INSPIRATION…Helen Taylor

My mother, Helen Taylor, is an amazing woman. She turns 80 today. There are many things I love about her, and many things I owe to her.

As a younger woman she was a music teacher. So she encouraged me to try out playing instruments and to sing and to listen to music. Until today I love doing all three (though I should admit I’m best at the third one by quite a long way!) And I’m sure that the grounding in music she encouraged me to get feeds into my writing today.

Listening to music helps me when I’m writing. I find different sorts of music boost me in different sorts of ways. And there are the things that you learn about from music too – rhythm, harmony, dissonance, silence, beginnings, endings. All these will feed into just about any kind of art work I can think of.

And as well as being a musician, my mother is a painter. As I was growing up I’d often find her wearing a paint-spattered shirt, absorbed in a painting, working long (and often quite strange) hours.

That was an introduction to the spells of untamed focus that comes with a passion for a particular art form. And, as with the music, there were specific things I learnt.

My mum taught me to mix colours. She’d tell me to fill the whole page if I did a drawing. She showed me how she plays with a picture, taking things out and painting over things in layers until they feel right. She’d tell me the best way to find out what a picture was like was to look at it upside down. Sometimes she’d turn a painting to the wall and say it was good not to look at it for a few days…so she could go back and see it with fresher eyes.

Some more directly than others, these are all things I find myself doing these days when I’m writing.

Here is the sort of work she would do. It’s a sketch for an oil painting of hers from over thirty years ago…

I know she painted that over thirty years ago because it was before she was ill.

At the age of 50 she suffered a stroke which left her paralysed down the right-hand side of her body, and took away perhaps 80% of her ability to speak.

It’s a sad thing to say every time I say it but, overnight, the illness robbed her of her ability to play music. She’s never moved her right arm since. Nor has she played a piano or a guitar.

But it didn’t stop her painting. She learned to paint with her left hand, and has come up with many new paintings with a different sort of beauty.

Here is one…

The determination and strength of character it took for her to paint pictures like that might be the most inspiring thing of all about her. I have never heard her feel sorry for herself about her disability, or even complain. She just gets on with things.

Here she is. Happy birthday, Mum!

 

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2 comments for INSPIRATION…Helen Taylor

  1. Milla says:

    Yes indeed, some similar memories… little sister Camilla here. I’ll never forget when Mum decided that it was high time the drainpipes on our house were repainted. It never surprised us that she didn’t choose black. But electric loganberry? Why not. And they’re still that colour today.

    Then there were the clothes. A kind of 70’s-style Afghan job we called “The Ostrich Cover” with its feather-effect layer on the outside. Or the snazzy (and expensive) nylon track suit she bought after her stroke from a local sports boutique. We used to refer to it as “The Electric Blue Boogie Suit.” Then a pair of lederhosen she bought on holiday for me in Switzerland. (More worryingly, I actually used to wear them.)

    So yes, Happy 80th Mum. We love you and your crazy stylishness so much!

  2. Lia Olival says:

    Sean que lindo o que vc escreveu! Adorei!
    Um beijo Lia

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