Denny Taylor Art

Paintings for a Peaceful Mind in Troubled Times

It seems these days we are all looking for solace, given the extreme times in which we live. For me, that has meant picking up my brushes again after a fifty-year break. I had intended to do this sooner. I still have the easel I used in the 1960s and my palette, and I’ve gathered paper and pencils, paints and canvas, almost every summer, but I have always been pulled back into a research study or a book I was writing. However, about a year ago at the beginning of the pandemic, I started drawing again and then began to paint.

My first attempts were feeble, and I struggled to find even a trace of the art student that I once was. I knew I needed to begin again and so I went in search of a teacher. I have written about the gifted artist and extraordinary teacher I found and the tribute to her is now on her website. You can access it here.

Studying art with a group of professional artists has been challenging. Our first month’s assignment was to paint two oil paintings based on two of John Singer Sargent's Venetian paintings. Needless to say, I bought four tomes on Sargent and studied his art as I was working on my own versions of his paintings. Both paintings are now here on my website.

Sargent was a friend of John Ruskin who, along with William Morris, founded the college that I attended in London as an undergraduate student, and where I studied "fine art" - i.e. oil painting. The reverence for the arts was palpable at Whitelands, now Roehampton University. I spent three days a week in a massive studio with incredible light. My paintings were 5 feet by 5 feet - huge blue nudes that were too big for their frames, and the trunks of dead trees, gnarled and contorted, in the colors of Earth.

It is not lost on me that people and the planet are the threads that have always been central to my research and writing as well as my art. What's extraordinary about this is that the young woman I was is now meeting the old woman I have become. You will find these threads in the paintings here on this website. I hope they bring you pleasure and a brief respite from the worries of these challenging times.

Please note, you can click on any of the paintings in this gallery to see the view the full painting.

Notes About the Paintings

A note about the fourth painting, “Boy on a Pebble Beach”. I was fascinated by the boy in the video that was the basis of this painting. His exploration of the beach was remarkable. He was teaching himself lessons he will later learn in physics, and ways of problem solving that he might later learn in mechanical engineering. All this was happening while he imagined the world, as children do, when they have the time to themselves and an environment that is conducive to play. To place him in the painting I took some photographs from the video and chose one, which I then reduced in size to fit on the middle section of the still photo that was one of my references. I hope this long explanation encourages everyone to watch children when they have an opportunity to explore their natural world and connect to the planet as they play.

A note about the seventh painting, “Children Playing Seen Through the Wall on the Second Floor of a Bombed Apartment Building”. This painting is the first of three-paintings based on photos I took when I was spending time with families in a region of armed conflict. My hope is that when they are presented together, they might become the basis of conversations on children and war and how we can protect them from such experiences.

The final note is about is about the painting, “Portrait of a Woman: A Character Study”. When we were presented with the digital image of this woman, I was reluctant to paint her. However, as I got to know the woman by focusing placement, proportion, color value and hue, I found myself thinking of Alice Hoffman and her stunning book The World that We Knew. The woman became Ava to me - the creature that the young women in the story made from clay to protect Lea, a young girl fleeing Germany in WWII. Here is one of the quotes that I was thinking of as I painted:

In the morning, the storm was over and the air was heavy and still. Ava went out into the yard. She began to walk. She thought about the moment when she opened her eyes, and the first time she felt sunlight on her skin, and of Paris when they got off the train, and the Seine at night, and the heron dancing in the garden. She was walking faster now. She was thinking for herself. The world, however cruel it might be, was too glorious to give up. She had no rights to it, she wasn’t human, but neither was the heron, and he had rights no human had, the rights of flight and sight. She stopped at the crest of the hill and turned to gaze back at the farm … she was strong now, uncontrollable, making her own decisions, defying what she had been told to do (p.311).

Paintings are complex semiotic constructions, often inexplicable, but to paint and write is a blessing and I am grateful for the possibilities of these re-imaginings of the world.