This book presents a comprehensive view of the work of American painter Philip Taaffe (b.1955), who has expanded the parameters of painting through his use of silkscreen, linocuts, collage, stencils, gouache, chine-collé, marbling, acrylic, enamel, watercolour and gold leaf. Possessing many technical skills, Taaffe has moved decisively between unique pictorial inventions and appropriations, as well as overlaying divergent modes of representation, through cultural patterns found in ornament, and biomorphic abstraction.

John Yau's insightful text is the first to look at every part of Taaffe's artistic development, from the works he made at Cooper Union while a student of Hans Haacke, to the present. It pays special attention to Taaffe's acquisition of different techniques, as well as investigating his various sources of inspiration, which include the work of experimental filmmakers Stan Brakhage, Bruce Conner and Harry Smith, the Natural History illustrations of Ernst Haeckel, and the ancient art of paper marbling.

'Philip Taaffe's paintings build their own autonomous structure out of a voice and a tone which is deeply personal and uncompromising, but are filled too with strange echoes from the history of art. There is a fearless sense of beauty, a sort of restrained wildness, a willingness to see both ordered pattern and chaotic yearning for possibility and transcendence. His unceasing task for four decades has been to activate space, to test the boundaries to see how much a picture can take.' -- Colm Toibin
'Philip Taaffe's paintings spring from the twin root of art history and the natural world. Through a wide range of work, and a self-critical practice, he has pushed abstraction into new realms, holding icons and calligraphy in the same regard as plants, snakes and shells. His work is both expansive and necessary.' -- Brice Marden

John Yau is an award-winning poet, art critic and curator who has published many books of poetry, fiction and art criticism. He is the author of a volume on American painter Thomas Nozkowski for the Lund Humphries Contemporary Painters Series.