For more than fifty years, Andy Taylor has been drawing and painting the scenery within a day’s drive of his studio in Carbondale, Colorado. Familiar landscapes painted in Taylor’s colorful, gestural style convey the mood of the artist, seen through his characteristic brushwork and vibrant palette. The subjective reactions to reality in the form of shape and color are a signature of Taylor’s work.
Andy Taylor is passionate about the ideas he visualizes – a feeling, a color, a style – and spends months or years developing the portrayal in his mind and projecting it on to canvas. As the idea takes form, Taylor completes a series of works and moves on to the next visualization. Over the years, Taylor's landscapes have grown in their abstraction, emphasizing the dance of light, the movement of leaves, the most simple blocking of shape in a majestic landscape.
Taylor starts his process with pen and ink sketches with marginalia, a process he considers to be the bones of a painting and a form of meditation. His sketches are visual reminders of a scene, but are always left incomplete, leaving room within the process to “invent significance and freedom to make discoveries” as he paints. Every inch of Taylor’s hand-stretched canvas is a gift of color, achieved using the transparency and texture of the dry application of many layers of color to create a masterful palette that changes with the light as does the landscape before him.
Andy’s work has been shown at numerous Western museums, including the Denver Art Museum, the Aspen Art Museum and the Phoenix Art Museum. A veteran of many one-man and group shows since the 1970s, Taylor became a Club Artist at the prestigious Coors Western Art Show’s new gallery at the National Western Club in 2015, 2016, and 2017. He was most recently featured in Southwest Art Magazine’s Andy Taylor: Discovery of a Lifetime.
