Jo Taylor was born in Lancashire in 1969. She studied at Leeds Metropolitan University and is an Honorary Fellow at the University of Liverpool. She is Artist in Residence, Faculty of Veterinary Science, University of Liverpool.

Rigorous life drawing and patient observation are the starting points for these visually arresting works. It is through watching, drawing and riding horses that Jo Taylor captures a sense of their power and presence. Like her influences Leonardo and Gericault, Jo is attracted to the expressive body of animals.

Taylor captures the shapes and the patterns and the energy of these creatures. Her surfaces – charcoal, chalks, watercolour, acrylics, bitumen and wax – gather a momentum of their own. Sometimes she flings sand or grit at the canvas. Rachel Campbell-Johnston, 2008

Jo Taylor has travelled the world looking at horses: on the Camargue marshes, at the Jerez horse fair, out in Montana cattle country and on the plains of South Africa. Then, she says, she got to the point where she wanted to keep still for a bit – “to celebrate what is on my doorstep”.

For this new body of work she has returned to one of her favourite haunts, the Coolmore Stud in Ireland, to paint the crown jewels of British bloodstock, a dynasty unrivalled anywhere in the world.

This is awe inspiring, expensive horseflesh rendered in bold, muscular, fluid strokes with the confidence that comes from Taylor’s intimate understanding of equine anatomy. Extract from catalogue introduction by Jane Wheatley, 2010