James E Taylor, The Artist

Artistic Influences ~ James E. Taylor, Painter

My earliest memories are of grandfather, boats, tropical sun, and catching fish off the coast of Maui, in old Hawaii. I thought I caught the sun and as fish lost color in death, I was puzzled. I wanted to hold on to the color and the light. I did what all children do; I painted and drew from memory. I wasn’t exposed to formal art until about thirteen, when I went to a Saturday morning art class at the Kansas City Art Institute. What magic was happening there! I was immediately hooked to the art world and my exploration of the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art began my journey as an artist.

Of course, every boy who is interested in pictures of the sea discovers Winslow Homer, Charles Evers, Frederick Waugh and Gordon Grant who are the giants of the American Marine Art scene of mid-twentieth century. It was not many year later I discovered the long British and European Tradition, my favorite being Arthur Briscoe’s prints of working sail, which probably stimulated my interest in graphic art. As a young boy in the time of Abstract Expressionism my early art giants were predictable, Van Gogh, Jackson Pollock, Barnet Newman and Ellsworth Kelly -- I tried to figure out what they were doing by painting.

I joined the U.S. Navy and with much luck was a Photographer’s Mate where else could you live a boy’s dream playing with ships and planes all day. As the years went on, I began to receive a lot of recognition for my photography and painting, advancing to First Class and serving all over the world. My last tour was spent creating a Special Projects Section of the Atlantic Fleet Combat Camera Group. With that experience under my belt, I elected to try my luck as an artist out in the world.

I had developed a respect for comic books as visual literature while in the Navy; little knowing I was way ahead of my time. I painted in grids that began to look like newspaper pages, and told visual stories. Notice came fast and Warm Neck Funnies (all the artists involved had beards) seemed to be a success. We received some national recognition, a few prizes, but soon we ran into lack of cash flow. We had become a small band of believers and we bought a print shop, also not a success. What we learned there was that as very accomplished photographers, we knew the pre-press activity so well it made sense to build a photo-lab in Harvard Square, just like a Navy photo lab. What a good idea! Sales doubled every month for a year and we were riding a tiger in no time. After seven years I moved back to painting, tired of the business world and soon was living in the woods painting marine work, having moved on from comic books.

I served on the “board.” of the American Society of Marine Artists and for many years as a graphic designer I helped make the ASMA Newsletter viable. Marine Art was by this time attracting much notice having grown from three outlets to over twenty full time venues across the country. An exciting place to be, but Boston the city, had become oppressive and difficult for me to find time to paint. I had grown beyond marine art, although it is still part of my painting repertoire, the purity of the water and the marine experience was what moved my motor. In my search for new subjects, I submitted a painting of Codfish to the ASMA Exhibition and received much praise and notice. I have painted fish as my marine art ever since.

I came to western Massachusetts to teach drawing, painting workshops, and reinvent myself as a painter. Richard Schmid’s paintings greatly influenced the way I handle oil paint, and I had always had respect for all the Wyeths. I began to paint with a healthy tension between detail and expression, painted with juicy and delicious oil paint. I often do watercolors in my preliminary work, in a less formal, more exploratory manner. My many years of graphics and teaching allow variety of mediums to explore. My advice to students -- painting is a lifetime activity, a language about moving others in direct proportion to the marks or paint applied over square miles of surface, which is the foundation for all our artistic fluency.

James E. Taylor, Sprout’s Crossing Studio