Michael Taylor, Showers and other works

Biography: 

Michael Taylor is regarded as one of Australia’s best known abstract expressionist artists and one of Canberra’s leading contemporary artists, with a practice spanning over 60 years.

Formally educated at the East Sydney Technical College, now the National Art School, under Ralph Benson and Godfrey Miller, Taylor trave;led onto Europe in 1960 under the New South Wales Travelling Scholarship.¹ His exposure in European galleries to the signature gestural and emotive styles of de Kooning and Pollock influenced his intense and expressive style.

After a period of notoriety in Sydney in the 1960s, Taylor moved to the Canberra region in 1971 to take up a teaching position and has remained in the Monaro district since; moving to  Bredbo, Michelago, and finally Cooma in 1995.

This district has provided the subject matter for much of Taylor’s work, and he allows the oscillating natural scene around him to determine the colour, movement and general form of his landscapes and waterscapes. Taylor continues to live and work in the Monaro district and his work is exhibited in major collections across Australia including the Philip Morris collection, BHP Billiton and the RACV collection.

The artwork: 

Taylor was raised and spent much of his childhood in Woolwich, Lane Cove, and on the Parramatta Rivers. Even in later life in the Monaro district Taylor was never far from the coast, and in ‘Showers’ he uses broad, colour saturated strokes to give us a sense of liquidity: of water and its transience, of envelopment in the landscape, and of a childhood and life spent cocooned in nature. The reduced palette and heavily textured surface of ‘Showers’ is reminiscent of his earlier oil on canvas ‘Bluey in Nature’ (1968), where we

see Taylor playing with the idea of underpainting in a vibrant key colour and submerging it with rapid strokes of a different colour, thus creating the idea of movement and depth.

Bibliography:

Grishin, S., ‘Micheal Taylor: An Artist’s Profile’, Artist Profile. Issue 44, 2018

McCulloch, A., & McCulloch, S., The Enclyclopedia of Australian Art, Allen & Unwin, St Leonards, 1994

Further reading:

Raymond, G., Michael Taylor: a survey, 1963-2019, Canberra Museum and Gallery, Canberra, 2016