Stormy seas are a common challenge for lifeboatman Mark Taylor. As a skilled coxswain of the RNLI boat that serves the coast around Tynemouth in the north-east of England, he has often faced down dangerous swells to reach mariners in distress.
But this weekend Taylor, who has also become a sought-after artist, is getting used to the contrasting waters of the Thames. After working on his painting in his studio near his North Shields home, the 43-year-old has been picked out for a London exhibition and a new artistic residency on the banks of the Thames in Canary Wharf.
“I’ve been around water all my life,” he told the Observer. “I’ve always been obsessed with boats and with the moment when the bow of a launching lifeboat hits the waves. But I also want to get across the history of any landscape I paint, whether it is the pier at Tynemouth or the wharfs of the Thames.”
His paintings, which include seascapes and portraits, are already popular, and have been collected by celebrities including the singer Sam Fender, Duran Duran’s Andy Taylor and the acclaimed screenwriter Ian la Frenais. Prices for his new collection start at £9,500.
“It can be pretty heavy stuff out at sea, so I paint every day to stay level,” said Taylor. “My father, Dallas Keith Taylor, was a lifeboatman and a pilot boat skipper in nearby Blyth harbour, so he also went out in all weathers. He was a painter too, with a commercial gallery. At art school I wanted to be more like a Mark Rothko or a Jackson Pollock, not like my dad, but after some time teaching art, I missed my own painting and I have found my own style now.”
Taylor worked as a manager at Newcastle College, running courses as well as teaching, but he gave it up a decade ago, not just to return to art, but to care for his father, who suffered with motor neurone disease. “It is the best thing I’ve ever done. I looked after him in his final months and during that time, he would hold my hand and correct me as I painted, showing me how to get an effect on a cloud, or something. I realised I enjoyed painting every day. Towards the end, my father told me he could not have painted something of mine I’d showed him. He said, ‘If you can carry on painting like that, you’ll never be hungry.’ It meant a lot.”
His solo show in the lobby of the Marriott Hotel was offered to Taylor after he won a place in the Royal Society of Marine Artists annual show last summer and it is a position previously held by artist Lincoln Townley. “I know that Lincoln’s residency here absolutely catapulted his career to the next level,” said Taylor, “so if my residency is half as successful, I’ll be a very happy man.”
Several of his new paintings of the docks and quays of east London feature collages made with old maps, hinting at the past of the Isle of Dogs as a fulcrum of international trade, and, before that, as estuary marshland.
“The new residency in London will give me a completely new audience. I want to paint all the glass reflections and the lights of the modern office blocks, but to show the history and the importance of the tides.”
In Tynemouth, Taylor’s studio is within sight of the lifeboat station and he is regularly interrupted by his RNLI pager. “If I’m painting with oils I can just put my palette down and the paint will stay damp for a few hours and I can go back to the work. If it’s acrylic, I just have to leave it. It’s happened during family meals, even on birthdays, but there’s potentially someone’s life to be saved.”
“When I am out on a lifeboat ‘shout’ I can’t really think about painting, but I have sometimes tried to capture on canvas the big 10-foot drop looking down the boat from the prow when you are on the crest of a wave, and the crew are coming up below me with a rope. Sometimes I’m leaning right out of the boat with the crew holding on to my jacket as I lean right out to grab someone’s hand. It’s a dangerous moment.”
While in London, Taylor plans to volunteer as a part of a relief crew working around the Thames or in Dover.
