Artist's Statement

My paintings are mainly the material manifestations that result from impressions of places, events or moments that simply affected me, caused me to stop and think or just happened to be interesting.

I am not too concerned with making accurate pictorial records, I have a camera for that, but if a particular place, building, event or object sets me thinking I do like to investigate further. Having found a subject of interest, I like to explore it in the visual terms of colour, composition and perspective. I find the aesthetic far more challenging than the reality.

Nowadays, all my paintings are acrylic on cotton canvas although I have painted on composite and wooden panels as well as sheet steel (car panels) in the past. I am not concerned with texture, that of woven canvas being the only acceptable surface, and even then only rarely visible through layers of primer, paint and varnish. As a painter and working in two dimensions, I feel any depiction of texture should come from the painting and not from additional three dimensional elements.

Whilst I admire the painterly qualities of traditional oil paintings - particularly the Newlyn School - I have no desire to emulate them. I work in thin glazes with a minimum of six layers being used to create each finished colour. The completed paintings are usually totally flat, an effect emphasised by four coats of satin matt acrylic varnish.

My palette is strictly limited to a single tube of each primary colour - red, blue and yellow - plus a black and two whites, six tubes in total. All the paints, except one of the whites, are semi transparent - necessary for the glaze colour building. The other white is opaque and used for final highlights.

The first painting I ever exhibited, a view towards the distant cranes over the Vange marshes (house and Airfix kit paints on hardboard, 36" x 24", unsold) won a half crown prize in a local competition, I was about fourteen at the time. Since then, my work has been exhibited in London and New York as well as East Anglia, the Midlands and the South West in GB and lately in France. Many of the paintings on this site are now in private collections in Europe, the USA and Australia.

I work mainly towards open exhibitions and competitions but welcome commissions.

I hope you enjoy viewing the paintings on this site as much as I enjoyed painting them.

Alan Taylor, Foulognes, 2010