Hidden Worlds: An Exhibition of Paintings by Jessica Taylor 

Timothy Langston Fine Art & Antiques Presents an Exhibition of Paintings by Jessica Taylor May 14 - 20th 2018 at Timothy Langston Fine Art & Antiques 20A Pimlico Road London www.timothylangston.com
I know I like painting when it has certain almost quite physical effects on me: so the colours or brushstrokes make me feel almost hungry or when my heart feels a little bit squeezed then I know I like it and there's definitely an aspect of discomfort in that kind of pleasure.
I have some favourite themes from myths: fire as something which transforms and people turning into animals to escape from
things, or people just being part animal and sometimes showing it and sometimes not.
So for me a painting is most satisfying when it teeters in this quite fragile place have not been quite fully determined - but there being enough undetermined free space for someone's mind and eye to imagine connections between kind of interesting edges and connections between planes and colours.
Painting involves a lot of looking. So going outside for me is about absorbing light and tone and colour and having a reservoir that can be given back to paintings so, you know, what goes in will come out!
I tend to paint mainly in acrylics. I like to use a lot of layers and I guess I paint fairly quickly. If I want to embed colour and tone a bit deeper into the painting - almost dig into it - I might use scrunched up bits of tinfoil or cling film or sponges. I really like the tin foil at the moment actually. I really like the kind of scratchiness of it.
I think this little being here - he's a sculpture by Peter Ball made of driftwood and bones and string and he seems to suffer very beautifully. There's something about what's invested in this piece that seems to bring God realm and the human realm into one. I love Douglass Portway's work. He did these mystical quite serene pieces which were still really earthy and somehow had room for messiness and scratchiness and humanity in them. I think he made that God / human duality into a really interesting complementary one. Christopher Bollas came up with a phrase which I find really helpful when thinking about art: "the unthought known". For me painting allows quite a natural exchange between things that are known that are unthought and things that can be thought about.