Painter, sculptor and teacher. Taylor was born in Hamilton, Victoria and moved with his family to South Australia, then Western Australia in 1932. He was a scholarship winner to Perth Modern School where he exhibited an interest in drawing, photography, model making 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 1938, was captured in 1940 and spent the rest of the war in Stalag III prisoner of war camp where he met Guy Grey Smith. They both drew in the camp. He was demobilised in Perth in 1946. He returned to England and enrolled in post-war rehabilitation course at Birmingham College of Art.
He returned to Perth with his wife Sheila in 1949 and settled at Bickley, where he held private art classes in landscape painting. This locality was the catalyst for his 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.
He moved to live in Northcliffe in 1967. 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
- Date written:
- 2010
- Last updated:
- 2023
