Voices of Experience - Bryan Mark TaylorVoices of Experience Bryan Mark Taylor Widely traveled artist Bryan Mark Taylor has a diversity of skills and talents. In addition to winning top awards both nationally and internationally, Taylor lectures and teaches, co-founding the Sentient Academy and Vision X global art conference. Artists may also know Taylor as the developer of the popular Strada easel. He shared with us paintings from his world travels, notes on his painting process, the beginnings of his artistic journey, and his thoughts for students beginning their journey on the artist's road.
As a child, I had an intense love for the outdoors and enjoyed hiking, backpacking, and fishing in the Rocky Mountains, which eventually led to my interest in landscape painting. My parents were supportive, and I was able to begin private painting and drawing lessons around the age of ten. I had the privilege to take classes from a wide variety of teachers. However, I didn't study with one particular artist for too long because I wanted to develop my own individual style. However, some teachers like Huihan Liu remain good friends.
There are so many beautiful places to travel to, but I think Italy is still my favorite because I lived there in my late teens and early 20s and learned the language. However, I've enjoyed other places aside from European and North and South American countries—India and China, for example. Their cultures are so different from what we are used to here in the west, and there are many beautiful things to paint in these places.
Will you share with us your typical palette pigment colors and other materials you use?
One of my recently completed pieces is called Loire Valley Twilight. This piece was based on a plein air sketch made in 2018 and featured a degree of realism. However, it is a carefully composed piece where I had to arrange, invent and redesign all the elements to make the composition work. This includes colors, values as well as the individual components in the painting. For example, the boats in the foreground were entirely made up based on the general types of vessels you’d find along the river. The values were also carefully executed to create that specific time of day when the sun sets, and the first lights of the city come on.
You have an excellent facility in taking your work to the more abstract. Are you working both representationally and abstractly simultaneously, or are you leaning toward exploring abstraction more than your representational work?
Just for fun, if you could sit down and have a long conversation over dinner with an artist from the past, who would you choose, and why? To see more of Bryan Mark Taylor's paintings, go to: All artwork copyright Bryan Mark Taylor
|
Become an Artist's Road Member Today!
Already a Member?Log in here. To renew your membership, log in and follow the links. Search the SitePerspectivesNot ready to become a Member yet? Subscribe to our free email postcards, "Perspectives". Enter your email address here.
Member ContentFree ContentThe Artist's Road StoreNocturnes - A Primer on Night Painting Filled with inspirational examples by the masters of nightime painting, this little book is sure to fire up your creative energies. Never tried painting at night? We show you how it's done with a step-by-step-oil demo and a tale of night painting in the wilds of Rocky Mountain National Park. The Primer on Night Painting - Nocturnes is a 7 x 7" PDF download with 40 pages of text and images. It includes a gallery of paintings by masters of the nocturne, information to inspire and encourage you in your plein air nocturne painting, an illustrated step-by-step demo and tips for working in pastel and oil. Also available in a softcover edition. Check out the tools and other products that we use in our own art and travels in The Artist's Road Store. We only offer things for sale that we enthusiastically believe in.
About Us
|