most walls. In his landscapes, when people turn up, they hold their own. John is in awe of, but never dwarfed by, nature.

It’s exactly 10 years since John and other pioneers went East to open up their gallowgate studio. What marvels have emerged from their atelier in that decade. You wouldn’t know it from the way he tackles a Munro, or from his brisk, alert city walks, but John Taylor has just turned 60.

He’s lived with the rigout and vigour, the passion and compassion, the brave exemplary seriousness of the tried and true artist for who seeing is being – and vice-versa. And yet he will tell you a joke, or sing you a song, or dollop you out a plateful of stew with just the same utterly unpretentious exhilaration and generosity.

Mentor, master printmaker, moving spirit in the studio and gallery developments of the last 30 years, John Taylor distills a lot of life and learning into these deceptively austere new paintings.

In some, a tree and a stick figure are rendered equal in their parched proximity. There’s a grim Beckettian grin behind a lot of the work. Taylor’s capering, copulating Beast is a revelation in more ways than one. Life in all its precariousness asserts itself very quietly. In a room that’s also a womb and a tomb, hostages sag into near abstraction – le baggage right enough, in that callously apt French phrase.

Taylor’s never painted like this. Taylor’s always painted like this. the most abstract of these new images do a little to imply a lot. Their angles dwindling to a smudged dead end it takes the viewer all the way back to Taylor’s Rothko inflected experiments of the late 50’s and the magnificent opening stretch of that influential Third Eye Show.

Back then, Taylor’s world was fragile: fragmentation always a hazard. It remains a risk. There is nothing glib about the artist’s serene insistence on trying to keep it together. However hopefully he travels, Taylor is no tourist with a sketch pad. The eerie, lambent vastness of the Australia John has discovered through his partner Jacki Parry, is in glowing contrast to the pale and interesting Scotland Taylor tramps and paints.

“Feminine” imagery has always been a crucial aspect of John Taylor’s iconography. It seems to me the refusal of this classically masculine craftsman, and outdoors man, to conform to macho Scottish type, is a vital attribute of this and indeed all his work.

The sneak preview I was granted was a privilege. This is a terrific show by an understated and underrated artist.