Art: Making Their Ears Twitch

His mates always kidded young Jack Taylor. He was brash, he was illiterate, he could never keep a steady job. Yet he called himself an artist. A year ago, he was pushing a wheelbarrow on a building job in London’s West End. The truck driver pointed at the nearby Redfern Gallery, and jeered at Jack: “You call yourself a painter. They buy paintings in that place.

Go in and show them some.” Jack did. To his astonishment, the gallery directors gave him £10 for one of his pictures on the spot, urged him to come back in six months with more work. Last week, just two weeks before his 28th birthday, the gallery displayed 44 of Jack’s paintings on its swank walls, and hailed him as England’s first 20th century primitive, a “Grandma Moses in embryo.” In contrast to Grandma Moses’ lovingly literal rendition of a world she knows, Taylor paints a world of dreams far from the squalor and drabness of the London slums he lives in. His landscapes are bright with unlikely color, his figures dressed in gay costumes of some imagined peasantry, his buildings festooned with cupolas, arches and campaniles of an architecture he has never seen.

For Jack Taylor has never been out of England, seldom out of his native London.

“I don’t like London. I ‘ate the grey dullness of it, I think London stinks,” he says.

“I want to get as far away from it as I can, an’ I try to, an’ the only way I can is in me pictures, me own buildings, me own cities.” “A Sort of Spiv.” In the past, Taylor has had little to thank life for, and he gives it little thanks. The son of an oddBrian Seed BRITAIN’S TAYLOR & “THE AQUEDUCT”

He thinks London stinks. job workman, he was the oldest son in a family of four sons and seven daughters. He was a rebellious, difficult child. When he was sent to school, the teacher asked him to spell “a.” He couldn’t, and the other children laughed. “I swore I wouldn’t learn to read and write, they wouldn’t make me.” Obstinately, he stuck to that vow, left school at 14 without having learned to read a sentence. He got odd jobs as milkman, baker, house painter, hospital orderly. “Sometime I quit, sometimes they sacked me. I just couldn’t get interested. I didn’t care. An’ I was always gettin’ into mischief, always fightin’ or breakin’ windows, an’ then boozin’ and gettin’ into trouble with the police. I was a sort of spiv all right.”

The Last Laugh. But while others worked or studied, Jack drew. Nobody encouraged him; his parents scoffed. When he married four years ago, his wife gave him no more sympathy; once when he quit looking for work to concentrate on painting, she left him until he agreed to go back to work. But he kept stubbornly on, making his own brushes by cutting up a clothes brush. Once, he broke down. “The day I came walkin’ into the Redfern Gallery, I felt I couldn’t go on much longer.”

Jack now lives with his wife, two children and his parents in a shabby house in southeast London, does his painting (on board) in a seven-foot square storeroom. With success, Jack has also acquired an interest in reading, using the Bible as text. “I’m beginnin’ to put words together,” he says proudly. “Everything’s sortin’ itself out. I’m happy for the first time in me life.”

Jack has studied nobody else’s paintings. “I’m not really interested in other people’s art,” he says. “It’s doin’ somethin’ of me own that I want, somethin’ I see in me mind.” Two days after the show opened, all but one of the paintings had sold at prices ranging up to £35. But what Jack enjoyed most about success was its effect on people who had previously laughed at him. The local borough newspaper wrote him up recently. “I could jump for joy to see it make ’em sit up and make their ears twitch,” says Jack. “They think anybody who wants to paint is queer somehow. Why, I get more out of paintin’ one picture than they get out of twelve months of livin’.”