I wasn’t really at the point yet where I thought I could justify going to buy canvas yet. I went over and took pieces from next door, using those as surfaces for my work. They were throwing away all these boards and wood. In the beginning, there was construction going on next door to me, in spite of lockdown. I consider myself fortunate that the early part of the pandemic intersected with a time where I just found myself wanting to paint and draw. It was almost like going back to college, but I had to be my own tutor. Then, suddenly, approaching lockdown, I found myself back in Los Angeles, and I got Covid early on. When the band works, it’s very emotional and quite exhausting. Every weekend, I would be painting or drawing, but I was really engaged in the band. How did lockdown and Covid affect your practice?īefore lockdown, I was working in England the band was working in London. I can’t help it because, if you’ve been doing what I have, for as long as I have, you can’t help but think: Is it a product? Very quickly, I got out of the idea that my drawing was just a private experience. One of the things that happens is that people tend to come to you when you’re successful in one field, and ask, “Hey, would you like to do a clothing line?” or “I want you to be in my film.” You go from being a musician to being all sorts of things. Taking a journey with my band, like I have, is a privilege. The process was very sensual and physical. The first few things I produced I would call smudge art. It was as though I went underwater and haven’t come up since. He uses color to try to define emotional places.
I was talking to my therapist one day, and I said, “I need to visualize this and I need colors.” It’s not dissimilar from Carl Jung’s color theory. But initially I returned to drawing as a therapeutic strategy. From the stage design to the branding, logo designs, and merchandising, it’s quite a playground, if you are aesthetically minded. For us, sometimes, the design work that comes along with being in a band is almost as fun as the music-making. Nick Rhodes and I are both really visual. At that moment, I got caught up in the excitement of making music, as opposed to a career in any kind of art. I was at art school in Birmingham when I collided with punk rock and began Duran Duran. John Taylor: I’ve been aggressively painting for three years, but I had always been painting and drawing in my childhood. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.ĪRTnews: Have you been a painter as well as a musician and songwriter this whole time, and Duran Duran fans just never knew this side of you? Taylor sat down with ARTnews via Zoom from his home in Los Angeles to speak about his newfound artistic practice for the first time. Half of Taylor’s show has already sold, according to One Hour Ahead’s founder, the Aspen-based art adviser Sarah Calodney. “Not Broken, Unfinished” is one of two shows currently on view at the gallery, which opened in February. Presented by One Hour Ahead, the exhibition also marks the arrival of a new contemporary space in Aspen’s burgeoning downtown art scene. One of his Artforum covers, for example, depicts three subjects in a park, inspired by an old photograph of Taylor’s mother, with her friends, as a young woman.
#John taylor duran duran series
The exhibition features seven of his paintings-ranging from the abstract to the figurative-and a suite of “Cover Versions,” 12 inkjet on canvas prints, a series of mock art magazine covers that play with the notion of art world branding and their imprimatur. Throughout the pandemic, Taylor mined family pictures, personal memories, and his earlier formal art education to produce a new body of work. But this month, Taylor vaults onto a different artistic stage with his debut fine art exhibition “Not Broken, Unfinished.” As cofounder of the iconic new wave band Duran Duran, British musician and songwriter John Taylor is no stranger to the spotlight.
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