Harvey Taylor: Collected Works is at the Minories

And so I suppose for painters it’s a similar kind of thing.

That’s certainly been the case for one of Colchester’s most popular artists, Harvey Taylor, who is realising a little dream of his - to have a solo show at the prestigious Minories Art Gallery.

A sumptuous collection of startling portraits and vivid, almost abstract, landscapes, is certainly got the town talking including current president of the Colchester Arts Society, Simon Carter.

He says: “To understand these paintings you need to stand in front of them and experience the play between surface and image.

“In reproduction they seem to be merely photographic, but stand close to one of the recent large scale portrait heads and your eye explores dots, dashes, trails of paint, extraordinary shifts in colour, in fact a whole strange and tangled world of paint marks.

“Move only a few steps back from the surface and the hallucinatory lunar landscape of paint resolves itself into a startlingly real image. An image that, unlike the source photograph, has a palpable physical presence.”

Harvey is flattered to say the least.

He tells me: “It’s always rather wonderful when people come up to you and say something nice about your work, and it’s especially so when it’s someone like Simon.

“Over the years I’ve had little shows here and there around town but I would say this is the one I’ve been wanting to do for a while.”

Originally from Kent, and after studying at the Winchester School of Art, Harvey moved to Colchester in 1997 to work at the town’s Sixth Form College, where he is now Head of Art.

“I’ve always exhibited throughout my time at the college,” he adds. “I think it’s important for my students to see their tutor is actually a real life painter and exhibits work.”

Starting off with colourful abstract pieces, since 2008 Harvey has been concentrating on portraiture and even more recently moving into landscapes.

“It’s always been painting and always in oil,” he smiles. “The paintings on show here are from a period of about eight years. My daughter was born in 2004 and I suppose when you’re always sketching, you tend to sketch what’s in front of you, and that was my family.”

Harvey says he began to use photographs as his starting point with the intention of capturing a moment in time. Then, through a long labour-intensive way of working, from a large digital print which he grids up, he then only looks at a small part of the image at a time, building up the painting very gradually.

As Simon Carter goes on to say: “The results have a power and vividness that invest the almost throwaway moments of photography with haunting and profound physicality.”

“I’ve always seen them as just heads,” Harvey says, “rather than portraits. Just an image and when I first started, quite a lot were thrown away.

“I think with portrait if you do a bad job of it, people will know immediately. There’s no escaping.”

In asimilar vein to the way he’s approached his portraits, Harvey has chosen the landscapes close to his home for inspiration, including the woods close to Bourne Mill, and Donyland Woods on the way to Mersea.

“I’ve always been fascinated by trees,” he explains, “especially the texture of the trunk of a tree. I work in the same way with a photograph but it is quite interesting how some people have said they have an abstract feel to them, especially the seascapes, almost like I’m going back somehow to my earlier paintings.”

Harvey Taylor: Collected Works is at the Minories, High Street, until January 25. Entry is free and it’s open Mondays to Saturdays, 10am to 5pm.