Made late one night in Paris
2023
Oil stick on paper

Born in 1958 in Ventura, California, the youngest of eight children, Taylor’s initial exposure to the medium of painting came from his father, who was a commercial painter employed by the U.S. Government at a naval air station. In junior high school, Taylor began to vigorously absorb the tenets of major art historical movements spanning the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries. Taylor later studied at Oxnard College, where he studied Journalism, Anthropology, and Set Design, and made the acquaintance of James Jarvaise, the Head of the Department of Fine and Performing Arts. Jervaise was instrumental in instilling the young painter with a sense of vocational efficacy that helped to focus Taylor’s efforts entirely on his artistic practice. Taylor’s formal training came in the 1990s when he studied at The California Institute of the Arts while also working as a psychiatric technician at Camarillo State Mental Hospital. It is here where Taylor developed his guiding sense of human connection while creating portraits of his patients. His practice evolved to exceed the boundaries of canvas: he began to paint the surfaces of found and discarded domestic objects like furniture, cereal boxes, empty cleaning bottles, and even packs of cigarettes. From these, Taylor creates assemblage sculptures, stacking and affixing disparate objects together to create, in some instances, faux African tribal masks from inverted Clorox bleach bottles erected on broomsticks.

What unifies Taylor’s practice across two and three dimensions is that it supersedes the confines of any traditional genre of painting and sculpture. His four-decade long practice combines pillars of figurative, landscape and history painting. Each result is a complete narrative that reflects the breadth and depth of his subject.