Demo Pop Art Diaries 7 A Retrospective Part 2

Loz Taylor From the Sporting Life to the Good Life!

At the end of part one we saw Loz Taylor leave school, go to college and look around him for work that could sustain him in body and spirit. During one of his regular visits to what people of a certain age still call the “Labour Exchange” Taylor was offered the chance of an extra £10 per week if he were to do some form of work experience, pretty much of his choosing. So he informed the member of staff that he had always had an ambition to become a cartoonist and she acquiesced. So for a while Taylor became a cartoonist and indeed had several of his cartoons published in a very popular local paper called the Black Country Bugle under the pseudonym of Laurie.

Taylor’s college years were full of new and enlightening experiences, as he immersed himself in all things artistic, including graphic design, photography and working from life models. Of all the unclothed women he drew during that period, he particularly remembers an older lady called Viv, whose husband thoughtfully used to bring a heater into the studio to keep her warm. Perhaps this was an early sign of how important even then, the reality behind the art was to Taylor. 

One of Taylor’s earliest life drawings.

 

Taylor also experimented in graphic design, where he touched on advertising and also screen printing.  Taylor shows me an early collage work where he was asked to take a letter from the alphabet and “morph” it into something else entirely. He chose the letter ‘W’ and transformed it into a flame and match design. Taylor also created a work at this time that he called the ‘Three Fools’ in which he depicts three “Foolish” self characteristics i.e. the gambler, the drinker and the artist dreamer, with his head in the clouds. He made three planning stage drawings and then decided to finish the work in one of his favoured methods of the time - collage.

“Three Fools”

  
Taylor also tried his hand at self portraiture in a “graphic” style whilst at college.

The “career” as a cartoonist did not turn into a lasting one, but it did give him a fair amount of free time during that year to indulge himself in one of his great loves – horse racing.

He was though, still in turmoil as to which track his life would go down. Was it to be racing or art? He wanted desperately to do both but could see no future in either. So worked up did he get over this that on at least three occasions he ritually burned all the copies of the Sporting Life he had accumulated up to that time. It is certainly true to say that this quandary was a powerful “de- railing” factor in the young man’s life.  

Guilt is an extremely powerful emotion, especially for the young and impressionable, and can be felt for many reasons. One of the most emotive is when we feel we are not meeting the standards and criteria set for us by society.  A young Taylor felt that pursuing a form of gambling as a career was taboo, and that talking of becoming an artist would be dismissed as fanciful. It seems odd now that racing (and poker) enjoy a “sexy” more positive image, when back then, a young man, standing at a bus stop with a copy of the Sporting Life under his arm, would have been looked down upon and dismissed as work shy.

It almost goes without saying though that Taylor wore his badge of shame (The Sporting Life) with pride, although inwardly it also brought him a considerable amount of stress and anxiety. Indeed it is true to say that in these early days of his fascination with betting, racetracks and fast moving quadrupeds, even his new found partner Deb had her concerns.  However when she saw the strength and extent of his intent, and the deliberate and calculated form it took, she came to understand and accept it. 

The next step in Taylor’s merry- go- round post school existence was to take a Kalamazoo computing course. He knew from the off that he would never make a computer programmer, even though part of him realized that it was where the immediate future lay. What he did do however quite typically was make the racing obsession “fit” into what he was being trained to do at the time, inventing a racing game program using Cobalt that was a great hit with his colleagues. Taylor soon moved on though, little realizing what a great friend the computer, and in particular the internet, would be to him in the not too distant future.

Whilst still on the computer course Taylor managed to get a “proper” job as a circulation assistant with a local newspaper the Express and Star.  In Taylor’s own words he was a glorified paper boy, collecting the accounts from newsagents and delivering the papers for them to sell on.  The boss of the Express and Star loved horse racing, and the pair soon struck up a friendship, sadly however the friendship did not have sufficient substance to allow his boss to let Taylor “shadow” the papers racing correspondent!

Without the additional excitement that working closely with the sporting pages of the paper would have brought, Taylor found the job in his own words “a complete drudge”. Still it took the powers that be there, two years to discover that he was not a team player, and had no enthusiasm for the cause of paper delivery and account collection. So they demoted him to….just delivering papers! It is no surprise to report that Taylor took little time in leaving. Finding himself needing work again, to pay the bills on the flat he and Deb were renting, he decided to go self employed – as a window cleaner. 

Taylor: “It’s what the West Brom striker Jeff Astle did when he left football. And if it was good enough for that great man, then it was certainly good enough for me.”

Taylor was now in a kind of limbo, waiting for an opportunity to fulfil his artistic potential. Constantly processing images and ideas in his head, and storing them away for later use. This was to lead him, as I have mentioned before, to call his art business “Stored Images”. It was approximately 1993 now and halfway through his time cleaning windows.
Then, one day, Taylor bought and read the very first edition of a magazine called .NET.  He read the magazine from cover to cover, turned to his partner, Deb, and said, “This is the future!” She read the magazine too, and was soon in total agreement.

Taylor’s “Sacred” Coat of Arms and Raison D’Etre

In the early 1990’s e-mail was what a Yorkshire man received through his letterbox in the morning, with the world wide web more closely resembling two children with a piece of string and two baked bean tins! An exasperated Taylor would talk to friends in the pub about the possibilities f the internet to almost universal blank stares. However he found a kindred spirit at home in his partner, Deb, and they bought their first modem and acquired an e mail address, and Taylor soon found his way onto an early racing forum.

At about this time, Taylor wrote two books on ‘pedigree handicapping’ at the request of an editor of Raceform Update, for whom he was writing a weekly column. Taylor was also producing “speed ratings” for sale via the internet, which he could send out all over the world with very little cost and no boundaries.
It seemed that the computer and the web combined were making his career in racing easier and easier month by month. But frustratingly technology had still not caught up with Taylor’s artistic ideas, with the available print technology still falling far below the necessary standard required for what Taylor had in mind.

In the year 2000 Taylor got a job working exclusively for an internet racing company called At The Races (ATR.com) and he concentrated all of his efforts on making his new association work and continued to build his career.

In 2006 Taylor bought a small storage space in Dudley from “Storage King” to both store his art works and to create new pieces. He used this space for about eighteen months and then moved to Princess Alley in Wolverhampton, a real step up this, to a real art studio, where he met and socialised with other artists for the very first time. Included in their number was Lloyd Austins, who was later to create the 3D modelling of Taylor’s “Dogs of War”.

Eighteen months after his move to Princess Alley, he was on the move again, but was this time to settle in the studio he inhabits to this day, in Wulfruna Street, Wolverhampton.

The Makers Dozen Studio -

Wulfruna Street, Wolverhampton 

Now there was no conflict between racing and art. The technology was in place for Taylor to transfer his art from his head to the paper (or canvas) and he had made a success of a career in racing
This was also the time of the “mini big bang”, as Taylor likes to call it, an important moment when ideas about art and chance were allowed to explode, yet collide and interact with each other at will. 

My friend Loz Taylor would tell me, I know, that he is just starting out on the road to real success in “Business Art”, and I would not argue that. However, I think, if nothing else, these diaries are highlighting quite a long road already trod by this erstwhile “paper boy”. But I will leave the last word to a man who made a pretty good living by teaching others how to be successful, Mr Dale Carnegie. When he wrote this, he surely must have had Taylor in mind!

“Flaming enthusiasm, backed up by horse sense and persistence, are the qualities that most frequently make for success.”

Here are some of my personal favourites among Loz Taylor’s work:

Paris Flickers and Young Blades Are Just So Glam

Mann Ray Stops Bullets (Negative) and Crime Scene