Painter, sculptor and teacher, Taylor was born in Hamilton, Victoria and moved with his family to South Australia before 1919, then to Western Australia in 1932. He was a scholarship winner to Perth Modern School where he exhibited an interest in cricket, athletics, drawing, photography, and aviation.
In 1937 he enlisted in the Royal Australian Air Force undertaking pilot training at Point Cook. He transferred to the Royal Air Force in July 1938, was shot down in May 1940 and spent the rest of the war as a P. O. W. It was while at Stalag Luft III c. 1943, that he met Guy Grey Smith. They both drew in the camp. Demobilised in Perth in February 1947, he returned to England, married Sheila Smith, and enrolled in painting at Birmingham School of Art.
They returned to Perth in January 1949 and settled at 'Aldersyde’ Bickley, where they raised three children. Bickley quickly became home to the entire extended Smith family who emigrated from the UK. Life in the Perth hills was the catalyst for Taylor’s fascination with the bush landscape and forest forms, which became central to his work. In 1960 he visited Britain and Europe for six months. He taught painting and drawing part-time at the Perth Technical College from 1951 to 1961 and at the School of Architecture and Planning at the Western Australian Institute of Technology from 1965 to 1969. In late 1967 he moved to Northcliffe in the heart of the tall-timber karri and jarrah forests of the south-west of Western Australia, where he produced some of his most powerful, impeccably crafted evocations of nature. The first work acquired by the Art Gallery of Western Australia in 1949 was a self-portrait.
He took many public commissions, including for the Fremantle Port Authority’s new overseas terminal building 1960-62, AMP, ANZ, and Curtin University. Many of these can now be viewed at Curtin and UWA.
Two retrospective exhibitions of his work were held at Art Gallery of Western Australia in 1985 and 2004. In 1986 he received the Inaugural Emeritus Award from the Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council. A monograph by Ted Snell was published in 1995. Retrospective exhibition catalogues were published by the Art Gallery of Western Australia in 1985 and MCA/AGWA in 2003. Daniel Thomas in the artist’s obituary stated that “ after the death of the very different and much more erratic Arthur Boyd, Howard Taylor was Australia’s best artist of any kind.”
- Writers:
- Dr Dorothy Erickson
Gary_Dufour
- Date written:
- 2010
- Last updated:
- 2023
