The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

1.

Stephen Taylor has spent much of the last two years in a wheat field in East Anglia repeatedly painting the same oak tree under a range of different of lights and weathers. He was out in two feet of snow last winter and this summer, at three in the morning, he lay on his back tracing the upper branches of the tree by the light of a solstice moon.

On a typical summer’s day, this unknown middle-aged artist is loading his car, ready for work, by seven in the morning. He lives in a dilapidated terraced house in the centre of Colchester, a town of one hundred thousand inhabitants, ninety kilometres north-east of London. His sagging, dented Citroën has reached a stage of decrepitude so advanced that it seems set for immortality. Across the back seats, strewn as if the vehicle had just been involved in a head-on collision, are canvases, easels, insect repellant, old sandwiches, a bag of brushes and a box of paints. There is also a suitcase jammed with scarves and jumpers, for outdoor painters tend to know the story of how Cézanne caught a chill one morning while painting a sparrow in a field in Aix-en-Provence – and was dead by sunset.

The road out of Colchester leads Taylor past a fractured landscape of warehouses and building sites. The commuter traffic is impatient and quick to anger. Near the train station, an old crab-apple tree stands in the middle of a roundabout, an unlikely survivor of the roadworks which made off with its fellows. Eight miles west of town, Taylor turns off the main road and starts down a little-used farm track. Waist-high stalks bow and disappear beneath the front bumper, like hair through a comb. Taylor finds his usual parking place and, fifteen metres from the tree, arranges his base camp in a clearing in the wheat.

The oak is estimated to be 250 years old. It was therefore already home to skylarks and starlings when Jane Austen was a baby and George III the ruler of the American colonies.

2.

To those familiar with paintings as polished, fully realised objects hanging in museums, it comes as a surprise to see the sheer mass of bulky, soiled equipment required for their creation. Taylor owns more than a hundred species of brushes including hog’s hair ones with filbert tips, sable points, round heads, shaving brushes, soft Japanese watercolour brushes and handmade badger blenders.

Next to these, Taylor sets down a no less heterogeneous assortment of gnarled tubes of paint, which together make up his visual alphabet. It is hard to believe that these ingredients could be combined to create meticulously detailed skylarks, spring leaves and lichen-coated branches. Pastes which in lesser hands would end up as mud will be tamed and recast to take on the guise of facets of the earth and sky.

In time, there will be no reminders of the fleshly origins of painting. The dark magenta stains on the artist’s fingers, the red speckles on his shoes, the glutinous green and blue smears on his palettes – all of these will be dissolved away, leaving the paintings to stand by themselves, as silent about their material parentage as a newly laid-out country road. To watch Taylor at work is to be reminded that even Perugino and Mantegna, usually known only as disembodied names in histories of European art, were once corporeal beings who dabbed paint onto bits of wood using sticks tipped with pig’s bristles, and at the end of the day returned home from their studios stained by the tints they had used to fashion the cottony clouds which float serenely above the heads of their infant Christs.

3.

Taylor sets to work on the lower-left-hand branches of a tree study he began a week ago. Between thumb and forefinger, he manipulates a sable brush, dipping its tip into a tear of magenta and raw sienna oil which will later, seen from a distance, coagulate into a perfect implication of a leaf in the noonday sun. Two hawks fly high above the field, on the lookout for rabbits stirring in the wheat.

The daughters of the local bourgeoisie, who often ride their horses down the lane which runs alongside the tree, tend to glance away from this unkempt artist as he moves around at his easel, though by way of compensation, there is always a sympathetic nod from a tramp who wanders the area, his trousers held up by a length of rope, shouting passionate obscenities against a government which dissolved a decade before.

Taylor first came across the tree five years ago, when he was out for a walk in the countryside following the death of his girlfriend. After stopping to rest against the fence which runs beside it, he was overpowered by a feeling that something in this very ordinary tree was crying out to be set down in paint, and that if he could only do it justice, his life would in indistinct ways be redeemed, and its hardships sublimated.

It is not unusual for Taylor to forget to eat while he is working. At these times, he is nothing but a mind and a hand moving across a square of canvas. Past and future disappear as he is consumed by the tasks of mixing paint, checking its colour against the world and settling it into its assigned place in a grid. An insect may crawl unmolested across his hand or take up temporary residence on his ear or neck. There is no more ten in the morning, no more July, but only the tree before him, the clouds above, the sun slowly traversing the sky and the small gap between one branch and another, whose resolution and completion will constitute a whole day’s work.

The tree from a glider at 1,000 feet

Taylor is tormented by a sense of responsibility for the appearance of things. He can be kept awake at night by what he sees as an injustice in the colour of wheat or an uneasy fault line between two patches of sky. His work frequently puts him in a tense, silent mood, in which he can be seen walking the streets of Colchester. His concerns are difficult for others to feel sympathetic about, however, for few of us are primed to feel generous towards a misery caused by a pigment incorrectly applied across an unremunerative piece of stretched cloth.

His progress is slow: he can spend five months on a canvas measuring twenty centimetres square. But his painstaking approach is in truth the legacy of over twenty years of research. It took him three years just to determine how best to render the movement of wheat in a gust of wind, and even longer to become proficient in colour. Whereas a decade ago he would have used at least ten shades of green to paint the tree’s foliage, he now relies on only three, and yet his leaves appear all the more luxuriantly dense and mobile for this reduction in complexity.

Taylor found his teachers on museum walls. The great dead masters are generous instructors: it is not uncommon for one of them to impart a piece of technical wisdom to a pupil born five centuries after him. Works which ordinary gallery visitors might regard as inert entertainment are, for artists, living prescriptions.

It was Titian’s Man with a Quilted Sleeve (1510) that taught Taylor how to paint leaves. It was not even the whole painting that engaged his attention during the hundred hours he spent in front of it in the National Gallery in London. He had no particular interest in the man’s face; what detained him was the blue sleeve and, more specifically, the way Titian succeeded in suggesting an expanse of fabric at once weighty and airy, despite working with a minimum of colours. Titian taught Taylor about economy, about how to imply things rather than explain them. He taught him that a painting of a tree should be the story not of each individual leaf but of the dynamic mass of the whole. There are only five blues in Titian’s sleeve; the genius lies in the careful choice and judicious combination of these hues, so that while the lower folds appear flattened and empty, the upper ones manifest the presence of an arm so clearly that a viewer might almost think it possible to reach into the painting and grasp its bulk.

4.

Taylor defines Titian’s place in the pantheon with the greatest compliment he knows: the artist was able to look at a piece of clothing as if he had never seen its like before.

Precise delineation is central to Taylor’s conception of painting. The sky is never simply blue, he explains. In the region nearest the sun, at the top of a canvas, he uses ultramarine, to which he adds increasing amounts of turquoise as his brush descends towards the earth. At 25 degrees, he mixes in small amounts of nickel yellow and magenta until, at the horizon, there is nothing left but a soft white haze.

Taylor accepts the restricted nature of the challenge he has set himself. An essay he wrote to accompany an exhibition of half a decade of painting opened with the following declaration: ‘For most of my adult life, I have worked on certain observations of the physical world. In particular, for the last ten years, I have been interested in changes of light as you look towards and away from the sun’ – a summation of ambition finely poised between self-deprecation and megalomania.

The year before, for two weeks of a wet January, Taylor stretched himself out on waterproof covers at the foot of his oak tree and sketched studies of leaves, sticks, grasses, worms and insects. Some 180,000 leaves fell from the oak that winter, destined to be eaten, at an imperceptibly leisurely rate, by hundreds of millions of bacteria living around its roots. Taylor painted the grey-brown habitat of springtails, rotifers, eelworms, earthworms, millipedes, false scorpions, slugs and snails. He undertook a close study of lichen overspreading a bit of bark, having been drawn to the fungus after learning of its status as an epiphyte – that is, an organism which grows upon something else without feeding on it. He observed a stalk of goosegrass, a tall green plant known to naturalists as Galium aparine, whose leaves concluded in minuscule hooks coated in cuckoo-spit, a viscous secretion produced by froghopper nymphs to protect themselves against predators while they suck their host’s sap.

The specialised vocabulary of biology is dear to Taylor. It is a sign of attention and of a community ready to honour details. Technical terms do not in his eyes insulate us from the natural world, they merely help us to cleave with greater fidelity to its most precious and discrete phenomena.

5.

It is the close of an exceptionally hot summer day. Taylor is outside in his field, preparing to work through the night.

The moon is rising above the nearby village of West Bergholt, a view which he spent four and a half years painting before shifting to the richer possibilities offered by a single tree. He is still surprised by how hard it is to identify the precise moment when the moon makes its appearance in the sky. At first, it hides amidst the lights of faraway towns, and from there moves surreptitiously into position – a small but powerful dot, beginning now to blaze – just above a distant wood. As it ascends, it undergoes a steady chromatic transformation, starting off a purple-orange, then ten minutes later losing its magenta flush, and at last, against an increasingly black sky, bleaching from yellow to a dazzling pure white.

Slowly, Taylor’s eyes adjust to the gloom. The preponderance of green in the night sky makes him feel as if he were inside an aquarium. A lamp switches on in a house a few miles away. A star, orange-fuchsia in colour, appears on the horizon as the trees below sway in the breeze, like clusters of coral in an underwater current. Taylor turns on a pocket-sized torch which he has hung around his neck, throwing light onto his box of paints and his easel.

As the night wears on, the human world gradually recedes, leaving Taylor alone with insects and the play of moonlight on wheat. He sees his art as born out of, and hoping to inspire, reverence for all that is unlike us and exceeds us. He never wanted to paint the work of people, their factories, streets, or electricity circuit boards. His attention was drawn to that which, because we did not build it, we must make a particular effort of empathy and imagination to understand, to a natural environment that is uniquely unpredictable, for it is literally unforeseen. His devoted look at a tree is an attempt to push the self aside and recognise all that is other and beyond us – starting with this ancient-looking hulk in the gloom, with its erratic branches, thousands of stiff little leaves and remarkable lack of any direct connection to the human drama.

6.

Studio may be too grand a word to describe a small annex to the bedroom on the first floor of Taylor’s house covered with studies of the oak tree at various times of day and year.

Despite its diminutive size, it is a particularly pleasant room. There are few jobs in which years’ worth of labour can be viewed in a quick scan of four walls and even fewer opportunities granted to us to gather all our intelligence and sensitivity in a single place. Our exertions generally find no enduring physical correlatives. We are diluted in gigantic intangible collective projects, which leave us wondering what we did last year and, more profoundly, where we have gone and quite what we have amounted to. We confront our lost energies in the pathos of the retirement party.

How different everything is for the craftsman who transforms a part of the world with his own hands, who can see his work as emanating from his being and can step back at the end of a day or lifetime and point to an object – whether a square of canvas, a chair or a clay jug – and see it as a stable repository of his skills and an accurate record of his years, and hence feel collected together in one place, rather than strung out across projects which long ago evaporated into nothing one could hold or see.

Taylor knows that he is creating things which exceed him. He has a chance to get himself right on the canvas in a way that he cannot in the run of his ordinary life. He is not always the perceptive, patient observer. His social self is beset by frailties. He is nervous around others and apt to mask his anxieties behind an exaggerated laugh. Nor is he conventionally powerful. His journey has been dogged by peculiarly English discomforts. Achievements which might in other countries have come more easily – leaving behind a provincial, working-class background and asserting his artistic identity in cultural and intellectual circles – have been hard won and remain fragile.

Yet when he is at his easel, he can, without arousing any impression of arrogance, say that he knows how to paint. At such moments, his peers are no longer just his drinking companions from the local pubs, and he himself is not merely the penniless son of a postman and a shop assistant; he is the confidant and heir of Titian.

7.

In the spring, after three years of work, Taylor helps a driver load up a van with thirty-two studies of the oak tree. Their destination is an art gallery at the edge of the City of London, where large commercial towers abruptly give way to irregularly shaped streets lined with small offices and shops. The paintings will be hung on the walls of the gallery’s ground and basement floors, while the large plate-glass window facing the pavement will play host to a single twelve-centimetre-high canvas depicting the tree in early autumn.

The oak looks oddly foreign in this hard landscape, with its crowds heading brusquely for their offices, its cranes looming high above and its planes crossing overhead on their way to airports to the east and west. There are people out buying coffee, sandwiches, papers or new heels for their shoes, servicing their essential and practical requirements. In the midst of such activity, it seems logical enough to ask exactly what Taylor’s art might be for.

To help us to notice what we have already seen. The tree paintings endeavour to excite and command our attention. They are in a sense comparable to advertising billboards, though instead of forcing us to focus on a specific brand of margarine or discounted airline fares, they incite us to contemplate the meaning of nature, the yearly cycles of growth and decay, the intricacies of the vegetal and animal realms, our lost connection with the earth and the redemptive powers of modest dappled things. We might define art as anything which pushes our thoughts in important yet neglected directions.

Nevertheless, Taylor is suspicious of any attempt to summarise art in words. He insists that a worthy painting will automatically render all commentary inadequate, because it must influence and affect our senses rather than our logical faculties. To convey the particularity of artistic work, he quotes Hegel’s definition of painting and music as genres dedicated to the ‘sensuous presentation of ideas’. We require such ‘sensuous’ arts, Hegel suggested, because many important truths will impress themselves upon our consciousness only if they have been moulded from sensory, emotive material. We may, for example, need a song to alert us in a visceral way to the importance of forgiving others, a notion to which we might previously have assented purely in a rote and stagnant way after reading of it in a political tract – just as it may only be in front of a successful painting of an oak tree that we are in any position to feel, as opposed dutifully to accept, the significance of the natural world.

The great works of art have about them the quality of a reminder. They fix that which is fugitive: the cooling shadow of an oak on a windless, hot summer afternoon; the golden-brown tint of leaves in the early days of autumn; the stoical sadness of a bare tree glimpsed from a train, outlined against a heavy grey sky. At the same time, it is forgotten aspects of our own psyches to which paintings can seem mysteriously conjoined. It can be our unspoken longings that surprise us in the trees, and our adolescent selves that we recognise in the hazy tint of a summer sky.

8.

Sales in the gallery are slow over the next eight weeks. There are no reviews in the national press. It is hard to buy paintings when one knows so little about what prestigious forces think of them.

Still, a few customers come in off the street, without appointment, responding to instinct. One tree is sold at lunchtime to a trader from Deutsche Bank, another to a printer from Bow, a third to a couple visiting from Melbourne who have lost their way to Liverpool Street Station.

During the last week of the show, the smallest oak of all, a mere ten centimetres high, made up of oil paint on board, is bought by a dentist from Milton Keynes. Susan hangs it in the living room, where it coexists, and competes for attention, with a television, a set of wooden camels from Luxor and Noddy and Tessie Bear’s village.

Susan enjoys showing the work to friends. This has nothing to do with vaunting wealth or status. In a sense which is not entirely clear to her, she wishes to tell others that she is a bit like the painting. She has seen the tree before. It is the tree from her childhood in Somerset which she passed on her way to school. It is the tree she saw on cycle rides through the Durham countryside at university. It is the tree which stood in a field across from the hospital when she gave birth to her first son.

Like a modern, secular icon, the painting creates a magnetic field around itself, proposing a fitting attitude and code of conduct for its viewers. The ordinary business of the day normally intrudes insistently on the goings-on in the living room. The television is a jealous screen. Noddy rarely misses a chance to make himself heard. Yet occasionally, late at night, when the rest of the household is in bed, Susan will linger a few moments over the painting and feel herself subtly aligning with its personality and recovering thereby an amplified sense of her history and humanity.

9.

The show comes to a close. Backdated across two years, Taylor has earnt the equivalent of the annual salary of an unsuccessful plumber. There is an impractical side of human nature particularly open to making sacrifices for the sake of creating objects that are more graceful and intelligent than we normally manage to be.

Taylor is undaunted by his fortunes. He has recently visited a village north of Colchester to look at a tributary of the River Colne. He wants his next project to be about water. He plans to set up his base on a jetty where he will, over a number of years, paint the river in a range of its moods and lights.

‘Have you ever noticed water?’ he asks. ‘Properly noticed it, I mean – as if you had never seen it before?’