06 Sep Artist Spotlights: Taylor Pierce

When Taylor Pierce ventured out this past spring to Red Rock Canyon, a dramatic and pristine conservation area not far from her home on the outskirts of Las Vegas, Nevada, her main goal was to snap photo references of the seasonal flora that burst into colorful life in the Mojave Desert. What stopped her in her tracks on the scree-covered slope, however, was a cluster of yucca trees, with one fallen, its branches splayed across the tawny ground. “This should be a painting,” she recalls thinking as she snapped an iPhone photo.

Photo: Marina Vail

Back in her home studio, she enlarged the image on her iPad and sketched out her composition on canvas in bold red oxide acrylic brushstrokes. Then, using a “very limited palette” that includes titanium white, Payne’s gray, ultramarine blue, and yellow ochre, she added “big blocks of color, just scribbling it in” before gradually refining the scene in a signature expressionist approach she describes as “emphatic mark-making.” The resulting work, Fallen Yucca, typifies Pierce’s intriguing, inviting style.

Are We There Yet? | Acrylic on Canvas | 20 x 20 inches | 2023

Now 29, Pierce demonstrated a talent for and fascination with art since the early years of a childhood spent first in upstate New York and then, from 10, along the Gulf Coast of Florida. Her preferred medium was graphite pencil, first expressing her early obsession with horses and moving on by high school to faithfully detailed human portraits. Yet, though she’d toured Sarasota’s Ringling College of Art and Design, the thought of accumulating educational debt with no clear way to pay it back led her on a different path. She enrolled in and eventually completed a major in accounting and ventured into the business world.

Meanwhile, in 2018, she met Kyle, a pharmacy student, whom she married the following year. For their first Christmas together, she surprised him with a pencil portrait of his favorite TV character, demon hunter Dean Winchester on Supernatural. “He was just blown away,” she says, “and urged me to think about pursuing this again. That motivated me to start making art more routinely in my spare time.” The couple’s move to Nevada for Kyle’s work two years ago gave her compelling new subject matter. “I’d felt stagnant in my creative process, and when I came to the desert for the first time, it spoke to me. I had never seen a Joshua tree before, and it looked like something out of Dr. Seuss.”

Around the Bend | Acrylic on Canvas | 12 x 12 inches | 2024

The lively and sometimes outlandish beauty of the region inspired a whole new creative direction and style in Pierce. And collectors have already begun taking notice, with her first solo show, Impressions of Wild Places, having just concluded in late September at the Windmill Library Gallery in Las Vegas; and, recently, she’s been admitted to her first juried art fair. Meanwhile, travels farther afield, including a recent trip to Death Valley, continue to expand her subject matter. “Moving to Vegas,” she concludes, “I got my spark back.”

See Pierce’s paintings at taylorpierceart.com and on Instagram, @taylorpierceart.

Based in San Rafael, California, Norman Kolpas is the author of more than 40 books and hundreds of articles. He also teaches nonfiction writing in The Writers’ Program at UCLA Extension.