Interview with Tim Taylor
Can you tell us about your background and what initially drew you to the world of art? Were there any significant influences or experiences in your early years that shaped your decision to become an artist?
I grew up in the days of The Beatles, Rolling Stones, and Peter Max. My parents loved and encouraged the arts, so as a child I had art lessons, music practice, and was in theater. I was just a kid who liked to make stuff and do things. In high school my art teacher was very encouraging. I didn’t really like many of the classes except art, band, and drama. Art was a time you could make whatever you wanted, and you could imagine anything. The assignment to “paint whatever you want” worked for me.
Thinking about a career in art got real in my senior year while I was an art major at Cal State Chico. It was time to decide what to do after college. With a double major in art and chemistry, it was a dilemma. Should I gamble on my hopes? Unable to resist I went to Graduate school at Claremont, which marketed itself as having promise for studio art. But there was no roadway to success like I hoped.
Where does the “art world” begin? I still dream of being in the art world, without the distractions of having to make a living by mundane hourly work. I don’t take any exhibits for granted. It still feels lucky to be invited into a show.
I stayed with it because studio art is what I love doing most. Once you know the joy of making art, nothing comes close. It really wasn’t a choice of being in the art world. I’m not sure that’s a choice you can make. Somewhere along the long line of show applications and rejections, well past the point of giving up ever being in the art world, they started to accept my work. I think the art world chooses you.
How have your personal history and experiences shaped your identity as an artist? Can you share how your cultural, social, or familial background has impacted the themes or techniques in your work?
I’ve made many foolish decisions to make art instead of pursue more profitable things. I’ve quit good jobs to go chasing after the Muse, convinced I was doing the right thing, only for her to disappear in thin air. I watched my beautiful young wife walk out the door saying she thought she knew me better after a show that brought out a character she hated. So my identity as an artist includes a lot of guilt and failure in other matters in life. But one of the most foolish things I ever did was go to Washington DC to study medicine at George Washington University, the most expensive med school on the planet. I got sucked in by their pitch that medicine could be an art and a humanity. Creativity would not go to waste. But it would become a lifetime of unsolvable debt by a hard taskmaster, at best. Doctors have to ignore their own hearts to be successful. The MD would be life’s most potent barrier to making any art, and it came with a promise to grease the wheel in life. The student loan debt exposed me to truly horrible people who used it to run my life.
I was never able to match up commercial success with my visions. I quit work in 1998, blowing off student loans, because I was cast in a play that took all day to rehearse and memorize. What was education worth, if it didn’t lead you into your dreams, or if it prevented them? After doing a theater show with a well known director, I thought we were going to make a movie next, but the director died while the script was being written. So, I went to the Johnson Atelier as an apprentice (Grounds for Sculpture), thinking to at least earn an hourly wage in art. I learned some casting, patina, and stone techniques, but I was a grunt and the mold rubber gave me a rash. Back then the Atelier was still pouring metal. Seward Johnson was making the enamel-painted Marilyn Monroe and Laurel and Hardy bronze statues, and bringing Monet’s into the third dimension. Johnson is also where George Segal’s “Depression Breadline” was in production. I was one of the commissioned artists working on Andrzej Pitynski’s “The Partisans”, and had an unforgettable time with Pitynski. I loved working with him and the other sculptors and metal pourers.
After a short apprenticeship at Johnson, I sculpted art for a producer who was making a Children’s Museum in Nashville, and I made some theater setwork while acting in some stage and TV productions. I’ve been adrift throughout life in that way. I made backdrops and sculptural stage props while acting in community theater shows, and worked only enough to pay the rent. By the early 2000’s my defaulted student loans had become a guarantee of perpetual poverty. A perfect irony to all the youthful hopes of a graduate education, I had to come to terms with the fact that there would be no “success” – I had passed a point of no return in debt. So in my 30’s and 40’s there was no point in trying to redeem a “career”. I knew I would always be poor, by virtue of the education that promised comfort. And in that guarantee of perpetual poverty, there was nothing to lose. I wanted to deliver art as a gift – not a gift that you had, but something you would give. Poverty was something the debt collectors in Education couldn’t loot. Art’s there for you when all you have is a chunk of plaster or a piece of paper and some charcoal. So art becomes even more precious when it’s all you have to do, and to offer. A little wax can be purchased for the price of a candle, and if you save it maybe you can cast it when you have the money.
Resources have always been a factor in choice of mediums. I’ve made more art from scratch than wealth. I’ll blow lunch to get a tube of burnt sienna. When I can’t afford a canvas or don’t have the space to paint big, I’ll buy a small set of colors with warm and cool to mix hues from. Many waxes have waited months for the right foundry, and only about half make it to metal. So, loss and slim means have definitely had influence through the years. I never had the resources to sculpt that large aluminum. The worse abject poverty of my life came recently, from the vaccine mandate, which stopped all my work, art, and theater. As if all the social forces that brought oppression to American art in the 60’s had reproduced and populated the whole earth. I spent 2022 on food stamps after I sold all I had. My cameras became bowls of soup and I was glad to sell them and have something to eat. All my paid-for travel and show plans in 2020 were canceled. I find myself making art from whatever I can find again. And that’s where cutting small rocks started. I didn’t have the money to buy a sable paintbrush. My mail was heisted for a year, and I couldn’t order anything - internal theft that the Post Office could not solve. I’d made speech about the vaccine, and found myself experiencing the full power of National Intelligence in censorship and social destruction. I could not even audition for a Union theater show, or do extra work for a meal. My car was repossessed in Saipan, because I was on travel when locked down in USA on the way to Europe for show. All the 2020 shows were canceled from Italy to Paris, to Sicily and Austria. My residency in Umbria never happened. My studio across the world was lost with all the art in process. So, I picked up a few rocks and was able to grind and polish them. I don’t know if it kept me sane or if I went nuts, but I found solace in a pace of production, in and of itself. I set out to cut one rock a day. There have been a few times in life like this when all I had was a chunk of plaster and maybe some pastels. I’ve had to choose what to do with only a few bucks, and that has been a big limit. In the pandemic, it was a handful of rocks.
I don’t give much thought to “theme”. When younger, I would say that it was important for art to be playful. Whimsical. But now I make art out of personal need to have something to do, and it isn’t always playful anymore. I still think artwork should be pleasant to experience visually. Art should do only what art can do. Harmony is an important theme. You have to listen to the art while it’s being made, and be in tune with your heart. The work finds its own way, and you are the medium, not the materials, that art travels through to become a real object.
Having established yourself successfully in the art world, what changes have you observed in the industry over the years, and how do you adapt to these evolving dynamics while staying true to your artistic vision?
Thank you, Veronica. I’m flattered by the question, and your look at my work is something I value, but I have to admit that success isn’t something I feel. Industrial dynamics are something I have to ignore. They go over my head anyway.
It isn’t difficult to stay true to my artistic impulses, but they aren’t usually in line with trends in art. I can’t really follow the trends. Style takes longer to develop than what’s in style can last. You can’t chase what’s in vogue and follow your internal impulses at the same time. They are exclusive. What’s in style comes and goes, and even repeats itself. The most original work hasn’t happened yet, and therefor can’t really ever be in style. What’s in style is stuff that’s already happened. I just accept what’s next in my own process. Fine art should last longer than the fad and even the generation it’s made in. You can’t say if your work will last the test of time. There is the ultimate risk of being an artist, even if what you are doing catches on in your lifetime. Your own style is all you can really own, and it takes years to develop, where trends are semi-annual.
Can you walk us through your creative process? How do you decide which medium—be it painting, ceramics, multimedia, sculpture, ultraviolet, or installation—best suits a new idea or concept?
They are one and the same – the artwork and the medium. I don’t know how to choose a medium separate from the artwork itself. I try to filter out any idea or concept before I make a piece, or else the art becomes a servant, and the process is just labor. It’s more an inner visual impulse, which can be triggered by almost anything, including a fleeting feeling. The offense of a barbed wire barrier made to keep people out at the border, or inside a prison, is an abject object. But the tangled wire itself can defy it’s ugly purpose, and be strangely beautiful. A bloody mess in surgery under the light can be quite colorful. There’s a visual impulse before any meaning sets in. Art lives outside all that is expected. It has no rules. The impulse itself needs bringing into the world translated as an art object, and it usually includes it’s own most suitable medium from the early stages. I may decide if the form should be plaster or metal after it’s sculpted, based on what it looks like, but that’s secondary to the already formed object. I might have to decide if it’s something that I want to last years. If I like it enough, I’ll bronze it and go to the extra work. Still, I have to be able to afford the foundry. There is often little choice available. The medium becomes what you have available to work with in the moment. You can’t do Raku in an apartment home.
I think it’s important to include an element of art’s history in a piece. If it’s going to be in the continuum, it doesn’t hurt to include a subtle reference to the genre that a work may owe it’s development from.
With such a diverse portfolio, how do you hope to engage and communicate with your audience? Is there a central message or theme you aim to convey across all your works?
Probably that we are free. Art is free, even if we are not. Art has no laws. Authority in it is misplaced. But I’m not sure I work to communicate that specifically.
The audience is even more diverse than my portfolio. Medium constancy may not carry a message I’d want to demonstrate. There might be something about range, like a journeyman actor that can both do comedy and drama. A narrow identity limits the artist for the sake of easier recognition, but that’s type casting. I’m not convinced that specializing in a traditional medium isn’t just a dead end.
It’s all a single body of work. Thematically, I think the best art is purely visual pleasure. It’s something you look at and enjoy. The sensation of color on the eye. The harmonics of form that strum inner chords. The taste of the look. Fine cuisine has no message whatever. We love chocolate perfectly independent of any influence or “idea”. It is sensual. The best visual art is perfectly instrumental. A journeyman musician plays many different instruments. We have to deal with the fact that most everything has been done, except for what comes from within. You aren’t going to paint anything finer than Bonnard, no matter how specialized and practiced you become. You can only discover something from inside your own world or share a viewpoint that comes from occupying the space only you are in.
Working with such diverse materials, from pastels and pencil to charcoal and rare stones, how do you approach learning and mastering new techniques?
I can’t let go of any medium is part of the problem. I miss clay when I haven’t made any in a while. All these things I started learning in youth. How can I let go? If I leave sculpture behind to paint for too long, I feel emptiness. Like I abandoned something. It’s more that I don’t want to stop doing the things I love than wanting to be a master. You can apply all the principles of art making to any material on earth. The set of materials that is found in any art store is very finite and limits the potential that art has in our time. The fresco was innovation in it’s age.
Style is developed within mastery that already exists. Choices become a matter of personal growth and expression. You don’t work much on the “how to” beyond a point in development. It’s fascinating to learn how to draw when you are young, and you never forget your early lessons. It’s more important to stay in practice. It then becomes a question of what is worth the work of it. You want your product to be worth it’s time in production and for others to enjoy. You work more on subtracting elements than you do on generating them. If someone else can do it, you let them. You are after your own peculiar vision and the mediums are chosen to match the visual experience you intend to share.
How do you see your artistic vision evolving with the incorporation of so many different mediums? Does each medium bring a unique perspective to your overarching vision?
I don’t think I’ll end up choosing one medium over the other as the result of an evolution, or refinement. I can’t see sculpting in only a few materials or painting only in acrylics or oils. Some of the most progressive art is made from materials they don’t sell at Dick Blick. I get my enamels from the auto paint section. When I see a material, I sometimes want to use it for what it’s not purposed. The assumptions of “purpose” echo historic debates on form and function in art. There is no greater function for any material than the generation of an art object.
I get excited by the curiosity of what a new combination of materials can achieve visually. Right now I’m sculpting a cement piece but with the intention of embellishing the surface with hammered industrial white diamond. The form will become white, and as far as I know this hasn’t been tried yet. I have to do it before I’ll know if I like the way it looks. So there is steel, concrete, stucco or grout, hammered diamond, and sealant – none of which can be purchased at the art store, and few studios that will allow the mess of production. There is a possibility of conceptual chiaroscuro by the materials themselves, and it’s the curiosity that drives me to do it. I don’t really have the ability to refuse myself.
I imagine these dysfunctional things that no gallery would accept. I have all these bad art habits. It’s pure hedonism. Rounded little psychiatrists in soft chairs have noticed the same thing and warned me that I’m spread too thin to ever make a mark. I’ve been advised to hone into one area, but I can’t let go to seek that kind of success. Big money in art kind of success is just another one of the things that have already been done.
Ultraviolet as a medium is quite distinctive. How does working with ultraviolet light influence the aesthetic and thematic aspects of your work?
The experience of painting in UV is magic. You have a blob of brightly colored light on the tip of your brush. You become like an angel or a wizard.
I used to intellectualize it, to excuse myself for it. The pupil was wide open in the dark, and would let more light in. Like the movie theater, everything projected is brighter in the dark. We can travel far away. UV can be like painting large, or playing loud guitar. Or, it can be dainty and subtle. It can have enhanced vibrato, and electronic rhythm. Light as color is additive, not subtractive. It’s like playing an instrument in a different key.
I fall for the glimmer of it. I eat too much candy. I sometimes eat ice cream for breakfast. I should have art diabetes from it. I know it’s bad for you. I know it has no respect in the art world, but I think it’s beautiful. Worse yet, I also like the lack of respect it can bring with it. I like to hear the gallery say no. It sets me free from something restrictive, because I’m going to do it anyway. There’s nothing better than watching the suited art snob at the show turn his nose at it. UV art won’t be seen in the politician’s embassy, and that’s a good thing.
Ultraviolets resonate with something primordial in the physics of vision. UV translates light we can’t see. It speaks another color language with a thick accent. Why is any lightbulb in the gallery not seen as a “novelty” of modern technology. Why do we think some light tubes are more acceptable in the art gallery than others? Before there was electricity, was it OK to look at cave wall paintings with the fire of a torch? If this were a theme, it would be about losing restrictions and stereotypes to magnify a purely visual sensation. I have to admit feeling motivated when the gallery says no to it. I experience an intense boredom with oil on canvas during those times.
Installation art often interacts with its environment in a unique way. How do you conceive and execute your installation pieces to engage with their surroundings?
Every art exhibit is an “installation”. I think the distinction has become a fad. Who can compete with Disney or the psychologists, for immersion? Cerebro of the X-Men with his brain cap has to be the ultimate installation experience. I think of “Clockwork Orange” where the visual experience becomes a kind of brainwash.
Most art installations are destined to a kind of mediocrity by the budget it takes to really generate a competitive immersive experience. What installation compares with the set-up where you walk in a giant Van Gogh painting? What art image is larger than the Las Vegas Sphere? Installation art is at it’s best when the installation is just the gallery itself, presenting art without “idea” or “meaning”. The best installation refers to art as the subject. Otherwise it becomes a didactic experience that comes off as an effort to influence.
I want an installation to refer to the elements of art. But I have had difficulty finding gallery approval and have been rejected frankly because my work doesn’t serve the “mission” of the gallery, even in Amsterdam.
The installations I have in my sketchbook or as models are multi media, and with UV effects, motors, and moving parts. I want to make a kinetic installation that does nothing but present color, texture and elements of art itself, with variation, on a scale that’s wider than the visual field, and with zero messaging.
Even though I’ve placed some art in the outdoors, and am planning more, setting art to the landscape or surroundings is backwards. Art shouldn’t serve any location, or theme. Art doesn’t have to refer to anything else at all. If locations are important it’s only because of the limits that boundaries place on the art itself. Visual art shouldn’t be about the environment it’s placed within. The environment doesn’t need art to translate itself. Sculpture isn’t a decoration for the builders. Art isn’t any concept’s proof. It isn’t your idea’s servant. But you do need a place to put it.
You have an exciting array of projects in process for 2024, including rare stone, fresco, wax sculpture, and acrylic paintings. Could you share some insights into these upcoming works?
Thank you I’m also excited by what I have in process. I am trying to pick up with continuity to the several shows that were canceled during the lockdowns and travel restrictions of the pandemic. Paintings that were sent back from galleries in Sicily for example and some still in Austria that never made the show, some never finished. They were to be a kind of intro to what would come next. The “Clear Painting” with invisible UV acrylics was a concept I was developing and I have some unfinished work there before I complete that set. So, 2024 will continue with the pandemic-delayed works not shown. Locked down in the USA since the pandemic, I find it almost impossible to make art here. You are on a treadmill of survival. A residency in Umbria, Italy, that was canceled had finally agreed to use the studio space for both paintings and sculptures, and also to provide my bedroom for a black light installation. That was hard to get approved, and went right down the drain. I might have to find a residency outside USA to make any art at all, and hope they don’t get to locking us down again outa White House to push another drug.
We look at art in a much more authoritarian, restricted world than it was only three years ago, and something “canned” is going on again I’m afraid. Art will only rebel. I’m probably going to have to rent a space independently to install the art I want to make. But I still have paintings, drawings, and waxes going for bronze. I have contacted a foundry that has agreed to pour some metal. Everything I owned was looted by the vaccine pushers who kept me from getting work for over two years now. The military industrial complex has gotten heavily into disease and drugs. Making original art in USA is more impossible than ever. You want a decent return on your hour’s labor, but the idea that fine art is something to get rich from is arrogance outside almost all of art history. But that is the current environment. Success is often measured by money, which never lasts. So I have to fund my own projects.
I’m hoping to complete all these sets next year to close out what was in process. The word “experiment” has reference to science, which I now reject as a humanity. The virus campaign illuminated many things that were foul about science that I now realize I shouldn’t have accepted into my art, like the concept itself of “experiment”. You don’t need to try and discover something new. You just need to follow your heart wherever it takes you, and have the courage to go there. I’m expecting my art to be finer for the rejection of principles shared by science’s viewpoints on creativity, from here out. Discovery isn’t a goal anymore. Production is enough, and we learned the real value of the show when it shut itself down for the politician quacks.
