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Green Pebble Magazine
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Articles> Guy Taplin
Image published
with permission of the arti
Just
recently, artist Guy Taplin was mistaken for a tramp. He was in the Essex
town of Colchester when a homeless person greeted him in the street as if
he was one of their own. It must be something about him, Guy chuckles as he
recalls the incident. His wild head of grey hair? The way he dresses in jeans
and old sweaters, often covered in wood shavings and paint? Or the fact that
he somehow has recycling in his very being? It doesn’t matter, it’s
happened before and Guy is relaxed about it. In his view homeless people,
society’s vagabonds, represent a gritty, real side to life with which
he identifies.
‘A person can have a dialogue with [the dispossessed] that they can’t
have with anyone else,’ he says enthusiastically, although it’s
anyone’s guess how the conversation would have progressed had the tramp
discovered that Guy Taplin’s wooden bird sculptures – made from
bits of discarded, weathered flotsam – recently fetched as much as £22,000
a piece.
Meet Guy Taplin in his comfortable cottage abutting Wivenhoe’s railway
line to London Liverpool Street and it soon becomes clear that this 70-year-old
has no airs about him. Born and raised ‘from very basic stock’
in the East End of London during the Second World War, he left school at 15
and bumbled his way through countless jobs – with the post office; in
the army; as a window cleaner, meat porter, swimming pool lifeguard, hairdresser
- only to be fired from all of them for what was sometimes a mistake but what
was more often than not a childish prank. In one instance he poured water
into another postal employee’s drawer, destroying several thousand pounds’
worth of stamps. In another, he shot water up women’s skirts using a
water pistol, ‘wetting their knickers for a laugh’ from a vantage
point in a basement. It was harmless fun, he says, but it meant that he rolled
from one job to the other.
Soho and the East End could have been his downfall had his inherent sense
of fun not kept him on the fringe, rather than in the middle, of a territory
where criminal elements such as Billy Hill and the Cray Brothers operated.
But as Guy himself believes, as long as he was willing to work hard, which
he was, there always seemed to be a guardian angel looking after him. That
guardian angel led him a merry dance but eventually brought him to Zen Buddhism
and then to Regent’s Park where he was made responsible for the park’s
highly-prized waterfowl collection.
By now he had also discovered his first Spanish decoy ducks in London’s
antiques shops. Falling in love with them, he was prompted to buy a book on
the subject and to begin whittling his own decoys...
This is only a small part of the article.
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