IN 1985 HOWARD TAYLOR was the first artist to be awarded the Australia Council's Emeritus Award for sen ior artists. The same year, he was honoured with a retrospective by the Art Gallery of Western Australia, curated by Gary Dufour, who is also responsible for the current exhibition, Howard Taylor: Phenomena. Recognised for his very successful career in Perth, Taylor has nonetheless remained a local hero, virtually unknown in the eastern states.

Many people's introduction to Taylor's work came during the exhibition Phenomena: New Painting in Australia at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and Melbourne's Ian Potter Gallery in 2001, the year of Taylor's death, aged eighty-three. There, curator Michael Wardell placed Taylor's works as the altarpiece in a chapel of painting that reified an abstracted art sensitive to natural forces. With this major retrospective exhibition - formerly at the Museum of Contemporary Art, now at the Art Gallery of Western Australia - Taylor is finally getting his due. Taylor's exhibition surveys a lifetime of making drawings, paintings and sculptures, and is accompanied by a major catalogue, with a biographical essay by the Art Gallery of Western Australia's Gary Dufour and the MCA's Russell Storer, who analyses the enigmatic beauty of Taylor's late works.

Dufour gives an insightful account of the artist's life and influences, his fascination with flight and the detailed model aircraft he built before he enlisted in the RAAF. Taylor transferred to the RAF and saw action in the first months of World War II before being shot down over Alsace Lorraine in 1940. A prisoner of war for five years, Taylor learned to draw and paint, and decided to become an artist. Released in 1945 he studied art in Birmingham, falling under the spell of British modernists, in particular Paul Nash.

Taylor was a dedicated and rigorous craftsman employing many old-fashioned techniques, notably egg tempera and the traditional use of preliminary drawings and maquettes for his works. One of the joys of Taylor's show is seeing his gallery of Lilliputian sculptures and paintings. Taylor's methods are integral to his personal vision. His disciplined approach, relish in surfaces, joy in detail, and innate sensuosity compete with a rigorous, almost puritan, sense of design. He approached his art as a draftsman, and it took nearly a lifetime before he finally escaped the tightness of line drawing, though even in his late works he still favoured black and white.

Today, his early work seems eccentric, eclectic and somehow very 'English', much like other postwar Australian artists, such as David Rose and Edwin Tanner. Taylor would be somewhat forgettable if judged solely on the production of his early years, though it was an essential evolution to the transcendent art of the last great years. Dufour and Storer compare Taylor's work with that of other artists including Fred Williams, whose sparse, pared-back Lysterfield landscape and its ilk, while not specifically mentioned in the catalogue, are very much the kind of work that guided Taylor to the climactic bare, white, minimal canvas. Paintings such as Open country (1982) are telling of the similarities and differences between the two artists. In addition, the work of Barbara Hepworth, while less fashionable today, was undoubtedly an influence on the English-schooled Taylor. The simple organic geometry of her work is echoed in the spheres, circular sections and basic construction of Taylor's sculpture. And, while Taylor was isolated in Perth, he wasn't cut off from international trends such as Minimal art, which may well have encouraged him to voice a personal vision. Taylor digested his influences and evolved a language that was as simple, yet as profound, as a haiku.

Like Williams's, Taylor's audacious abstractions are made palatable to cautious Australian taste by being grounded in the mythology of the bush. In fact, it is hard to think of any Australian artists able to separate their work from representation. The addition or modification of an international modernist idiom to local forms is a sterile exercise most of the time, but Taylor eventually got it right with his major sculptural commission The black stump (1975), a sort of Tony Smith meets the 'gum tree school'. He never looked back. Sphere (1996) epitomises his mature work, combining a basic palette with simple forms and composition to evoke the power and purity of natural phenomena. His simple equation of white as light is enhanced by his remarkably subtle control and emotional range of pallid and atmospheric tints, from nacreous dawn light to leprous dusk. His use of curved canvases to create gradients of light and shade, complements his tonal range and supports Taylor's central trope of illumination. Bush fire day (1996) is both disturbingly beautiful and a portent of cataclysm. Taylor's sculpture Weathered jarrah (1997) is as sexy and simple as a conch shell or coco-de-mer, and just as complex and mysterious. Taylor's paintings are aloof, resistant to being read in reproduction, and must be appreciated in the flesh, where the size of the painting and the nuance of tone and surface can be felt. Direct contact with the artist is also desirable: pictures of Taylor's Northcliffe studio and a transcribed interview are also reproduced in the catalogue.

Although Taylor denied any spiritual leanings in his work (art, he said, is also drudge, drudge, drudge), the question of his relationship to nature is never quite answered, so that Taylor assumes, in the end, a status not dissimilar to American artist Ad Reinhardt, famous for his black-on-black paintings. Both artists promoted a pragmatic approach to art making, yet their works nonetheless evoke a transcendent and poetic response. If there is a spiritual and moral aspect to the exhibition, it is that of 'the little engine that could'. Taylor's rigour, persistence and inner confidence in his work overcame parochial and provincial limitations to create a body of remarkable work at the very end of his career.

At last, here is an accessible and authoritative monograph on this fascinating aviator/artist, now admitted into the pantheon of great Australians. Dufour and Storer's publ-ication, documenting Taylor's uncompromising trajectory and late flowering vision finally cements his reputation in the eastern states. Howard Taylor: Phenomena ensures that Taylor will be remembered as an antipodean Daedalus who flew towards the light.

Catalogue details:

Gary Dufour (ed.)
Howard Taylor: Phenomena
Art Gallery of Western Australia
$29.95pb, 160pp, 0 9750168 8 2
$59.95hb, 0 9750168 2 2

Exhibition dates:
Art Gallery of Western Australia
5 February-2 May 2004

Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery
15 July-29 August 2004

Cairns Regional Gallery
28 January-13 March 2005