Camera - Johnny Taylor

Giclee available in custom sizes on fine art paper or canvas. Please call for details.

Johnny Taylor started drawing as soon as he was old enough to hold a pencil and quickly exhausted the big three subjects all artistic little boys are required to depict: spaceships, monsters and racecars. A true child of the 70's, he soon moved on to the art/music/film troika of Mad Magazine, KISS and Star Wars while still in grade school. By age 10 he was producing a weekly comic strip for the local paper and had found his calling.In 1993, Johnny made a New Year's Resolution to paint three small paintings a day, every day, for the entire year. By immersing himself in the daily practice of painting he began to look at the world around him differently - more observant and conscious of visual details. Johnny started college intending to pursue studio art but instead was drawn to the Art History classes that met across from the art studios at the University of Memphis. Jasper Johns, Stuart Davis, Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat inspired Johhny. He was also influenced by the regional art of his native American South, especially by Southern folk artists' use of text as both a thematic and decorative element. The Quilts of Gee's Bend are good example. He also draws inspiration from graffiti art, specifically the stylized, single gesture marks of graffiti "tagging".Though everything is game, imagery-wise, he is drawn to advertising images and glyphs, the visual shorthand of contemporary culture. In a sense, his paintings are post-modern landscapes. “I paint what I see. A painting's composition may derive from an underpass’ blocky, irregular patchwork of painted-over graffiti. Another piece's umber and vermillion color scheme may be inspired by a business sign I've seen on a street that I travel regularly. My practice of applying layer upon layer and the subsequent masking and tearing away of those layers to reveal many previous layers is informed by the abandoned billboards peeling layers revealing bits of images that came before, scraps of its history visible all at once.”