All children draw with crayons or daub with watery colours at school or home and I was no different...the magic appearance of colour and shape on a pale surface that likens the fecund sky of the adventurous imagination beguiles most youngsters and spatial realism is irrelevant, children begin as Pollock and Rothko and graduate to caveman artistry and cartoons.I attended Art school for one year in 1975-6 and dropped out but took art up again from about 1980 when a short film about me was mooted. I painted with oil or goauche on paper in those days.

My themes were unconscious until about the mid-eighties when I had several successful art shows in Germany and sold a big portrait and showed later in libraries and in the early 2000's at the Stuckist shows. I had painted and sold portraits by then including a painted bust. My style is figurative, the themes are existential and national or about the history of these islands in particular, though my partial Celtic ancestry means some of my art is generic. I like to include wildlife as an integral part of works and strive to liken the appearance of light to the extent that I will use literal light for skies with luminous and fluorescent paints; this literalism expresses my passion for realism despite the notional content of any given picture and betrays my sculptural background. I like to use glazes and particularly love skies and strong contrasts of tone. Landscapes and vertiginous viewpoints feature in some images for metaphysical reasons I won't go into at present.

Thanks to a friends recent gift of charcoal, I've revived my collegiate love of this medium. My goal is to paint all the many unpainted pictures I've conceived from their sketches in old folders and to further explore my interest in perspective and the use of realistic and literal effects of light and substance. My technique varies but I will often paint a virtual sculptural monochrome underlay to a picture on top of a charcoal sketch from an idea and more or less glaze this but often I'll paint opaque occasionally impasto where I feel it's necessary. One thing I've seen in my work with the distance of recent evolution is that I often like to divide the picture space up into different pictures within pictures without it being too artificial or literally graphoid.

I like to work big and think pictures should be windows big enough to dream oneself through into the makers occult world and therefore into another world as if visual fiction itself were a kind of mystic experience and not merely a cosmetic decoration for the bare walls of rich and materialist dilletantes and as a supercurrency for speculators for artists whose works artificial value have been fed by the bribes of the same people to venal critics.

It is for that reason that I believe that all true artists should offer prints of their work because the content of any work is not in the original object but in the aesthetic meaning of the work and so for that reason photography has been a boon to Art just as cinematography has been a boon to the theatre although the same differences apply between the live organic craftwork in the gallery as between the theatre and kino.

Steven Paul Taylor