The Fourth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

HOWARDTAYLOR– DRIVEN TO ABSTRACTION The south-west corner of Western Australia is home to a relatively small but unique natural heritage - ecologically mature ('old growth') karri forests that have been growing and evolving for millions of years. Much of the original forest has been cleared since European occupation, and some of what remains is still subject to clearfell logging. Nevertheless high winter rainfall and thousands of hectares of rich gravel loam soils combine to create the ideal conditions to support these forest giants, and the area remains one of the purest regions in the world. For over three decades Howard Taylor could step outside his studio in the heart of the karri forest and observe the smooth silvery-grey giants (Eucalyptus diversicolor), the most ancient of them up to 80 metres in height, and the luminous, insinuating light that streamed through their upper storey. Working continuously, Taylor produced paintings, pastels, diagrams, three-dimensional maquettes, sketches and sculptures right up until the day in July 2001 when he slipped and fell, aged nearly 83, dying of complications following surgery not long after - an utterly ordinary, expeditious and peaceful elderly death. Taylor's studio was as neat as a pin. Photographs show impeccable palettes and brushes, tools for measuring, rolling, sifting and scraping hung in faultless symmetry, a space for everything, reflecting the orderly mind and stringent work ethic of a decent and solitary man. Above all, these studio shots depict the immediacy and intimacy with which Taylor occupied his chosen environment. A bank of windows is all that separated the artist from the great screen of the forest outside. He was obsessed w ith the refraction of light through trees and foliage, with the optical effects that are consequent upon the play of light on landscape, with the ways in w hich light transforms, penetrates, bounces off, reflects from, and is absorbed by surfaces. He recorded these perceptions through matter-of-fact drawings of places and his experiences of them, or through monumental sculptural recreations, or distilled to their essence in paintings by a reductive process that broke down the component parts of the world to rectangles, circles, shadows, hollows and their mirror images. This was not simply documentation. Howard Taylor was captivated by the physiology of sight, by the actual visual mechanisms through which forms and images are received, converted and interpreted. His rendering of these processes was a professional, practical, technical matter, achieved by the careful deployment of layered pigments and the precise shaping of materials. 104 APT2002 Sun figure 1989 Oil on canvas 90 x 120cm Collection: Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide Courtesy: Galerie Dusseldorf, Perth Photograph: John Austin By all accountsTaylor was interested in the essential all his life - in the intricate workings of machines, the particulars of flight, the characters of friends. He drew and sketched wherever he was, even in aWorld War Two prison camp. It was an analytical. almost scientific approach to understanding both the natural and the man-made: When I first started making things I had this background of aeroplane structure, you make a plane and you cover it, that sort of thing. But I also found, in looking at the fragments of trees around, that I became interested not only in the outer structure of a tree but the inner structure of the tree.The tree has always fascinated me as a unit, from the roots upwards through the trunk to the branches, through the forks to the outer flowering top.' Early in his career Taylor was clearly influenced by the tonal landscape experiments of British modernists such as Paul Nash and Graham Sutherland, but the trajectory of his interests and methods moved ever more perfectly towards abstraction as the appropriate means for orientation. Acutely sensitive to, but not overawed by, his surroundings, he carefully selected the perspectives, angles and glimpses that were of most value. He moved deliberately, every day, between the illustration of literal and abstract forms - from exacting studies of leaves and streams to the infinite subtlety of dissolving light sources. Howard Taylor Australia 1918-2001 Object on the ground 1989 Oil on canvas 90.7 x 120.2cm Collection: Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth Courtesy: Galerie Dusseldorf, Perth Photograph: John Austin