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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