Nick Taylor

A Welsh painter originally from the Gower Peninsula who currently shares his time between London and a 3-acre area of young woodland in Pembrokeshire. Having completed his BA at New College, Oxford, and his MA at The Courtauld Institute of Art, he spent 13 years researching and writing a non-fiction retelling of the last 5000 years (‘The Parable of His-Story’), published in the UK, America and Korea. He came to painting in 2012 and has already begun exhibiting widely in London, Kent and Wales.

His work draws on shamanistic ideas of symbolism and magic from an indigenous relationship with nature that is both childlike and vivid. He believes there are more ways of seeing the visible world than the purely photographic, and he depicts the dreamlike and overlooked realms, whether in the domestic or fantastic, with flat picture planes and wildly hedonistic colour palettes.

Largely self-taught, his paintings begin life as scribbled dictation from journeys and visions. These drawings he repeats until he feels the line has become fully embodied. He then moves to paint and allows the chorus of colours to take over. His paintings are informed by an apprehension of the darkness that lies within the world and his passionate commitment to the joy that transcends it.