Guy Taplin

About

Taplin never trained as an artist. ‘They materialize,’ he says of the now famous birds he started making whilst working at Regent’s Park. Inspired by the old wooden decoy ducks he saw for sale around London’s junk shops, he made the first from detritus cast up on the Thames in London. He creates them now from the wooden waste thrown up by the North Sea’s tide around Wivenhoe, the old wooden piers and posts and painted detritus the wind and sun slowly wear smooth, like sandpaper.

‘It’s like alchemy,’ he asserts, the way his sculptures emerge, unplanned, instinctively, from his now ageing hands. He calls them ‘a gift from the unconscious,’ made for the sheer joy of making them.

Though Taplin’s work fits into a long tradition of folk art, this is not to suggest they are created without deep thought or skill. Taplin is that rare thing: a ‘natural,’ a hugely gifted artisan of quietly understated genius. His acknowledged heroes include the early twentieth century Cornish fisherman-turned- artist, Alfred Wallis – who painted what he saw and had seen, honestly and naively, on pieces of old cardboard and waste material – and the nineteenth-century Northamptonshire ‘peasant poet,’ John Clare. They are both men Taplin describes as ‘not quite as others’ – creative men with whom he feels a close affinity.

This major exhibition of over fifty new works by Guy Taplin will be on show at Messum’s St. James’s from 6th October and will be accompanied by a short film, produced earlier this year, as David Messum discusses the new work with Guy at his Studio on the Esssex shoreline. A fully illustrated catalogue with forewards by Alan Titchmarsh MBE and writer and curator David Boyd Haycock are also available. For more details visit www.messums.com.