Art Etc - Mosaic Magic
Read the Art Et. Sept/Oct 2024 Issue 28 article:
Mosaic Magic
Delia Taylor-Brook is a mixed media artist whose prime inspiration is her deep and ever-expanding love and connection to the natural world. She is one of many female artists who have an instinctive bond with nature emanating from an affinity and empathy with it. As Delia states “I cultivate relationships with my subjects by creating images whilst allowing for my own input to form a final creative expression. Hill and coastal walks provide endless inspiration as the observed dramatic beauty is essential for my landscape paintings”. This artist uses different mediums including acrylic and watercolour and often combines them in collage work. Her Still Lives are born of contemplative moments allowing her to express the feelings and ideas of composition conjured up by such reveries, whether these are interior tabletop scenes or views through doorways into the landscape that often include birds. Delia has made forays into print making such as her collagraph Red Poppies that won a prestigious prize at the Faringdon Art Society Exhibition; as well as conducting landscape, wildlife and still life painting workshops.
Her father, a merchant seaman, married a girl from Australia whom he met in Sydney, and it is from her that Delia inherited her love of nature and colour which has remained the bedrock of her art. Her mother designed colourful knitwear that was sold in Regent Street outlets in the 1960’s and 70’s. Delia grew up in Bristol, and later her and her husband lived in London, and they finally settled near Builth Wells in mid Wales. Many of her friends and acquaintances were art lovers, either as practitioners or exhibition goers that gave her the impetus to create. It was also from her mother that Delia inherited notions of spirituality, especially that found in nature. Although she was bought up a Catholic, she follows Sufi beliefs. This self-taught artist’s formal profession is that of a psychotherapist, she is a believer in the healing power of immersion in nature. This underwrites her art methodology as her early paintings sought to penetrate the immediate visual surface of landscapes and its fauna, much as she does with her human patients. Delia attempts to unravel and reveal the inner life…the true spirit and soul of nature as it were. Essentially it is a forensic take on the natural world which she has been enthralled by since childhood.
Many of her earlier landscape paintings were executed in a personal expressionist style as were her depictions of wildlife such as hares, foxes and numerous avian species. These images reflect what she perceived as being the vital inner life of her subject matter. This was achieved by blurring the literal compositions resulting in a kind of miasmic Expressionism. In this series of paintings she attempted to represent the soul of the subject, more of an x-ray image than a photographic reproduction. This work was influenced by the art of Cecil Rice, Soraya French, Kurt Jackson and Anne Blockley who prefer an expressionistic take on their subject matter.
Despite her foray into Expressionism much of Delia’s work is realistic, such as her still life paintings where lemons often feature as yellow is one of her favourite colours. As she states “I am in awe of artists whose skills enable them to create works that are hyper-realistic”. However, driven to explore and experiment to find expressions for her love of colour has currently led Delia to becoming involved in mosaic creations, providing a new direction for her artistic output that now sees her “reading” the face of nature. Moving away from a painterly autopsy into the heart of nature she now, via mosaics, concerns herself with its familiar colourful surface manifestation. In her 30-year art career 20 years were taken up by painting and it is only in the last decade that her interest in mosaic work has taken place. This recent venture is encouraged by work of other U.K. mosaic artists such as Elaine Goodwin, Emma Biggs, Helen Nock, Cleo Mussi, Erica Bubbins and Dougald McInnes. Delia finds that mosaics provide new inspirational colour and textural possibilities as she explores this medium which has a long history.
The first mosaics appeared in Mesopotamia around 3000B.C. From there complex patterns and pictures became widespread in the Roman and Greek worlds. Early Christian basilicas were covered in mosaics. They were favoured for centuries in the Byzantian world. Early Islamic architecture, including mosques and important buildings, were covered in mosaics. Their use as an artistic expression had declined by the time of the Renaissance except for those made by Raphael, notably the Creation of the World in the Chigi Chapel Rome. Nearer our times the pre–Raphaelite Edward Burn-Jones designed stunning mosaics for the apse and choir of St Paul’s Within the Walls, Rome. Antoni Gaudi 1852-1926, the great Catalonian architect used mosaics profusely and his Park Geull is a hymn to their glorious artistic possibilities. Many contemporary artists use mosaics to decorate architectural structures, park benches, pavements, garden containers, musical instruments and even bicycles. They are longer lasting than paint, a fact that architects, artists and designers have known for centuries.
Delia has created a body of 2D and 3D pieces for interiors as well as a range of garden ornaments and containers. An early work, Tuscan Sunflower Pot, won the highly commended 3D prize at the Faringdon Art Societies Annual Exhibition. She sources ceramic dishes and chargers from second hand shops and the like whose surfaces she then covers with her spectacular mosaics. This method is called trencadis in Catalan meaning Broken Tiles, or pique assiette, French, meaning “stolen from the plate”. Essentially, she is up-cycling. Ceramic tile shards, coloured glass, beads and other lustrous materials are employed in her picture making. Much of the wildlife, especially birds that she adores, appear in mosaic compositions that she skilfully constructs, displaying her creative acumen. Her mosaics are reminiscent of Gustav Klimpt’s The Kiss where the couple appear in their jewelled splendour as if growing organically out of the earth.
An exhibition of Delia’s mosaics saturates the eye and mind with its sea of uplifting colour and sparkle. They exude vitality and vivaciousness that brings joy to the viewer; as art should. Her up-cycled dishes would be wonderful additions to interior spaces, providing an ideal centre piece on a hall or dining table. All this is evident in her recent exhibition at Mid Wales Arts Caersws where she is also undertaking a residency. Delia is often commissioned to create wall plaques to customers specific needs.
Her long held environmental sensibilities see her currently supporting two conservation projects namely Project Hafren and Glaslyn which are two outstanding nature reserves between Llanidloes and Machynlleth in mid-West Wales. One project is focussed on preventing Bute Energy building vast wind farms on this unspoilt landscape which would in turn affect the wildlife. Delia’s input is a mosaic plaque of Glaslyn as part of a large group exhibition protesting this environmental vandalism, the other project is the Curlew Conservation Project across Wales and elsewhere to prevent the loss if not the extinction of the curlew in areas where they were once plentiful. Pylon and turbine covered Wales must not become a cheap battery source for others. Vast swathes of South Wales were ravaged by the industrial sprawl, obliterating the land that the Mabinogion tales were enacted on as well as the birthplace of Arthur of the Round Table. Added to this desecration is the centuries long lead poisoning of waterways in central coastal Wales and the slate mining scarred landscape of North Wales. Most of the profits created personal fortunes for many with little gain for Wales or its inhabitants.
Delia has exhibited in Wales at the Art Centre Caersws, Llanwrtyd Heritage and Arts Centre, Wyeside Arts Centre Builth Wells and several exhibitions at Oriel Crick at Crickhowell. In England she has had several exhibitions at the Faringdon Arts Society, Eynsham Art Group, West Ox Arts and at Stanton Guildhouse Art Centre. She has exhibited in many arts and crafts fairs in Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire in the last few decades.
Delia enters and embraces her inspirational landscape and lets its vistas and its denizens enfold her. This provides a potency that suffuses her arts manifestations giving it an evocative magical, enchanting and life affirming dimension. From this concord springs nature’s inner vitality and its sumptuous surface colours which are expressed in her paintings, and more recently, in her sensual mosaics.
Essentially Delia Taylor-Brook has explored the inner core of the natural world in her paintings and now its outer core in her mosaics. This exploration by a psychotherapist into the healing power of nature seems apt as it has resulted in a continuous trove of art from a perennial beloved source of inspiration.