Lawrence Taylor's Artwork – featured in The Desert Sun:

Follow Lawrence Taylor into his mysterious landscapes

Artist combines impressionism with realism in his paintings

Nature in its guises has long been an active presence in Lawrence Taylor’s paintings. In his landscapes, he is masterly at conveying the essential spirit of a place by his brilliant use of color and his understanding of how light alters what is seen. Each of his paintings is a celebration of nature’s beauty.

Impressionistic in style, Taylor embraces a skillful blend of realism as well. Many of his art works include a path or steps that dare the viewer of follow to a place that will forever remain unknown.

As part of the Annual Heat of the Night Art Walk at The Art Place on Friday in Palm Desert, Desert Art Source Gallery will spotlight Taylor’s paintings as an ode to the summer season.

A comfortable niche

Taylor was born in Nebraska, spending his early years absorbing the strong values and hard work ethic of this country’s Middle West. Always an artist, he honed his talents in local schools including the University of Nebraska.

The lure of California, especially San Francisco during the late ‘60s, found him enrolled in art school and studying with several established artists in the Bay Area.

Taylor embraced all of the art movements, but found a comfortable niche in impressionist with a realistic touch.

Taylor is substantially a lyrical painter blessed with the good taste of a pleasingly decorative sense accompanied by an expressive sureness, especially in the facility of his draftsmanship, which is penetrating and free. All of his works reveal an intimate emotionalism and sense of proportion. He combines a subtle intoxication with a sense of vigor that has its own linguistic syntax, its own rules that control the freedom of the brush. As he says “Impressionism with realism.”

Traditional values

Taylor works with an extremely rich palette. Viewing his work, one is struck with the secure hold that the artist has over landscape, making it a great force of persuasion for his artistic message. At times he has a touch of the extravagant that he then develops with a modern sensibility of taste and subject.

Taylor’s artistic path is marked by human and sensitive research that carries him to the corners of the world according to the needs of his restless creative personality. For him everything is a pretext for that poetic ferment that he translates into his vigorous visual images.

Taylor is an authentic artist. He loves reality, which is confirmed by his subject matter. He believes in the traditional expressive values of art and continues to offer his audience the gifs of beauty and love in this otherwise emotionless techno-world.

Jean McKig is a free-lance writer based in Pinyon Crest.

From The Desert Sun
May 2000