C.W. Taylor’s Textures

         I did a previous post on wood engravings by Charles William Taylor (U.K., 1878-1960) nine years ago, but today I saw a few more, and this time what really struck me about them was how everything in the image is built out of patterns of texture.  As I’m currently working on a landscape piece myself, I’m really studying how Taylor uses detailed patterns of strokes to make his layers of multiple trees, his water, his ground…

        First, however, is a small view of Colchester, and the light in this piece blows me away!  There's a contrast between dark shadows and light so brilliant that it washes out St. Nicholas’s spire in a sparkling shower.  And it’s all done with the texture of lines and crosshatching.  Look at the variety of patterns across the sky to see how Taylor has made a gradient of light, plus another pattern on the church, and contrasted with the yet different pattern on the building beside it.  (By the way, this lovely church was apparently demolished in 1955.)

        Somewhat more typical of Taylor’s work are the two pastoral landscapes, but this view of deer in Epping Forest also has amazing light.  Look how the deep shadow of the huge tree is an absence of grass and leaf litter, and how the light glints across the water and illuminates the outlines of the deer.  Look at all the different patterns of strokes - vertical, horizontal, diagonal, short, long, curved, straight - and how they define plants and differentiate the areas.  Instead of outlines around areas, these textures create the entire scene.

        The final piece looks like dusk is falling, and again Taylor’s mastery of light and shadow gives us everything we need to interpret the scene.  In my previous post I praised the sense of spaciousness Taylor brought to his landscapes, but with these examples the light brings a sense of intimacy, and a feeling that we have been offered a portal into a singular, enchanted time and place where the light happened to fall in just this extraordinary way, which Taylor has managed to capture in black ink on white paper.

[Pictures: Colchester, wood engraving by Charles William Taylor, (Image from Art UK);

March in Essex or Epping Forest (title given differently in two places), wood engraving by Taylor, 1920s-30s (Image from National Gallery of Art);

Wickford, wood engraving by Taylor, (Image from Art UK).]