artist statement
Wet, wild and rocky spaces; boundless seas and windswept skies – this is what I want to paint. For me, painting is the perfect antidote to a life where we often feel ‘cabined, cribbed, confined’, so I create paintings full of light and space.
The coast and moorlands are my natural subjects. Most paintings start with a walk, especially by the sea, with its wide skies, sweeping vistas, its endless horizons. Using charcoal, chalk, and oil sticks, I use plein air sketching as a basis for developing work back in the studio. Reference photos are usually abandoned quite early on in the painting process. Instead, using these sketches as prompts, I work intuitively, from memory, responding to the way the paint is performing on the paper in shape, colour and texture, trying to be free and energetic with mark making. The painting process takes on a life of its own.
Landscape painting also enables me to be a very quiet Eco-warrior. I am never going to glue myself to the M25, but I do hope my paintings convey a sense of how both beautiful and fragile the environment is, how much it gives us, how much we have to lose, and how we must all do our part in protecting it.
artist bio
Largely self-taught, Nuala Taylor came to painting fairly late in life. Embracing the freedom of retirement, she enrolled on a Foundation
Course in Plymouth, following this with the Studio Practice and Professional Landscape courses at Newlyn School of Art. She is currently is a member of Devon Artist’s Network and Drawn to the Valley, with whom she regularly exhibits. She is a founder member of the newly formed
Plymouth Artist’s Alliance. Her work can also be found at Home Frame Gallery Ltd. and Kaya Gallery on Plymouth’s Barbican.
artist gallery
