Referencing Blake’s The Ghost of a Flea Taylor describes this small blue and red capillary-striated painting as a portrait of him eating bits of himself - specifically his nails - and considers this discarded finger as a kind of commentary on the act of self-destruction. It reflects Taylor’s belief that the artist body has equal value to any other material in the making process so that the physical self is in service to the studio.

Taylor sometimes describes his studio as a stomach: a swilling and churning dual sphere of production and consumption, where all that enters is incessantly gnawed, singed and regurgitated, and where his inner world of personal stories and fictional characters, develops. His paintings emerge over several years through a process of painting and re-working until the final iteration rises to the surface. Sometimes abstract, sometimes bearing reference to figures or forms, internalised fictions rise and external influence seeps in.

The painting is oil on linen and exhibits Taylors process of working in and out of the painted surface over the revisitings of many years. In some places the canvas weave is exposed as another texture amongst lacunae of paint.

“I like to think about paintings coming from this dark space, set amongst the hypnagogic dark and dank terrior that represents the ambiguity of the creative process. A place, fizzy with habits and indecision, where practice and method become redundant, and in their place the monstrous and all that is unidentifiable seep. Bad habits, good habits, objects made from boredom, from damage and internal mutterings. The kinds of actions and behaviours that belong to the margins of your day, where you pick and scratch, wait and stare, allowing your attention to be removed from the matter at hand. A place in which in-built fictions can intermingle, morph, and collide, and maintain the hallucinations, patterns and images that unlock the biological happenings and evolutionary knowledge that the artistic journey encapsulates - where a work might ‘happen’”.

Ross Taylor (b. 1982, Harrow, London) lives and works in London and completed his MA in Painting at The Royal College of Art, London, in 2008. In 2018 he was selected as artist-in-residence at The Edward James Foundation, and between 2015-16 was The Abbey Scholar in Painting at the British School at Rome, Italy. Recent exhibitions include, Shoulder pipe forgiveness claw, Larsen Warner, Stockholm, 2021; The decorator always gets paid least, Ivan Gallery, Bucharest, 2020; Rattus Rattus, Galerie Russi Klenner, Berlin, 2020 and The studio at 4am, Hastings Contemporary, East Sussex, 2020.