| P R O P E R T Y | 22 THE RIVER MAGAZINE | Spring 2019 of pizza seem to echo the paintings; strings of melted cheese, Winsor Yellow stretching from teeth to hand, blobs of Cadmium Red tomato dripping to the studio floor. What is it about artists, how the mundane things of life around them begin to take on other significance? Each time I slide into a relaxed, informal mindset I am eventually, and suddenly, pulled out of it again when my eyes catch another striking item. Standing in front of one of his latest creations, ‘No Words For...’I lean back and comment on how some of the smaller graphic details part-overlaid with heavier, darker brush strokes suggest a profound depth. ‘Yes,’Taborn answers, ‘I like to feel I can climb into the painting,’he says, making gestures as though he were pulling aside the foliage of a rainforest, stepping through undergrowth. The colour palette is now cooler, subtler, than his work in the 1990s - perhaps reflecting the urban jungle he inhabits today. Since the painting days of Factual Nonsense, Taborn has explored other media including experimentation with glass and neon during his time in New York after his NESTA Fellowship, and made objects involving grinding, routing, burning and casting. More recently, in 2018 Taborn received an Award from the Gottlieb Foundation, one of a series of prestigious international awards he has won which, as he says,‘enabled me to continue to enjoy the relative indifference of the art market to my art.’This has given him the opportunity to pursue what he calls‘his deep-seated lust for the sensuality and immediacy of pure painting.’ When I leave, across the garden in the dark and along a trail of stepping stones, past rabbit and guinea pig hutches, back through the house and out onto the busy streets of south London I feel charged by the encounter. This was an event, a journey, an expedition, a discovery of something unexpected. David Taborn is an explorer, not only of Lambeth and a world beyond, but of the world within; of the imagination. “I LIKE T O F E E L I C A N C L I M B INTO THE PAINTING” Taborn in front of his recent work “Tattoo”, oil and alkyd on canvas