Bernie Taupin is a British-born American artist whose early childhood appreciation of the arts was introduced by his Bohemian mother and maternal grandfather. While in New York during the winter of 1970 and 1971, Taupin found himself seeking solace in the myriad museums in the city. It was during these visits that he began honing his visual sensibility.
In 1990, armed with an acute painterly awareness and an appreciation of modernist painters of the 1960s and 1970s, Taupin began a serious career as a visual artist. The aesthetics of Anselm Kiefer, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko appear within his work and figuration is of little interest to him. By restricting himself to the vocabulary of abstraction he remains open to explore the more visceral relationships between color and texture, materials and composition.
Taupin manipulates a wide range of media into abstract works that only hint at narrative and yet are loaded with dynamism. While creating this new body of work virtually any material was subject to serve in his creative arsenal. Among the use of more traditional media such as acrylic and oil paints, wax, cheesecloth, bubble wrap, glass, metal, twine, wire and shredded paper can also be found within this body of work.
Although he now lives and works on a ranch in California, the influence of 1960s and 1970s modernist painting is apparent and he describes himself as an “east coast painter.”
Bernie Taupin may be best known for his legendary songwriting career with Elton John, yet very little tangible overlap exists between his work as a wordsmith and his approach to painting. Taupin explains that his creative process is “simply the visual extension of what I have spent my life creating through words.”
Additional information will be available soon but please contact the gallery regarding questions on this artist at (212) 717-9100.