The View From the Bunker, 1987

  — Cordelia Oliver ¹

In his latest painting John Taylor seems to me to achieve a quality that is rare in contemporary Scottish art, combining as they do a first impression of extreme beauty with a subsequent sense of disquiet. Disquiet, that is, not with the artist’s achievement, nor with his manner of painting, but at the message his work conveys.

These paintings by a Glasgow artist who, to my mind, has been all along seriously underestimated, reveal a notable change in style from what he was doing over the past few years. The high-key, fine-edged, sail-like shapes and the pale, silky, evocative colours which gave his earlier watercolours their lively, exhilarating clarity, calling up suggestions of sun and wind and speed whether on land or water, have all been discarded, maybe outgrown, and in their place a new sombre note has been not just touched and held, but developed in a very interesting way. Not that this recent work, most of it in watercolours, though on a more generous scale than is usual in that medium, has grown dull in colour. On the contrary, the informing hue is the kind of throbbing blue that touches a deep spring of emotion hard to explain in rational terms. The series had its source in a small coloured snapshot of a relative’s war grave in the desert, one of a regiment of identical headstones stretching to infinity in a waste of limitless sand under a baking sun: impersonal to a frightening degree.

The paintings take this seed of an idea and expand it in a variety of ways but always from the same basic source. The tiny colour print, sometimes populated by headstones and sometimes by small stark crosses, becomes the only aperture to daylight in a low, cavernous, fortified structure. This gives the series its original title, The View from the Bunker, the latter taking on the aspect of the charnel house — a source of security or a sanctuary gone terribly wrong.

Nothing in these paintings is realistic; nothing heavily overstated as so often happens in todays “painting with a message”. In fact, the very beauty of these works — for Taylor is a true colourist, now as always, and his sensitivity to the need to match craft with content is as acute as ever — has the effect of intensifying the sense one is given of lacrimae rerum, of pity as well as anger that humanity should be so determinedly heading, lemming-like, for its own destruction.

The message is symbolic but powerful. It is also pictorial, depending not on illustrative figuration but on elements that, as often with this artist, seem akin to music. The various forms assumed by the “bunker” and its changing relationships with the tiny “aperture” which remains, in each case, the focal point of the composition; the groupings of the skeletal figures in the sombre foreground space — oddly phosphorescent and more like stick insects that human remains — are all worth a close look. Indeed these paintings, more than most, reward time spent in looking: you find yourself increasingly interested in the “how” as well as the “why” — the means by which some of the effects are achieved. But no matter how intriguing the means and the effects, the work in its totality has the last word, always.