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THE TIMES ART CRITIC INTERVIEWS JO TAYLOR.

Rachel Campbell-Johnston talks to an artist who is fascinated by every aspect of horses, inside and out.

EVER since the first Mongolian hopped on to his windswept pony, the
horse has symbolised social ascendency. You have only to trot along
to Ascot to see that. You have only to see the cream of the county at
the Hunt Ball.

And this in part explains the popularity of the horse painting. If
you don't have a collection of ancestral paintings, who cares? Horsey
portraits are sign enough of class. Besides, can anyone tell the
difference? Plenty of ancestors look equestrian.

And that, in turn, goes some way to explaining the success of Jo Taylor.

Taylor -who paints commissioned portraits of individual horses, but
also chooses her own subjects -includes among her clients the Duke
and Duchess of Westminster.

However, Taylor's art arises not from snobbery but from that
heartfelt passion for ponies that afflicts so many little girls.
Where, with most, it is displaced in their teens by the onset of sex,
for Taylor it has transformed itself into her art.

As an art student at Leeds she was stuck, she says. Something was
clogged up until an understanding tutor gave her free rein and she
went back to the subject matter of her childhood passion. Once she
had the bit between her teeth, she never looked back.

Taylor is trying to rescue horse painting from those cliched
point-to-point prints you see on pub walls. She studies anatomy
almost as assiduously as some modern-day Stubbs and has attended
post-mortem examinations (although the veterinary surgeons did not
let her draw or take photographs -"I think they thought I might be
planning a Damien Hirst").

"I was astonished at what I saw. All that stuff that's inside," she
says. "You just sit on horses without having a clue about what's
going on under the surface."

It is this "stuff inside" that she tries to emphasise in her
paintings, which are often built up in layers, bits of feathers and
grit and sand all thrown in to accentuate the structures. She hopes
to combine a meticulous attention to anatomy, to the structures of
muscle, ligament and bone, with the sense of movement which she, as a
keen rider, feels and tries to distil in lines.

Atmosphere, too, is important to Taylor. Many a chilly morning she
has sat out on the freezing Yorkshire gallops watching the racehorses
thundering at full stretch. She has crouched for hours in the corners
of stables, spending time in the yards of trainers David Nicholson
and Sir Michael Stoute.

She has drawn her inspiration from direct contact with such legendary
racers as Viking Flagship. Patient observation is at the foundation
of her art. "It takes time for a horse to settle," she says. "You
have to let it grow accustomed to your presence.

"When I am painting a horse or any other animal I have to work from
first-hand experience," Taylor explains -she also takes hares, stags
and the unwanted greyhound which she rescued, as her subjects.

She puts her hands on the animals, feels how they are held together.
She is alert to their smell, to the noises that they make, to their
individual characters, their distinctive mannerisms.

"It can be very time consuming," she says. "But the paintings are
very immediate when they work." Which is why owning one of her
paintings might be a fine substitute for having a horse of your own.