Catalogue: The Collected Paintings

The Sounding of the Seventh Angel

DAVID G. TAYLOR

The Collected Paintings 1956–2000

“. . . powerful and inventive.”

Kenneth Clark

“. . . important, significant work that ought to be preserved.”

Dennis Reid

__________

“A visionary creates, or dwells in, a higher spiritual world in which the objects of perception in this one have become transfigured and charged with a new intensity of symbolism.” Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry

THE VISIONARY SYMBOLIC

Peniel, 1960

183 x 127 cm

On the front of the canvas:

“Let me go for the day breaketh.” (Genesis 32:26)

The Sounding of the Seventh Angel, 1960

206 x 274.5 cm

On the back of the canvas:

Panel II of five-panel series
Pentaptych Based on the Vision of St. John

Sparagamos, The Fall, c. 1966

(dimensions and current location and status unknown)

The New Jerusalem – Building of the City, 1967

206 x 274 cm

On the back of the canvas:

Panel IV of five-panel series
Pentaptych Based on the Vision of St. John

Patmos (Fragment of a Pentaptych), c. 1967

183 x 124.5 cm

The Tenth Angel, 1968
(dimensions unknown, painting rolled)

Untitled companion piece to Patmos (Fragment of a Pentaptych), c. 1967
183 x 124.5 cm
(painting destroyed by artist)

The Bird and The City, c. 1969
(dimensions unknown, painting destroyed by artist)

Passage Over Eden, 1969

208.5 x 274.5 cm

On the back of the canvas:

Part I of Edenic Diptych

Waters of Sharon, Cedars of Lebanon,1970

208.5 x 274.5 cm

On the back of the canvas:

Panel II of Edenic Diptych

Silence, 1972

172 x 274 cm

(Collection of G.C. Ian and Joanne Burgess)

Sea Lilies, c. 1974

162.5 x 305 cm

I, Ezekiel by the River Chebar, c. 1972

(dimensions unknown, painting rolled)

Likeness of the Ox, c. 1973

266.7 x 304.8 cm

(Collection of Ellen Turkienicz)

Visitation, c. 1973

(dimensions unknown, painting rolled)

There Is No Constancy in Time: Reject It, c.1981

(dimensions unknown, painting rolled)

We Know Not Where We Stand, c. 1982
(dimensions unknown, painting destroyed by artist)

Wounded Creature Flying Home, c. 1984

127 x 213.5 cm

THE VISIONARY FIGURATIVE

Paddler Floating In Time, 1984

195.5 x 195.5 cm

On the front of the canvas:

Paddler Floating In Time,

How, On That Little Map,

May You Find Your Place?

Phantasmagoria, 1987

195.5 x 183 cm

On the front of the canvas:

“Father, Son, or Holy Ghost,

Which Upsetteth Satan Most?”

Feeble Minds Serenely Dwell,

In a Manichean Hell.

The Assumption That There Is A Horse, 1986

198 x 251.5 cm

On the front left side of the canvas:

As People Become More Sophisticated,

The Assumption That There Is A Horse

Will Grow Less And Less Common.

On the front right side of the canvas:

Anthropomorphism Rejected, Yet Unresolved

In Youth We Were Very Much Admired, 1986

155 x 193 cm

The Rule of Either/Or (Three Persons Within a Pyramid Shape),

1987

173 x 221 cm

On the front right side of the canvas:

Whoever asserts the inevitable category

Ends by asserting the impenetrable mystery,

And for him no solutions are possible.

Interval Between Ice Ages, 1988

211 x 216 cm

Bridge, Daiquiris, Humanism, Et Cetera, 1989

231 x 160 cm

And All My Joys Are Sorrow, 1989

117 x 173 cm

On the front of the canvas:

And I wondered why they had placed
A scarab on my heart; and they answered,

"Lest, when you are questioned, the heart

Cry out and condemn you."

Northern Primavera, 1990

137 x 173 cm

Wind-Sown, 1990

142 x 178 cm

Recapitulation, 1990

254 x 142cm

On the front of the canvas:

Eduardo Paolozzi, “the Minotaur,”

Searches for meaning within the

Detritus of the twentieth century.

The Defence of Wednesday, 1991

241.3 x 165 cm

On the front of the canvas:

If I ask a man
“What day is it?”
and he replies, “It is

Wednesday;” and should

I then say, “Surely it is not
Wednesday,” he may become angry
and point out to me, in his calendar,
that it is, in fact, Wednesday! Common
knowledge and his position have thus been
defended. But surely the point is that, in nature,
one day follows another and one day is no more
Wednesday than any other, except in a human context –
in our verum factum or made-up truth. Most of our lives are
so constructed, yet few of us are even dimly aware that this is so.

FRANCIS BACON TRIPTYCH:

The Universe of Francis Bacon, 1990

203 x 246.5 cm

On the front of the canvas:

And What Is The View From The Skull

But A View From The Skull?

The Universe of Francis Bacon II (The Outward Vision Leads Nowhere), 1991

251.5 x 180.5 cm

On the front of the canvas:

An empiricist is one who was born in a cage
But is unable to recognize his mental confinement

However much it may be pointed out to him.
In like spirit, Bacon speaks to us,
Buried to the neck in his world of blood and stone,

Breeding despair.

The Apotheosis of Francis Bacon, 1994

251.5 x 180.5 cm

On the front of the canvas:

Dante At The Venice Biennial –

Crowds Applauding
The Apotheosis Of Francis Bacon

The Seven Ages Of Man, 1991

198 x 254cm

On the front of the canvas:

The Way Up And The Way

Down Are The Same

HERAKLEITOS

THE VISIONARY LANDSCAPE

Lake Bigar, c. 1985

155 x 223.5 cm

Animoosh, 1986

114.5 x 404 cm

On the front of the canvas:

“That mass of flesh that circumscribes me,

Limits not my mind.That surface that

Tells the heavens it hath an end,

Cannot persuade me I have any.”

Th. Browne, 1635

Clamshell Lake, 1988

114.5 x 404 cm

On the front of the canvas:

Unravelling of golden sleeves,
Sunlight of a momentary, unexpected warmth;

Lowering eyelids and the distant trumpet

Scarcely heard; October and mortality:
Do not linger here.

Fire in the Wilderness, 1991

170 x 162.5 cm

On the front of the canvas:

Proverb

Fire on the mountain,

The burning bush,

Sceptic’s anathema:
The privacy of revelation;

Nu elck syn sin,

So each according to his choice,

And each according to his way.

Petawawa River, Late Fall, 1992

129.5 x 173 cm

Equinox, 1992

162.5 x 150 cm

On the front of the canvas:

Down the far river
At the season’s turn . . .

Skylight in Summer, 1992

114.5 x 180.5 cm

On the front of the canvas:

Moving Himalaya,
Or shadowy Alpine ridge
And valley – in a moment gone –

And there, perhaps,

Caught in a shaft of light
At vision’s reach,
Celestial Hannibal
With his army on the move.

Fragment of Mahler, 1992

129.5 x 203 cm

On the front of the canvas:

A purpose recollected –

To give some last instructions
To his servants – and that done,
John Donne composed his hands upon

His breast – with nothing further

In this world to do, but die.

Kiss of the spouse remembered,

The earth in ashes unto him;

And with the fading of the light,

The poet, at the last, prepared.

What brought this back?
Something in the swallows’ dusking flight?

Or fragment of Mahler;
Autumnal questioning –
The winnowing down to
Something that cannot, quite, be caught

Before the fading of the light?

Kiss of the spouse,
The earth in ashes unto him,

The poet, at the last, prepared.

Lady Evelyn Smooth Water River, 1992

129.5 x 221 cm

On the front of the canvas:

Ah let me not intrude
Where russet catchments of old leaves
Lie Garnered from the wind,
And amber rustlings, above the mirrored sky,

Question the dying season’s solitude.

Silences Joining, Crow River Study I, 1993

162.5 x 160 cm

On the front of the canvas:

Crow’s cry
Gull’s cry down
Crow River winding;

Bright sky

Dark sky,
Shifting light finding

Paddler with paddle calmed,

Under the turning sky –
Still, till their echoes die,

Silences joining.

The Dawn Stealer, Crow River Study II, 1993

139.5 x 185.5 cm

On the front of the canvas:

Eoraptor,
Thief of morning,

Hurrying footsteps

Down a dawning
Now some quarter
Billion years ago
Curious, small, two legged creature

Marked in every limb and feature

Mother of the dragon brood;

Stood she here
That distant morning
In the promise of that dawning

Fiercely sensing
In the brightening air
All the empty world before her,
None to tell her (or compel her) where

Or how - a thief of morning –
She must go?

Windows for B.R., 1993

223 x 109 cm

Rogues’ Gallery, 1996

127 x 162.5 cm

Additional Paintings

“What specifically occurs in one work of art may have its referential analogues in other works by the same artist - and this specificity, along with its analogues, may constitute the various faces (reciprocally revealing and hence referentially significant) of an underlying principle whose characteristic identity does not preclude variety.” - David G. Taylor, “Aesthetic Personality”

Taylor produced a number of smaller occasional works throughout his career: abstracts, landscapes, portraits and others of a style fitting closely to the manner of approach in the major, large- sized paintings.