GUY TAPLIN
Continuing our series, we meet a proli c artist whose carved wooden birds are inspired by a lifelong passion
In a workshop perched on a sandbar overlooking the salt marsh banks and tidal inlets of the River Colne on the coastal edge of Essex, Guy Taplin is po!ering about looking for a suitable piece of wood. His studio, next to his home on a sandy track leading down to the river at Wivenhoe, is "lled with the dri #wood he collects on his daily beach walks, from simple weathered planks to portions of eroded "shing boat hull, "lled with rusty nails.
Guy will use these as mounts for the wooden birds that he has dedicated the last 42 years of his life to making, and still, at 82, works on every day. They surround him here, a still, silent $ock of seabirds and waders, exaggerated, elegant echoes of the egrets, curlews and Brent geese that stand tall on the mud $ats or soar through the sky on the other side of his window.
Guy is preparing for an exhibition he has coming up in October with London art gallery Messum’s, which has represented him for over 25 years. It is his 13th with them and the latest in a long career that started with selling to passers-by from a friend’s warehouse on the Thames, where he "rst set himself up with a band saw
ABOVE Twelve Flying Shorebirds features six carved birds on each side of a driftwood mount.
and a rotary sander in the late 1970s. Through the 80s and 90s he found great success. His birds were bought by royalty, ! lm stars and public collections, and in December 2000 he was compelled to telephone Sotheby’s to check they had really just sold one at auction for £ 17,750.
While the fever pitch of those years has gently subsided, Guy’s work continues to be sought a "er and he still has a show almost every year. But Guy’s take on his position is unexpected. Despite describing himself as obsessed and driven, he believes that where he has ended up is mostly by happy accident. ‘I’m not an artist, I’m not an intellectual, things just happen to me,’ he says.
‘ I le" school at 15. I taught myself. It was all accidental, exactly like Forrest Gump. I was just free to answer the call.’
Born in London’s east end at the beginning of the war, Guy spent his post-school years in national service and a series of short-lived casual jobs before se#ing up a fashion business making hippie belts in the 1960s. Around the same time he discovered Zen Buddhism, which went on to become an important part of his life and in $uenced his decision in 1974 to give up his fashion business to take a job closer to nature, as a municipal gardener in Regent’s Park. While he was there, the ‘ bird man’, who fed and reared the rare birds on the lake le", and Guy stepped in.
Guy has loved birds from an early age. It is a passion he traces back to a visit to the Herefordshire countryside with his mother when he was four and poked his head into a bush to discover a hedge sparrow’s nest with eggs in it. ‘A bird’s nest is such a wonderful, transitory thing,’ he says. ‘I was so overwhelmed by this, I can remember it distinctly.’
Later, he fell in love with the solitude and open skies of the Essex marshes and its $ocks of migratory birds, a place he moved to live on the edge of with his family in 1980, and where he remains. ‘It’s very bleak and lonely and there’s nobody about. I love it,’ he says. ‘ Birds became an obsession, without a doubt. Even when I was doing other things I was on the edge of birds, but it wasn’t until I got the job in the park that I really reunited with them.’
As the bird man of the park, Guy spent 12 days out of 14 at his shed on the island in the lake, tending to the swans and ornamental ducks. On a Saturday morning he would wander down to the antiques market on Church Street where he would sometimes spot a decoy for sale. These replica ducks were used by waterfowl hunters of the 18th and 19th centuries for luring in their prey, but in the 20th century they became appreciated as a collectable art form, especially in North America, where many were made.
Guy became fascinated with decoys and started to read up on them in specialist magazines. He had a shed and was surrounded by inspiration, so when he came across some cast- o% wood from building the open- air theatre, he decided to have a go. ‘It never crossed my mind to sell them, it was just something I was intrigued to do. But people started asking to buy them and eventually someone prised some out of me.’
The ! rst few he made by hand, but when the time came to leave his job in the park, a friend o%ered him space at his furniture-making warehouse. It was there that he developed the technique of glueing together bits of wood then cu#ing out the shape of the bird with a band saw, which is how he still makes them.
As visitors to the warehouse took an increasing interest, he decided to approach a gallery and took 16 birds to the Portal Gallery, Gra "on Street. ‘A week later they rang me to say they aren’t selling, come and pick them up. But it was a couple of months before I got round to it. By the time I got there they’d sold them all and o%ered me a one-man show.’ He has never looked back.
‘I’m not very good at making things, I’m a real botcher, but that’s why my birds work,’ says Guy.
‘ People who are good at cra ", it spoils their work. It’s too tight, too organised, there’s no mystery.
‘I don’t know what my birds mean to people really, but I think I’ve got them where people respond to them. It gives people pleasure to have them around. I don’t intend them to end up looking like they do. When I start making them, I’ve got no plan of how they’ll turn out, I’m working from the unconscious really, but suddenly you’ve made this li#le group of birds and they’re sort of like children, they take on a life of their own.’
Guy’s next exhibition is at Messum’s St James’s, 6th–29th Oct. messums.com