Demo Pop Art Diaries 4 "So like the lady with the mystic smile"

 The latest article in my series recording my discussions with Loz Taylor sees us talking briefly about appropriation and then about where Taylor’s works are currently on display.

So when is it Appropriate to Appropriate?

Picasso is “credited” with paraphrasing T.S Elliot when he said “Good artists borrow (or copy) Great artists steal“  I would like to think that this was said with some sense of irony as the quote itself was stolen, or borrowed, or copied! I feel what is lacking in these words is some perspective regarding the artist’s intent. Perhaps Picasso needed to reflect that the means sometimes justifies the end, i.e. when we steal as artists, it is to create still better art with which we  intend to repay our debt to society a thousand fold.

I personally prefer Peter Wolf’s take on the subject, he said “Of course, your ideas can be stolen... I used to think it was immoral; now I think of it as a compliment... Ultimately, an idea isn't yours; it's only your take on something“. Therefore  a photograph or still from a video can be by definition neither stolen or borrowed as only the person being photographed or filmed ever truly owns their own image.  

Today it has proved mutually convenient for Loz Taylor to meet me in my own home and as I greet him at the door I notice that he is carrying an image on canvas, he holds it up and I see that it is his image “Pester Me” a work of startling hues based around a photograph of one of Taylor’s favourite actresses Tilda Swinton. Taylor tells  me he is not aware of who the photographer is or was but that he loved the image, finding the smile comparable to that of the Mona Lisa, enigmatic, mysterious and with that eerie quality  some pictures have where the eyes seem to follow you wherever you move. Taylor is not seeking in any way to alter the photograph, purely to transform it into another work of art it is a thing of beauty in itself which he feels he wishes to help preserve, to build upon it’s integrity and keep it alive.  When so many images these days are used and then discarded as tomorrows fish wrappings. he feels that this image needs to be displayed and pondered over.  We then reflect that, its mystical nature aside, an image of Swinton is sure to have mass appeal as she has a larger than average group of followers having starred in many films such as “The Lion The Witch and the Wardrobe” whose appeal bridges the age divide.

Taylor added four short lines of personal poetry to the image, along with an alien landscape, the horizon of which passes directly through that “mystic smile”, which adds immeasurably to its enigmatic nature. 

It occurs to me at this point that it would be an interesting question to pose as to which has the greater artistic merit, the man who spends three months painting a beautiful portrait which can capture the likeness and to some extent the soul of the subject, or the perfect photograph.  It may “never lie” but does a photograph always tell the whole truth? The meaning behind a smile? Perhaps in the case of this image it is a gift to the artist that it does not!
 
“Pop Art looks out into the world. It doesn't look like a painting of something, it looks like the thing itself.” Roy Lichtenstein.

In “Perfect Score” Taylor takes as his subject a still image from a dance music video. The dance theme of the video led Taylor to make the link with ice skating so he embellished the image with the number 6.0, six times representing the perfect score in that sport. It represents several other things for Taylor however, the woman is provocatively dressed in an outfit which features black and white stripes (the  number six greyhound racing jacket of course)  and is extremely sexually attractive therefore suggesting the “carnal” reference to the word “score”. To a later example of this image Taylor added the words “Demo Pop” the first time he had applied these words to his work, therefore a milestone of considerable note.

Taylor feels that this work is also a “perfect” piece of Demo Pop Art being a strongly ideas based work with an equally strong aesthetic.  Indeed as a work with so many traceable themes it is as anyone who has read any of these articles or visited Taylor’s own blog the absolute definition of the genre.

Giving no Quarter in the Quadrant and Maxsimizing One’s Potential

“Perfect Score” currently hangs in a Wolverhampton bar called the ‘Quadrant Lounge’ along with several other pieces by Taylor, “Dogs of War”, “We Have to Take Everybody With Us” and “The Servant”. Taylor would like to take the opportunity to thank the bar owner, Min, for requesting that his works be displayed there and for keeping them in situ for over a year now.

“The Quadrant”                                                                 "Dogs  of war"

 

 

"The Servant"

                                                                               

Taylor also has some of his work on display at “café Maxsim” a Bistro, also in Wolverhampton . Taylor was just visiting one day when he asked if they needed any art work on the walls and as luck would have it…..

Maxsims

The pieces on display at Maxsims are:
                                                               “Girl Dreaming in Red”

                                                                         “Paris Flickers”

“Little Jesus” 

                                                                   "Painted Bottles"

                                                                                                                           
                                                                                                                  “Forever More”

And “Pure Chance”

 “Pure Chance” is an image Taylor created by feeding the greyhound racing jacket colours into a computer program that randomly spreads the rectangles of colour over the canvas ensuring that no two versions of the work will be the same - hence pure chance!  It is important to note here that the first of these pieces ever produced, known as C1 is in the possession of a private collector.


Taylor believes that Public display of his work is an important conduit in spreading the word of Demo Pop Art, but it is far from his intention that it be the only one. To this end earlier this month Taylor commissioned a pop art image to promote Demo Pop Art .  He hopes to create the maximum possible impact with the cartoon image across all available media, posters will be created, business cards printed and magazines approached in an effort to propagate the movement.

 

Taylor himself is in no way concerned that another artist has created this image, he simply considered it expedient to have someone else produce it. For Taylor it is sufficient to have conceived the idea of the two figures in the car discussing Demo Pop’s impending breakthrough. He is indeed very happy with the end result considering it “A job well done” It is of course not uncommon for artists to rely on the work of other artists to produce their original ideas, much as an architect produces the plans for a building that others will then construct. Taylor’s “Dogs of War” is another good example of this where we see the artist’s concept of the chess set produced by another artist skilled in 3D computer modelling.

I make no apology for this my fourth article being a little “Image Heavy”.  I feel a little like spreading the word myself today and what better way to do it than by “reproducing” some of Taylor’s works in an effort to engender further support of Demo Pop Art and to encourage you to view them “in situ” in all their glory. I wonder though, should I have used the term reproducing or copying or borrowing or…………………………

Demo Pop Art Diaries 3: Growing Art Organically, Papering Over the Cracks and finding Heaven in Symmetry:

We have talked at length about the way Loz Taylor uses the colours of greyhound racing jackets in his artwork and the reasons for so doing but as I chat with him today it becomes apparent that he wants to make sure anyone reading these articles realizes that although their use may be central to what he is producing now,  as an artist he has been generating work for many years showing great diversity in both it’s colour and meaning. Taylor is at present as he puts it simply  “drilling down as far as he can go” with the greyhound theme but as I have previously commented, whilst doing so the “machinery is always going”.

Emmanuel Radnitzky or as he was known to the wider world Man Ray once said:"I paint what cannot be photographed, that which comes from the imagination or from dreams, or from an unconscious drive. I photograph the things that I do not wish to paint, the things which already have an existence."

Taylor’s own delight in his choice of the digital medium as the conduit for his art is obvious and he talks with great enthusiasm of its flexibility allowing him to constantly review his works and if he feels it necessary improve or augment them.  He glances at one image which we will talk about later, “Kidnap” and expresses a desire to alter the position of the man’s foot for future editions. But aside from improving them he also has plans for future projects based upon those produced previously, he draws my attention to one of my personal favourites among his works “Man Ray Stops Bullets” he sees space for development in the image and talks of  laying down a backdrop showing each of the city’s in which the piece’s subject made his home, Paris and New York. Taylor is pleased that as his life moves forward and develops, so can his works and that the themes he has embarked upon as a young man can grow with him, after all in life some ideas will blossom and develop, proving worthy of our nurture and encouragement, whilst others are not quite what we at first thought and therefore not encouraged further.  I find it remarkable that this, the most modern and technological of art production methods is in fact probably the most organic.

Below we will take a look at just a few of Taylor’s works and the often unusual and unexpected inspirations behind them.

A Crazed Kidnapper Discovered In Sedgley Home!

I don’t wish to dwell here on the circumstances which lead most of us to gain intimate knowledge of our bathroom tiles! But I know this; most of us at the time would not be at a sufficient level of consciousness to enable us to turn the experience into two extraordinary and intriguing pieces of art.

When Taylor glanced down at an old broken tile at the flat he was redecorating with his partner he saw in the cracked glaze an almost perfectly complete pattern which he traced and reproduced to create his work “Kidnap“. The fact that its lines flow seamlessly from one to another owes everything to the way the glaze had been distorted. Taylor explains to me that the piece shows the night time act of a man kidnapping a woman and dragging her back to his cave for his own wicked purposes. Whilst the work can be viewed on one level as man arbitrarily taking what he wants, when he wants it, it also points perhaps to the longing for the unobtainable woman intimated by the covert nature of the night time kidnap (daylight would have made for a greater level of arrogance). It also points I feel to the primordial urges that remain present in all of us however inconvenient a truth they may be, manifested here in the Kidnapper’s choice of final destination.

In this and in most of his other work, Taylor uses no fixed colour code as he does with the greyhound jackets, preferring in some to use his judgement of what adds depth or meaning to the aesthetic, and in others to adopt a totally random approach, appealing as this does to his love of chance and its power to provide solutions.


After seeing the potential in the first tile Taylor looked around for others in a similar condition. He found one soon enough, this time with a beautiful set of parallel vertical lines resembling a majestic rock face. It took only minor modifications, the smallest alterations however and Taylor had created faces and figures and the lines became marching men, marching towards their ultimate fate and destiny, towards their date with the creator, they are like us all “Servants of Time.” But just as I was ruminating on the depressive nature of the image which resulted from this remarkable osmosis Taylor draws my attention to the presence of a “cheeky” ladies derriere at the rear of the procession, suggesting that although we may all be “doomed” nothing prevents us from having a damned good time enjoying life before our number is called!

Whilst employed in a youth training scheme a young Taylor used to visit the homes of ladies of a “certain age” to check on the safety of their homes.  He began to notice that at about the same time every weekday a certain expression of sadness would appear on the ladies’ faces, eyes would glaze over and even the occasional tear would journey down a well worn path.  The time of day was 11 am and the ladies in question would be listening to the now infamous “Our Tune” on Radio 2 presented by Simon Bates.  These real life stories of tragedy were getting through to the very hearts and souls of these women via the “Power of Radio”.

A startling and serendipitous correlation occurred to Taylor between Picasso’s ‘Weeping Woman’ and these weeping ladies who seemed to be experiencing an empathy with the stories they were hearing, perhaps a shared memory or a resonance with their own past tragedies or those of their loved ones. Taylor uses the rippling sound wave rings emanating from the radio to represent the power that radio has to reach out and change the emotions within us. 

Picasso said of  Dora Marr his muse and model for both Guernica and the weeping woman series "Dora, for me, was always a weeping woman....And it's important, because women are suffering machines."

I have a print of “Power of Radio” at home, it hangs proudly in my hall but I am even more proud to be able to say that I am the co-owner of the original of the next featured work:










 “Heaven in Symmetry”


At the age of 20 and very, very single Taylor, as is the wont of most young men of that age was daydreaming, fantasising about sex.  In this particular fantasy the man (I am not sure if the man in question is Taylor ) is standing and has his hand on the kneeling woman’s head whilst she “gives him pleasure.” I raise my eyebrows at this point when he tells me that his first urge was to record the image for posterity, but then I admonish my self and put aside my personal proclivities in deference to his purer more artistic tendencies!

In front of Taylor at the time lay only a pencil and ruler and a voice inside his head told him to record the image purely using straight lines.  So he drew straight lines to represent the man’s body and an arm protruding down at approximately 30 degrees to the top of the woman’s head.  Her mouth is open to accommodate her lover, who protrudes from his body at 90 degrees.  The reason for this graphic and rather geometrical description is to explain the impact of Taylor’s next thought process which was simply to mirror the entire image thus establishing in one action a variation on the male gender symbol “Mars” as the central piece of the work.

Later Taylor rounds off the eyes and creates an “Egyptian” appearance for the women. At the time Elizabeth Taylor’s (no relation) portrayal of Cleopatra still resonated strongly as a sexual image and Taylor recreates it here by using a simple straight line hair design and the stylised appearance of the eyelashes. The title of the image “Heaven in Symmetry” is at once self explanatory and evocative, primarily of course from the perspective of male fantasy, especially when we consider that simply mirroring the original image establishes the presence of two women in the scene. However I believe no one, male or female, could possibly draw any base or lascivious conclusion from “Heaven” indeed the viewer cannot fail to be captivated by the simple truth and beauty of the image and the loving way in which this act is obviously being performed  The woman’s embrace is intensely personal and her eyes are gently and lovingly closed suggesting the real presence of affection in her participation.

As our discussion around these earlier works draws to a close Loz checks his Twitter account as is his wont to do. He is currently in “discussions” with a Product Designer from London who is keen to offer Taylor advice on the production side of Demo Pop Art “industries”.  Taylor firmly believes his work “translates across all borders” and is keen to get it in front of the general public as we have previously seen.  To this end he is very interested in forge the necessary links with people who can make this happen, produce his designs to a high standard and market them appropriately. Taylor and the designer are at present discussing making this “transition” to the market place with the True Love rug, the clock and the other greyhound jacket inspired pieces as well as a new concept, a cylindrical lampshade utilising his recently created image “Positive Race Riot.”

Whilst our conversation is taking place and I am once again heading for the door and my waiting car, the June edition of “Man Ray Stops Bullets” (in blue) is coming off the printer destined for a collector in France.  I get a very real feeling for the first time of being somewhere where something very exciting is happening. I get to see a small part of the process I have touched on in both my previous articles, but more than that I realize that there is very much more going on both here and in the mind of my genial host. As if to emphasize this he calls out to me: “ Richard, remember to mention that the images are available from the Saatchi website as well as direct from me!”

I will focus on more of Taylor’s work in later pieces but my next article on Demo Pop Art will focus on the works that Taylor has on display both locally and a little further afield, but for now there is always the Saatchi website!
 
If anyone reading this blog feels that they have something to contribute to Demo Pop Art and help to carry the torch! Please feel free to email me at gmonkey.rg@googlemail.com.

Demonstrating Concepts for Design, The Democratization of Art and Paying LIP Service to the Past

Here is my latest post based upon my discussions with Loz taylor:

New Projects:
On Tuesday 10th June 2008, Loz (Lawrence)Taylor wrote on his blog:

“After completing two albums of digital images I think the time is right to start working on individual projects. Some of my ideas with be executed on photo/art paper via the computer - some in 3D - and some will take other forms“.

If  this was to be the germination of a new direction for Taylor then the seed itself had perhaps been planted  a few years before when he had one of his digital images “True Love” made into a high quality hand tufted rug,  seemingly a “one off” at the time but it exposed a willingness to explore his potential to diversify into the manufacture of  both practical and decorative items that  would showcase his art and it’s SACRED* values.

I am today once again in conversation with my friend Mr Loz Taylor and we are looking   briefly at what he is currently producing.  With Taylor, however this is a conversation which has two distinct levels, because as a “producer of Art” he does not merely focus on today and the new creation but also on the perpetuity of  what has been created before. For Taylor when he produces a work he does not simply move on consigning it to the dusts of memory or feigned embarrassment but, as we will see later due to his unique production methods he keeps it forever alive as a part of what is happening in the now.  

As to the new creations, over the second coffee of the morning Taylor tells me that in his work “Design is playing almost as important a role as art right now” and looking around his studio there are plenty of prototypes already on show that back up that claim, with even more in the design stage! However as I have previously hinted this is not a sudden hopeful leap of faith but something that has pervaded Taylor’s work for at least the last three years. After completing the “True Love” rug Taylor went on to design a set of “Demo Pop Art jewellery“ in October 2008 consisting of a ring, bracelet and earrings based on his beloved greyhound colours. Then in December 2008 he produced a set of 20 “playing” cards which were printed on one side with his image “We Found Diamonds” and on the reverse with the ace of diamonds, he even designed and produced the box!

If these earlier efforts saw Taylor operating pretty much within his comfort zone, his most recent excursions into design are much more ambitious both in their design and in their final intended application.

March 2011: Clock, Taylor designs a working clock, once again utilizing the six greyhound colours as the clock’s hour segments, how he did this with only six colours I will leave to the man himself to explain:

 “The main stumbling block was the numbers on the clock ranging from seven to eleven. One to six take care of themselves, as they are the colours of greyhound racing jackets (red = 1, blue = 2, white = 3, black = 4, orange = 5 and black/white stripes = 6). And the figure twelve, at the top of the clock, is simply two sets of b&w stripes overlapping each other – one vertical and one horizontal“.

“For the higher numbers, the simple solution would seem to be to add the colours for, say, five and two, to represent the number seven, and the numbers six and two, or five and three, to arrive at a representation of the number eight on the clock, but problems would surface when I wanted to represent the figures ten and eleven, as this would require the use of the ‘six’ stripes for each of the figures – thus displaying too many stripes on the left hand side of the clock“.

“Trying to keep as much symmetry in the design as possible, I mirrored the colours of the inner segments from the right hand side of the clock, so that the left hand side of the clock had those colours too. Then it was simply a matter of duplicating the middle and outer colours from the opposite side of the clock design to give me the required numbers“.

“For example, the number seven is represented by an inner orange segment (value=5) plus the middle and outer colour segments from the number 1 (5+1+1=7). The number eleven is represented by an inner red segment (value=1) plus the middle and outer segments from the number five (1+5+5=11). And so on“.

“The main colour code rule is that the segmented colours on the right hand side of the clock are not added together, but those segmented colours on the left hand side of the clock are“.

April 2011: Dogs of War Chess Set:
Taylor takes his original concept piece “Dogs of War” and finally adds the third dimension by creating the actual physical chess set .

Taylor says “ ‘Dogs Of War' is a chess set design based on the colours of jackets worn by racing greyhounds, which represent, to me, ambition, competition and risk. A lot of my digital works make use of this concept, including 'Young Blades Are Just so Glam' and 'The Audition’”

May 2011: Greyhound dice footstool:
Taylor inspires the creation of a practical piece where once again the physical adaptation mirrors exactly the concept, i.e. a cubed footstool is encased in fabric creating the effect of a huge dice in greyhound jacket colours:

“Belinda Longsden, of White Tree Gallery fame, has manufactured a fantastic 'greyhound dice' footstool for me. It's a big, bold design that would look great in a contemporary setting“.

All these developments are of course documented on Taylor’s blog http://stored-images.blogspot.com/

Taylor is keen to progress the idea of Demo Pop Art as a design forum and is very keen to foster associations with local Artisans to produce his ideas. As we have seen a local artist has just produced a new prototype for a footstool cover based on Taylor’s image of the “greyhound dice”. He looks out of his studio window with more than a passing interest in the view , one of his neighbours is the Wolverhampton Art College and they have made it known that they are looking to bring to manufacture designs by local artists. The ethos of the college being to engage businesses in the area to take these designs and produce the highest possible quality items for the marketplace.

There is an obvious drive to Taylor, the distinct impression of a man who feels he is constantly running against time and wants to stay a stride in front.  Clues to the reason for this drive lie perhaps in comments delivered within the first couple of minutes of our meeting  when he says “It is so hard to get your work into a mainstream gallery whatever the medium, it is no good me waiting for an invitation that may never come”.


Designer Outlets for Designer Artists
So how do you get your Art out there among the people? Firstly, it is clear Taylor does not believe that there is an upper echelon of Educated Art appreciators and an underclass of plebeians who will never “get” what is being offered up to them. He feels that people can come to art at any time or status in their lives and that when they do, “good” art a phrase he uses often should be available to them and at an affordable price! To explain whilst attempting to avoid sounding like an advertisement for quality soft furnishings, Taylor wants, next to approach high quality Interior design outlets such as that of Tom Dixon, (a British designer and manufacturer committed to innovation and the revival of the British Furniture Industry), as a channel for this purpose especially as a greater proportion of his work is leaning toward Art and design He furthermore believes that “A lot more serious Art will in future be sold through these outlets than will through galleries, thus giving Art and Design more of an equal status with other forms of commercial art and helping to cap the cost at which art is sold”

Taylor firmly believes that selling Art in this way will make it ultimately less elitist and more accessible which can, he says only be to the benefit of Both Art and the Artist alike.

Taylor stays tight Lipped On his distribution Techniques
Stored Images, Loz Taylor’s company produces what he terms Limited Issue Prints or LIPS whereby he produces one print of each of his works per month. He feels that structuring the release of his prints in this way helps “feed the democratization of Art” fitting perfectly between the exclusivity and finite nature of “limited edition” prints and the high, market saturating levels achieved by “open edition” prints.

Printing one “edition” of each image each month in this way Taylor believes he is keeping the ownership of the image exclusive enough to satisfy the discerning collector, whilst at the same time not making each print too readily available. In this then we have a situation whereby the Artist is setting the level of exclusivity, scope or range of production, keeping his printing run at this level Taylor feels he can retain control and still have the freedom to be creative and “drive” forward.

Another benefit that Taylor feels his system brings is that it will never disappoint future collectors who may come upon his work at a later time. In this event Taylor’s work would still be in production and still affordable, whereas a limited edition print would perhaps be in short supply or completely unavailable, it’s run having possibly been curtailed many years before.

Pride: in the name of love
Taylor grins at this point and I know he is about to reveal to me a slightly guilty pleasure. He tells me that one of the things that pleases him on a personal level with regard to LIPS is the way in which his method echoes “popular culture” you can after all have a march edition of one of his prints in the same way as you can buy the march edition  of  Hello Magazine.  It is as much as it could possibly be, of the moment, immediate and it ultimately perpetuates the contemporaneousness of the work itself. Always new and vibrant the timeline and the history of the piece is also preserved. Taylor is in this way I feel a little like a proud parent enjoying the progress of his progeny but not wanting it to stray too far from home.

Typically of someone enraptured by representing truth and beauty in the here and now, and gifting it to the wider world with the greatest expediency, Taylor balks at the idea of producing a piece of work he loves and seeing it’s development thwarted by being left to gather dust in the corner of an attic, or worse left to “rot” for all time in the basement of an Art Gallery.

At this point in our conversation Taylor’s mobile goes off and he receives an enquiry from one of his many followers on Twitter, it demands his immediate and continued attention and therefore brings to an end another of our very enjoyable sessions so I bid him goodbye and make my way out of his studio.

However on my journey home I find myself reflecting further on my friend’s methods and the careful reasoning behind them and it occurs to me that far more than simply a practical methodology they are a testament to the way Taylor thinks about how his Art fits into the world of both his current and potential audience.  In his plans he has considered no only the current art dealer and/or collector but also the person of possibly moderate means who either now or in years to come decides that they are looking for something aesthetically pleasing and affordable, whilst at the same time has something real to say. After all they do say, don’t they, that with maturity comes wisdom.



*SACRED Sex; Ambition, Competition, Risk, Endeavour and Death. These represent nothing less than Life itself for Taylor and are the themes that run through his impressive body of work to date. it is also the acronym which forms the basis for the Coat of arms of Stored Images, the company set up by Loz taylor to market and distribute his work.




 

Demo Pop Art : Truth and Beauty

An initial definition within an introduction to Loz Taylor.  

Andy Warhol said:  "I have a really loose interpretation of work, because I think that just being alive is so much work at something you don't always want to do. The machinery is always going. Even when you sleep".

This in essence could be used to outline the story of, to use the now common parlance one man’s “journey” to find his place in the world. Loz (Lawrence) Taylor however did not eventually settle for the normal world of convention and extruded conformity, but typically of the man, forged his own, one where pressure and stress give way to creation and passion a world in which he has given himself the freedom to evolve a new movement Demo Pop art.

It has been said , frequently and with some acerbity that many of today’s contemporary artists are merely copying Warhol, but could it instead be said that the great man himself simply quelled his creative output too soon, leaving others to fill in the blanks using the latest technology as he in his day had done.

Warhol had an all too brief creative ‘visual image’ period (1960 - 1968) before his sojourn into the world of films with the likes of Chelsea Girls and Sleep. What he concentrated on during that period though reflected the present day, the relentless surge of the consumer society using photography and screen print techniques that at the time were cutting edge.

Standing outside Loz Taylor’s studio, in Wolverhampton, I am struck that this my home town, the mother of Slade and Banks’s beer and the nation’s first traffic lights, seems an unlikely backdrop for the origins of a new art movement, but those thoughts quickly disperse when my subject arrives and I begin chatting with the gentleman in question, gathering information on a man I have known and respected both personally and professionally for over two years.
But today is different, today I am taking him out of his comfort zone talking about himself, the past and exploring what has led him to where he is now.

Loz Taylor has never been interested in reflecting on the past, feeling that this should in large part be left to the documentary makers to record via the media of film. He also feels that fine art should not be a commodity sold to the highest bidder going for the “price of a hospital wing” but should be produced for the sake of itself. Taylor believes above all else that his work must make “connections”, that is, be able to be traced back to something real.

SACRED
Sex; Ambition, Competition, Risk, Endeavour and Death. This is the acronym which forms the basis for the Coat of arms of Stored Images, the company set up by Loz Taylor to market and distribute his work and they are the themes that run through his impressive body of work to date.
Life to Taylor is played out in these terms, it begins with sex, becomes a competition and risks are taken as we endeavour to earn success, and of course it culminates in death for us all.
To properly understand his Art is to realize that everything in his work has to make sense of something, He uses a strong aesthetic to make connections, taking inspiration from almost anywhere in life and translating it using imagery that affirms life in all its complexities.
Racing and gambling are recurring themes in his work, for reasons I will go on to explain, but suffice to say here that they symbolise for Taylor the pace and competitive nature of life itself and the risks it entails.

Dogs of War: In this image the greyhound colours represent risk, gambling and ambition. The start of the race is likened by the artist to the beginning of life itself and the ongoing contest /race mirrors the continuing competition “you may be the last out of the traps but you can still finish strongly”.

The Audition: In this highly sexualised image a woman is auditioning for a dance part, scantily attired and posing provocatively, she is dancing for her life; competing, putting herself on the line, it displays both tragedy and hope in one image.

For Loz Taylor in art as in life we are driven to make the best connections we can to succeed. So what triggered this philosophy, exactly when did the epiphany occur?

Art or Racing?
In his teens Taylor found himself in that very quandary, he had left school with very little in the way of qualifications and gone through various “Youth Training Schemes” he loved art but did not in his words wish to become a “starving artist”.
Taylor explains: “I could never work out whether it was going to be art or racing. While all the time I was aware of being expected to ‘fit in’, ‘play the game’, ‘keep my nose clean’, and all the other words of advice I got that were really codes for conformity”.
His uncle Reg, an artist himself, told his young nephew he did not have to worry about pursuing a career in art then and there, but that he could always come back to it later in life.  However at this time Taylor had little interest in conventional painting, his thoughts were drawn more to the potential for the use of technology as an outlet for his talent.
It was a great disappointment to a young man of very little means in the early 1980’s  that it cost  upwards of £25 to typeset a piece of A4 paper and even if he could manage to create something on a computer screen it could not be satisfactorily reproduced, I site the dot matrix printer!
Therefore believing the door to the world of Art was closed to him Taylor turned to his other passions, greyhound racing and horse racing, which he had been bunking off school  to watch at Wolverhampton race tracks since the age of about 14.  It was a world of colour coded excitement which utterly seduced him, a vivid, vibrant vista of lush green grass, jockey silks and the coats of the animals themselves.

At the age of 16 Taylor was drawn in to the world of horse racing and had a brief spell working at stables, but any early ambitions to ride winners were soon put aside when he realized it was the gambling element that held the real draw for him.
Very early on Taylor had a knack for picking winners, so his racing pretty much paid for itself. As a young boy he remembers watching a film called ‘The Rocking Horse Winner’, which had a big influence on him at the time. Taylor: “I loved that film. I think it was based on a story by DH Lawrence. There is a great bit in it where the mother and son are talking about luck. "Oh!" said the boy. "Then what is luck, mother?" "It's what causes you to have money. If you're lucky you have money. That's why it's better to be born lucky than rich. If you're rich, you may lose your money. But if you're lucky, you will always get more money." Very Warholian!”

Towards the end of his teenage years, however, Taylor suffered a big setback. He began to suffer daily panic attacks that induced sweating, flushing and breathlessness at a time when no one really talked about such things.
This would lead to problems in these formative years of adulthood with both getting and keeping steady employment, sidelining any opportunity for a career in the normal sense of the word. It was during this time he had started down a path few careers advisory services would have condoned and started studying racing form and pedigree in earnest! At this stage, however, he made no formal connection between racing and gambling and his dormant passion for art.

At age 26 Taylor decided to finally get the education he had missed out on the first time around and enrolled at college, he did not of course do this “by halves” taking courses in Graphic Design, Photography and Life Drawing as well as Maths, English, plus Psychology A level. It was whilst at college that he met his lifelong partner Deb.

After college, aged approx 30 now, still having panic attacks and still with the semi-craving for the blessings of convention that is inherent in most young people, Taylor got a job circulating local newspapers. Unfortunately, it did not take his employers long to discover he was not a “team player” and they soon parted company.

The very next week Taylor picked up a bucket and sponge and started to clean windows part time. Taylor: “I suppose my position was pretty desperate at the time, me and my partner, Deb, had just rented a flat, and money was tight, but strangely I also felt a sense of freedom. Out on my rounds I had time to think. Plus, when I got home, I had the mental energy to get stuck into my twin obsessions of art and racing.”

With the coming of the internet Taylor found he could beam his speed ratings to all corners of the world, creating a business that began to pay him quite a respectable income. Over the next three years from age 37 to 40 with him and his partner both earning they bought their first house and he turned his attentions full time to racing, writing two books on pedigree handicapping along the way. Somewhat ironically, the onset of internet technology had enabled him to turn his back on “windows” forever.

Millenium Miracles: At the Races.com the Internet and Graphic Software
Reputations can spread like wildfire over the world wide web, and with Taylor now at the age of 40, an internet racing company called At The Races.com contacted him and offered him a well paid job creating his speed ratings exclusively for their website.
However every silver lining has a cloud attached to it, and part of the package was appearing on national TV. The panic attacks which, due to a lack of stress had abated in the last few years, loomed large on the horizon, so Taylor visited his GP, who diagnosed adrenaline overload and prescribed beta blockers. They worked fine and Taylor takes them to this day.

However it is fair to say that Taylor was not a natural TV personality, so it was mutually agreed that he continue his work for ATR remotely from home. We have seen previously how opportunity can come from adversity and when ATR went bust in 2004 far from moping around bemoaning his loss, Taylor concentrated his energies on his art, finding to his great pleasure that technology had finally started to catch up with ideas.
He produced several Lino Cuts at this time, two notable examples of which are ‘The Bar’ and ‘The Caretaker’ and started storing his work on computer, scanning in his sketches and photographs, and then manipulating them using the latest graphic software. 

In 2006 ATR was re-launched and immediately welcomed Taylor back to the fold. Providence, Predestination, Karma, are all terms I am sure my friend would hastily dismiss, however his return to ATR signalled the convergence of the two distinct tracks along which his life had henceforth travelled.  He began to produce Art which mirrored his passion for horses, greyhounds and gambling, the progress of which can be traced by visiting his ongoing blog: http://stored-images.blogspot.com/

The Big Bang Theory
Taylor likens the events following 2006 to a mini ‘big bang’ occurring in his head, leading to an ever increasing and expanding artistic consciousness. In his own words he is “only on level 1 thinking” and much more is to come. I for one do not doubt it this is an individual who is always thinking on the go, developing new themes “even when he sleeps” indeed his own production and promotion company “Stored Images” was so called due to his inability to store the quantity of ideas and images that were occupying his head even prior to his window cleaning days.

Art Taylor Made for the Future
The summer of 2009 saw over 300,000 people queuing to see Banksy’s Q exhibition at his hometown’s own Bristol Museum. Taylor points out to me that although he has coined this new movement of Demo Pop Art, there are artists already operating on it’s peripheries, indeed, he feels that Banksy himself is one such individual, an artist who presents a strong aesthetic whilst ensuring his work is always traceable to a specific origin and can be accessed by the “normal man”.
Banksy’s work is easily understood yet gives no quarter, makes no compromise. Taylor greatly admires Banksy’s work, believing that it incorporates the values of his own Demo Pop Art. More one liners than prose, more a pastiche than the true order of things not necessarily incorporating the “connections” Taylor feels are so vital to his own work. 

In Conclusion
So we now have an insight into Loz Taylor himself and what his Demo Pop Art stands for. How does it sit within today’s contemporary art scene? Well if the numbers turning up to the Q exhibition say anything at all, they say that people will queue for hours to see art that they can access.
Taylor’s work is, at its core, exactly that, indeed he feels his Demo Pop Art is a movement for representing and expounding the “truth” in life, producing images that the public can relate to and find meaning in. After all, Demo Pop Art, apart from meaning art that demonstrates traceable ideas and clear aesthetics, can also stand for the democratization of art.. So when you really think about it, in these days of public exasperation with much that the art scene has to offer, Taylor’s vision for its future seems almost irresistibly tempting.

Richard Gibbons © 2011.



   


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First of many!!

Hello and welcome to this my Blog concentrating on Demo Pop Art. Over the course of the next few months and hopefully years I will be  sharing through  regular discourse and general reportage,  my feelings and up to the minute commentary regarding Demo Pop Art a movement created and championed by an artist from Wolverhampton. loz Taylor.  Anyway enough of me for now keep watching over the next few days for the first entry proper which will be an introduction to Loz  himself.