Paintings

Beauty and the Beast 2021

THE TWELVE APOSTLES: 2018 SUZANNE TARASIEVE GALERIE PARIS MARCH 10 – 31

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS: 2018 SUZANNE TARASIEVE GALERIE PARIS

THE FALLEN SERAPHIM: 2018 SUZANNE TARASIEVE GALERIE PARIS MARCH 10 – 31

The Seven Deadly Sins

To Lift Life Out of Death: I am confronting dark with dark. I am a painter of death, of life and theatre. My death heads hold no horror for they are symbols for Mockery and Suffering, which as the Devil points out, are bedfellows. They glow with humour as we near the fire of hell. They warn of the destruction of human values as we are in the midst of an abyss of right and wrong, good and evil, strength and weakness.

The Five Senses

Time Will Tell – The Five Senses
Exhibited 2016 at Galerie Frank Schlag, Essen

Deformed Portraits

Gold Leafed Miniatures on Wood

Forgotten

Forgotten was exhibited in Scot’s Church as part of the White Night festival in Melbourne, 2014. Accompanied by a multi-channel immersive soundscape composed by Russel Goldsmith, the artwork consists of 9 painted panels forming a 6m x 3m work when displayed.

Forgotten, reflects those remembered for their crimes or ideal talents of courage. There are hundreds, thousands and millions of the unknown, and forgotten. All who contributed to life and to our future, which lie in unmarked graves in silence and darkness and stare out from damp shadows as a grim reminder of what is our destiny.

The painting was created over a period of two years. During that time personal tragedy and family sickness was intense and often the question in my mind was “What Next?” or Who is Next?

It was with internal sadness and my father’s imminent death that I chose as a primary source of reference, the catacombs in Paris, dimly lit with over 200 year old skulls placed side by side touching those who they probably did not know in life. With so many human skulls crumbling into fragments and tourists singing “them bones, them bones, them dry bones” or scrawling with texta pens their initials encased in love hearts on the craniums, I drew the dead for endless hours and watched the living. As a result my perception of humanity has been greatly changed.

Forgotten is a tribute to my father Robert Geoffrey Taylor who would have understood most succinctly the contrasts between the rich and the poor; the acknowledged and the anonymous.

Further research has been undertaken at the Cemetery of the Capuchins – 5th Chapel in Rome, the Natural History Museum in Paris and ‘The fool’s Tower: The Federal Pathological – Anatomical Museum at the Old General Hospital in Vienna where I have been able to study the skeletal structures of infants and the unborn and the deformities of human skulls and skeletons.

50 Minature Paintings

Vaginal Skulls

Elongated

Hit List 2013

The Hit List compromises of 90 miniature paintings measuring 19 x 22 cm, 40 painted in 2012 and another 50 in 2013. The skull portraits depict the infamous of the decorated men and women throughout history who have epitomised humans as a race of unruly and instinctive barbaric, corrupt, demonic and hideous beings with greed and possession as an instinctive nature. Those who have abused the human rights of millions of innocent lives with their murderous and torturous schemes are to be remembered as monsters with their obscenities decorated for all to make judgement.

Hit List 2012

The Hit List compromises of 90 miniature paintings measuring 19 x 22 cm, 40 painted in 2012 and another 50 in 2013. The skull portraits depict the infamous of the decorated men and women throughout history who have epitomised humans as a race of unruly and instinctive barbaric, corrupt, demonic and hideous beings with greed and possession as an instinctive nature. Those who have abused the human rights of millions of innocent lives with their murderous and torturous schemes are to be remembered as monsters with their obscenities decorated for all to make judgement.

2020 Mary the Virgin’s Sister