Shaun Taylor
Nashville -
United States
Mixed Media & Collage-
Other/Misc.
Timeline:
1983 to present / Art Instructor, Designer, Illustrator, Painter and Print Maker, Art Appraiser, Art Director
1983 / Studied graphic arts and illustration / Art Institute of Houston
1975 - 1981/ Paintings exhibited in Juried Exhibitions at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts & the Birmingham Museum of Art /
Recipient of "Best Painting Award" / Birmingham Art Association Jury Exhibition
1981 / Bachelor of Fine Arts / Birmingham Southern College (Recipient of Intaglio Print Award at BFA Graduate Art Exhibition)
1978 - 2009 / Works exhibited in solo shows and in group shows nationally and internationally.
1975 / Studied design at the Julian Academy / Paris, France
For information about purchasing and commissioning art works, email: lakotavision16@yahoo.com
website:
www.artistsites.org/ShaunTaylor/
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Artist Blogs
NadaDada Motel
2009-06-23
The following blog entry was written by Patricia Brown for the New York Times
RENO, Nev. — Venice has its Biennale. Basel, Switzerland, has its Art Basel. And Reno has the NadaDada Motel, a jubilantly unpretentious art event in which some 100 artists rent rooms at two of the city’s vintage hotels and motels and temporarily transform nicotine-infused rooms into art.
At NadaDada, one can find ceramic sea anemones on a simulated beach in one room (a comment on global warming displayed in El Cortez Hotel by Cindy Gunn) or encounter a bed in another room on which the bedspread and burgundy pillows are decorated with stencils of guns (“The Reno Gun Show,” also displayed in El Cortez, by Ann O’Lear).
The event, which is in its third year and ran from Wednesday night to Sunday, is an homage to Reno’s unsung motel heritage. It celebrates the spirit of establishments like the Ho-Hum, the Hi-Ho (could be they got the idea of 'Ho' from HoJo, as in Howard Johnson, or maybe it's a reference to the oldest...nevermind), the 777 and the Sandman.
“Transience is very much alive in Reno,” Jennifer Garza-Cuen, a photographer, said of the 50 or so motels that survive in downtown Reno, a city of about 210,000. “There’s a poignancy to it.” Many of the hotels have been plagued in recent years by drug dealing and other criminal activity.
The Town House Motor Lodge and El Cortez served as sites for NadaDada this year. The event attracted more than 3,000 visitors, more than double last year’s attendance.
At both venues, artists paid normal rates — about $150 a night — for rooms that were essentially blank canvases, canvases with wall-mounted Zenith television sets and orange shag carpet. Many artists did away with the rooms’ furniture completely, turning them into minimalist galleries.
El Cortez was built in 1931 to take advantage of the state’s liberalized divorce laws, back in the days before no-fault divorce when thousands wanting to untie the knot flocked to Nevada.
Vintage motels and lodging houses dot the landscape here, many holdovers from the divorce era as well as Reno’s now-dimmed status as a paradise for road-trip vacationers.
“Divorce seems like a weird thing to brag about, but it’s part of the attraction,” said Chad Sorg, 36, a window cleaner and video blogger who has curated two shows of NadaDada artists’ work at the Marjorie Barrick Museum at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
The NadaDada concept — “Get A Room, Make a Show” — came from Jeff Johnson, 48, a custom neon artist who thought the city’s sparsity of art galleries could provide an opportunity for artists to show their work independently. Participants came out of the woodwork — much like the roaches some of them encountered this year beneath the Formica furniture.
One room in the Town House motel contained Dominique Palladino’s artistic musing on matriarchal society, a display for which she tacked 600 pages of the Bible to the walls and placed a glass-encased hive of live bees in the middle of the room. In Room 311 of El Cortez, Erik Holland displayed plein-air paintings in gilt-edged frames.
There was quite a contrast in the El Cortez lobby on Thursday between an artist toting an 8-foot praying mantis and a full-time hotel resident, William Hogg, an 80-year-old retired electrical engineer who was trying to concentrate on his crossword puzzle. Mr. Hogg, who was born in Wales, described the artists’ physical appearances as “iffy.”
The iffiest may have been that of Andrea D. Juillerat in Room 218. Ms. Juillerat, a 39-year-old sign language interpreter and performance artist, designed a room filled with an enormous dress, made of 150 yards of flowing white fabric, that her fiancé, Ricardo Olvera, stapled to the room’s baseboards. Covered in white makeup, like a Japanese Butoh dancer, and draped in the sprawling garment, Ms. Juillerat stood in the room, unable to move since her dress was fixed to the walls. She said her work, “Sugar Room,” was meant to be a metaphor for prostitution and trapped women.
Many of the artists were inspired by what John Molezzo, a court reporter by day and an artist in his off hours, called the “mythic, Old West quality of Reno.” Mr. Molezzo displayed his own photographs, which showed blurs of neon and toothsome automobiles. “It’s a cinematic city,” he said. “Unlike Las Vegas, it’s still a step back in time.”
Some artists, though, ignored Reno and its history entirely. The Los Angeles Mud People, an improvisational silent performance art group, turned their room into a forest floor, with dried leaves strewn about and a small tree in the center ornamented with plastic motel drinking cups in translucent sanitary wrapping.
Daniel Sterling, a landscaper who said he has not worked since last November, traded his skills in exchange for a free stay at the Town House motel. He converted the previously dirt- and weed-covered courtyard into a verdant patio.
During NadaDada, Mr. Johnson, the neon artist, displayed a piece of art in the courtyard — a bullet-ridden newspaper vending machine in which the words “News Media Under Fire” had been inserted in neon.
Robert Greco, 50, a former steelworker from Steubenville, Ohio, who has lived at the Town House motel for a year, said NadaDada was “a dose of energy.”
“It’s nice to have a little bit of artwork up front,” Mr. Greco said of Mr. Johnson’s piece on the new lawn. “It perks up your whole day.”
Van Gogh's Ear
2009-06-15
The following was written by
Kurt Shaw, a writer who covers the art scene for the Tribune-Review.
It's one of the most legendary stories in all of art history. That in 1888, Vincent van Gogh cut off part of his left ear and gave it to a prostitute named Rachel as a gesture of love.
Now, a soon to be released English version of the German book titled "Van Goghs Ohr: Paul Gauguin und der Pakt des Schweigens " (Van Gogh's Ear: Paul Gauguin and the Pact of Silence) will be published in an attempt to debunk the legend.
In it, Hamburg-based academics Hans Kaufmann and Rita Wildegans proffer that the official version of events are inconsistent at best. Instead, they theorize that the lopping off of van Gogh's ear was a mere accident, the result of a row between he and fellow artist Paul Gauguin on Dec. 23, 1888.
Two months prior, the pair had taken up quarters in a small yellow house in Arles at the suggestion of Theo van Gogh, Vincent's older brother and patron and Gauguin's dealer in Paris.
Much has been made of Vincent van Gogh's descent into madness, a probable result of a bipolar affliction that led him to commit suicide at the age of 37. But in the fall of 1888, living alone in the south of France, van Gogh's only complaint in letters written to Theo was that of shear loneliness.
Theo's idea that Gauguin and van Gogh should live together had many advantages: Gauguin could keep an eye on the increasingly unstable Vincent, and the two stone-broke artists could share expenses. Excited by the idea, Vincent thought together they would form a "Studio of the South" in the little yellow house.
This would be "an artists' house," wrote Vincent, "but not affected, on the contrary, nothing affected."
But living, eating and working together in a room only 15 feet wide and 24 feet long proved to be taxing. Except for occasional outings with visiting friends and nightly visits to the local brothels, which the pair termed "hygienic excursions," the two artists were rarely apart.
Imagine this "Odd Couple" pairing. Van Gogh, then 35, was "Oscar." Just as unkempt as Neil Simon's Broadway and TV character, he would talk incessantly while working frenetically, oftentimes fueled by too much alcohol.
The 40-year-old Gauguin, on the other hand, liked everything orderly and neat. He was the "Felix" of the scenario. A former stockbroker and onetime sailor in France's Merchant Marine, he favored solitude, but was a good cook who did not mind preparing meals for others. That was another plus for van Gogh, who sometimes would rather drink than eat.
The only commonalities between the two were bouts of depression and suicidal tendencies.
Gauguin's account is telling: "Between two such beings as he and I, the one a perfect volcano, the other boiling inwardly, some sort of struggle was preparing."
It all came to a head on Dec. 23.
Upset over Gauguin's plans to return to Paris for Christmas, two days prior van Gogh had hurled a glassful of absinthe at Gauguin at a local bar in a fit of rage. "Dear Gauguin," wrote a sober Vincent the following day, "I have a vague memory that I offended you last evening."
Gauguin, who by then was staying in a hotel, readily forgave him. But when Gauguin set about leaving the next day, Dec. 23, with suitcases in hand, van Gogh ran after him in the street hurling wild accusations. Gauguin turned to confront him, whereupon van Gogh retreated to the house they shared.
There, as legend goes, he used the razor to cut off part of his left ear, which he carefully wrapped in newspaper and presented to a young woman at the local brothel who promptly, and fittingly, fainted.
Van Gogh was hospitalized, and Gauguin left for Paris the next day.
But after van Gogh's discharge from the hospital, he begged Gauguin in a letter not to speak ill of "our poor little yellow house."
Kaufmann and Wildegans spent 10 years reviewing the police report, witness accounts and the artists' letters. They claim that it was Gauguin, a skilled fencer, who most likely sliced off the ear with a sword in an act of defense during their final fracas, and the two artists agreed to keep a "pact of silence" -- Gauguin to avoid prosecution and van Gogh in a vain attempt to maintain the friendship, even though van Gogh was institutionalized for most of the rest of his short life and never saw Gauguin again.
Though this new theory of the ear incident will likely be hotly debated (scholars at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam have already publicly dismissed the theory), one thing is clear: The nine short weeks van Gogh and Gauguin spent together in late 1888 in Arles produced works that helped set the stage for much of what we know today as modern art.
During that brief, exhilarating period these two not-yet-famous artists created a stream of masterpieces within the shared studio -- including Van Gogh's "Sunflowers," which decorated Gauguin's bedroom wall.
The story also has inspired writers and filmmakers over the past 120 years, as evidenced by the numerous books and films on the subject.
Which is why most of the Western world believes they know what happened to van Gogh's ear.
Given the romantic nature of the tale, perhaps this story is better left alone. After all, of the long list of biographers for either artist, none have ever come across this account before, and Kaufmann and Wildegans theory of what happened is just that, a theory.
A Painting Riddle
2009-06-08
I thought I would relate something that really got my
attention. I was looking through an art book and saw a
painting by the artist, Annibale Carracci, an Italian
Baroque painter from the mid 16th century. The
painting is entitled, "Christ Appearing to Saint Peter
on the Appian Way". The painting concerns an apparent
vision that St. Peter had. It shows Christ carrying a
cross and pointing toward the viewer. St. Peter, who,
of course, appears startled, asks Christ, "Where are
you going?" To which Christ replies,"I am going to
Rome to be crucified again."
Dali and Picasso
2007-12-18
I tried to "copy and paste" some video links from the You Tube website. It didn't work. But if you want to see a couple of artists from the 20th Century doing what they do best, then just follow the instructions below:
To view a Picasso video, go to www.youtube.com and key in The "The Mystery of Pablo Picasso". It's a black and white documentary that is, apparently, a French national treasure. Besides the part of the film that shows Picasso painting, there is also a stop action segment of the works that he did for the documentary that, from an historical standpoint at least, is worth watching.
Another film, that appears to be from the '70s, is of Salvador Dali doing a very strange and to some degree comical bit of performance art. Go to You Tube and key in "Salvador Dali & Gala Born From an Egg" and search.
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