I was born in Portadown in 1963, at the beginning of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Religion was not theoretical where I grew up. It shaped neighbourhoods, determined friendships, and lines etched into identities. I watched adults defend beliefs that many of them struggled to articulate. That contradiction — between inherited certainty and lived confusion — has never left me.
I went to art school in Belfast in the early 1980s. But life intervened in the way it does: love, responsibility, the pull of a practical path. I spent the next three decades working in business and leadership, travelling to more than sixty-five countries, helping organisations build cultures worth belonging to. It was work I found genuinely meaningful. I was good at it.
But it did not quiet the visual language that had begun much earlier.
My return to painting was deliberate. I needed to rebuild before I could dismantle. Training at the Florence Academy of Art was a disciplined reset — classical technique relearned with full attention, so that any departure from it would be intentional rather than ignorant.
Now I live and paint in Nardò, in Puglia — at a distance from the landscape that formed me. That distance is useful. It allows examination without nostalgia, investigation without grievance.
My work moves between structure and disruption. I return repeatedly to symbols — crosses, circles, architectural spaces — not as religious statements but as questions. I am interested in why humanity constructs gods and myths, and how those systems of meaning shape identity, loyalty and division. The painters who have influenced me most — Gerhard Richter, Jenny Saville, Tracy Emin, Anselm Kiefer, and further back, Picasso and Van Gogh — all worked in that tension between form and fracture.
Many of these works emerge through trance and meditative drawing. Not from design, but from discovery. Each line a conversation between instinct and awareness.
I am not painting for recognition. I am painting to develop a language that feels honest to the life I have lived.
This chapter may be shorter than the last. It is no less important.
Tim Taylor 