Taylor on art
Art and artists by Ray Taylor
Articles about art and artists, with exhibition reviews and a roundup of everything arty on Vocal.
Latest articles
Alison Lapper at Bethlem Museum of the Mind
Looking up at Art
Looking up at art three: Lichtenstein
Looking up at art one: Constable
Looking up at art four: Marion Patrick
Looking up at art five: Frans Hals
Art themes, critique, exhibitions and events
Alison Lapper at Bethlem Museum of the Mind
Lady Helen Lands in London: Sargent and Fashion at Tate Britain
Art for our sake
A regular look at some of the fabulous work by other Vocal Art Community Creators.
About the author
Ray Taylor is an author, a private security professional (semi retired) and a volunteer visitor host at Tate Modern art museum in London. His role at Tate is to welcome visitors to the museum and to help them to enjoy their visit. Ray also sometimes gives 'Ten Minute Talks' during which he gives a personal presentation on a work at Tate Modern or the other Tate museum in London Tate Britain.
Ray is not an art expert, nor an artist, and has no qualifications in art history or other art-related subject. He speaks and writes from the heart, talking about what he sees in a work and suggesting ways of looking at art that help the viewer to get more from the experience. His series of articles Looking up at Art, suggest ways of seeing paintings and other artworks from a different perspective.
Read Ray's first Looking up at Art: Constable, The Cornfield
Taking a non-expert view on a work of art brings Ray closer to his reader and aims to bring greater inclusion to art appreciation. "You don't have to know anything about art in order to appreciate any work on display," says Ray. Everything you need to know about a work (well almost everything) is in the work itself. You just have to look for the clues.
If you like Ray's articles about art, you might also like some of his short stories inspired by art, or with an artistic theme
Short stories with an artistic theme
A homeless man escapes the hazards of the streets of London, finding himself wandering around the Tate Britain museum at Millbank, drawn to Tracey Emin, My Bed, on display there in 2016. What does he see in this controversial installation?
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The picture of Elizabeth Moody
A young student, fascinated by a Gainsborough portrait of a mother in the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London, meets a mysterious older woman who shares his interest. Where can it lead?
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A mysterious meeting in an unreal place. A story inspired by an art exhibition at the Tate Modern in London - Hilma af Klint & Piet Mondrian: Forms of Life. The story was written on an iPhone while surrounded by the inspirational abstract works of these two artists.
Hilma af Klint was a Swedish painter who was perhaps the first modern abstract artist. Dutch painter Piet Mondrian is best known for his abstract work, but began his career, as did af Klint, as a landscape painter.
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A young man visiting a Picasso exhibition muses on the meaning of one of the artist's self-portraits, and how it reflects his own life and a recent brief affair with an older man and mentor
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A security guard at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam uses his position to carry out an audacious robbery of the priceless painting
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A little verse, an acrostic. Distraction, obsession, oblivion and just a hint of Caput mortuum.
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No, not a Eurovision entry but a tricky murder mystery, a nod to Edgar Allan Poe, and a great excuse to include the following fabulous illustration by Harry Clark, public domain courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. From a frontispiece for Poe's Tales of Mystery and Imagination.
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About the Creator
Raymond G. Taylor
Author based in Kent, England. A writer of fictional short stories in a wide range of genres, he has been a non-fiction writer since the 1980s. Non-fiction subjects include art, history, technology, business, law, and the human condition.
Keep reading
More stories from Raymond G. Taylor and writers in Art and other communities.
Marion Patrick: Dog's Head
Marion Patrick is an artist you probably never heard of. Unless you have visited the Bethlem Museum of the Mind in Beckenham, a London suburb bordering Kent to the south east of England, you are unlikely to have seen her work. Patrick was a one-time resident at the Bethlem Royal Hospital, set in expansive leafy grounds just outside of the town.
By Raymond G. Taylor7 months ago in Art
Two Wrinkles In Time
It is pointless to run, my darling, because sixty seconds ago, I will kill you. My blade will have sliced reality open right in front of you. It will have first pierced it as it would a bed sheet left hanging to dry, flapping in the wind on a Sunday afternoon. But the metal will have drawn a line in the air that the ghostly tear will have followed. Then I, La Dyablès, machete firmly in hand, will have emerged from what your mind, at the time, could only interpret as the other side of here—whatever that means to you. I know. I have seen that look on the faces of countless unlucky… clients. You will not have been the first nor the last to try and reneg on a riches for soul contract only to present this visage to me when I come to collect.
By Lily Séjor4 days ago in Fiction
Comments (2)
Very interesting pieces you have shown us. I liked the black and white of the couple. Bet they had quite the story.
I’ll check out these events!