I started drawing as soon as I was old enough to hold a pencil. I 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, I soon moved on to the art/music/film troika of Mad Magazine, KISS and Star Wars while still in grade school. By age 10 I was producing a weekly comic strip for the local paper and had found my calling.
By the time I started college I was making the transition from cartoonist to painter. Eager to make that happen through effort and persistence, I made a New Year's Resolution to paint three small paintings a day, every day, for the entire year of 1993. Initially these paintings were simply line drawings with color applied paint-by-numbers style. At some point that year, though, my work crossed over that often hard to define boundary between illustration and painting. More importantly, I developed a style and enduring work habits. By immersing myself in the daily practice of painting I began to look at the world around me differently- more observant, conscious of visual details.
I had started college intending to pursue studio art but instead found myself drawn to the Art History classes that met across from the art studios at the University of Memphis. The quiet rigor of pursuing an Art History degree requires many hours of looking and listening. This "taking in" proved be a perfect balance to my daily painting sessions- an input/output yin and yang.
My Fine Art influences include Jasper Johns, Stuart Davis, Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat. I'm also influenced by the regional art of my 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 a key influence. I also draw inspiration from graffiti art, specifically the stylized, single gesture marks of graffiti 'tagging'.
Based on the ephemera of modern urban life, my paintings explore the things we look at each day without seeing. Though everything is game imagery-wise, I am drawn to advertising images and glyphs, the visual shorthand of contemporary culture.
In a sense my painting's 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 layer's is informed by the abandoned billboard's peeling layers revealing bits of images that came before, scraps of its history visible all at once. - Johnny Taylor, June, 2008
