Harvey Taylor

Harvey Taylor is a painter based in Colchester, Essex. He took his foundation course at the Kent Institute of Art and Design in Canterbury and graduated in Fine Art, Painting, from Winchester School of Art in 1993. He moved to Colchester in 1997 to teach art at the Sixth Form College, where he is Head of Art and Design. He is a member of Contemporary British Painting, and his work is held in the Priseman Seabrook Collection.

His painting has moved from abstraction to exact, labour-intensive realism. Each work starts from a photograph, which he breaks down using a grid and then builds up from very close observation, so that a single painting can take up to two months to complete. He paints in oil on canvas for a couple of hours every day, and for longer at weekends and in the holidays, with a small fixed palette and a single size of round brush. Although the finished paintings read as photorealist, he does not class himself strictly as one, and describes the act of painting a small section at a time as loose and close to abstraction.

His subjects are drawn from what is around him. He began with large portrait heads of his family, starting with a series of his daughter, and his interest in painting hair led him on to the sea, to the woods near his studio and around Colchester, and to close-up studies of leaves and plants, which he treats as all-over compositions balancing realism with a hint of abstraction. He counts Gerhard Richter, Lucian Freud, Chuck Close, Malcolm Morley, Richard Estes and Vija Celmins among his influences.