Tommy Taylor + bio | statement | press
Atlantan Magazine
January/February 2010
By Kristi York Wooten
“Taylor-Made: Abstract painter Tommy Taylor’s return to his native South sparks a creative tsunami”
The tired stereotype about artists being reclusive, social misfits doesn’t fit Tommy Taylor. For starters, this just-turned-40 bachelor (he’s single, ladies) is not only gregarious, but has a gift for gab. And with a future exhibition at London’s prestigious Frieze Art Fair and artist’s residency this fall in Seoul, South Korea, this boyishly handsome South-of-Grant Park local can scarcely afford to be introverted. But before Taylor goes global, he has a major Atlanta exhibit opening January 15 at Whitespace gallery. The show will feature an all-new series of his colorful acrylics and oils. His lush, expressive paintings have been likened to Willem de Kooning’s and have earned Taylor a reputation as a “painter’s painter.”
“Growing up, I hung out with the kids who sat in the back of the class, always drawing,” Taylor says of his upbringing in the conservative South Carolina town of Greenville. “They all went on the become architects and musicians, and I became an artist.” Taylor, who holds a BFA from the University of Georgia, ended up in Atlanta after living in both Savannah and New York City post-college. Visiting Greenville last year to help a friend with an extended art assignment had a rather cathartic effect on his own art— giving him the mental space to produce an entire show’s worth of work. Taylor, who revels in “the immediacy and fearlessness of the application of paint,” counts angst-ridden, British figurative painter Francis Bacon as a major influence, but he also gives props to abstract expressionist Antoni Tàpies and the conceptual/surrealist art of Inka Essenhigh. And although Taylor’s purposeful lines and pastel color blocks are a far cry from American painter Andrew Wyeth’s stark realism, he owes much of his interest in art to the classes he took as a young boy at the Greenville County Museum of Art, which once housed the world’s largest collection of Wyeth’s paintings. “I was always amazed at how [Wyeth] could render a rusty bucket with just a few brushstrokes,” Taylor laughs.
As for his own work, Taylor has had some pretty famous clients: Try fashion photographers Steven Klein and Ruven Afanador, for whom he beautified an on-set shoot involving actress Uma Thurman. He has also added flourishes to some of Atlanta’s hippest nightclubs of yore (Mumbo Jumbo, Fusebox, Vision), as well as the glam-graffiti décor of the current Midtown bôite Aurum. Taylor was even commissioned by Anthropologie to embellish the walls of its boho-chic stores nationwide.
Everything from a Metallica song to an accidental encounter with ‘60s pop artist Peter Saul is fodder for Taylor’s abstract but reality-grounded canvases— an approach that meshes just fine for a painter who wishes the art world wasn’t “so esoteric.”
Dialogue: Two reviews of Tommy Taylor’s Tangent
Friday, February 19, 2011
Burnaway.org
By Susannah Darrow and Laura Hennighausen
Laura Hennighausen
I honestly hadn’t used the word “anthropomorphic” since the days of art history term papers, but it comes in handy when describing Tommy Taylor’s exhibit of abstracts currently on display at Whitespace. Entitled Tangent, the show is a homecoming for Taylor after several years in Savannah and New York. I visited the exhibition with a friend, and we used the opportunity to gab loudly and excitedly about his works without worry of distracting other viewers.
In Taylor’s words, these paintings took him “down the rabbit hole” as he concentrated on not concentrating, allowing the works to develop as they wished and eliminating any preconceived notions of what a painting “should” be. Tangent is a welcome break from the staid abstracts littering Atlanta; I found myself rattling off imaginative comparisons and speaking excitedly to my companion about Taylor’s process. Paint, as well as graphite and chalk, is layered on the canvas and then stripped away to reveal engrossing colors and shapes. The fluctuation of palette choices and canvas size throughout the exhibition adds extra visual interest, as does the staccato staggering and grouping of the works.
Susannah Darrow
Artist Tommy Taylor returns to Atlanta after ten years with a bang in his current exhibition at Whitespace. Tangent offers a mature and cohesive body of work that reflects the artist’s exploration of his own painting style and exercises in balancing self-control with letting go. Both the color and level of precision reflect subtle variations and developments as you move through the gallery. The most extreme divisions, however, are in Taylor’s use of color. The show begins with more subdued neutrals, golds, and plums and then moves to a retro palette of bright red and mint. Taylor’s “anthropomorphic abstracts” serve as the thread that connects these pigment detours.
Taylor’s paintings pull from a variety of sources that span from a Twombly-esque use of pencil and chalk scratched into the surfaces of his paintings to a purple and gold palette reminiscent of Japanese screen paintings. Any allusions to the past, though, are only secondary to the compositions that are uniquely Taylor’s.