04 Sep Artist Spotlights: Andy Taylor

Andy Taylor’s abstracted landscapes distill and impart the emotions the artist feels upon first encountering those scenes. He imbues them with a surprising intensity that results in part from a close and longstanding familiarity with his subjects. In fact, most of his works have found their inspiration along the roads of Colorado’s Roaring Fork Valley between Basalt and Glenwood Springs. He drove through this landscape almost daily for more than five decades while seasonally managing a turf farm, and he revisits it regularly from his home in nearby Carbondale.

Take his recent oil painting Last Leaf Leaving, which is based on a stand of aspen trees he repeatedly passed as their leaves changed color during two weeks each autumn. “Though I don’t recommend it,” he says wryly, concerned about automotive safety, “I’ve stopped to sketch that scene.”

He captured it, and other vistas along that road, using ink and colored pencils in one of the sketchbooks he has always carried, taking notes about the colors to refer to later. Back at his easel, such sketches evolve through oil pastel studies into larger memory paintings he executes in three or more layers of oil paint — not so much precise renderings as evocations of the feelings that arose upon viewing it, “and what stopped me in the first place.”

Clematis | Oil on Linen | 68 x 52 inches

Taylor has felt nature’s allure since his early childhood years in Coatesville, Pennsylvania, about 40 miles west of Philadelphia. “I was always looking at trees and birds and other things, and my father was very good about showing us the world around us,” he says. His love of the outdoors initially led him to Colorado College in Colorado Springs, where he planned to study botany en route to a master’s degree in forestry — a program track that was phased out at the time he enrolled for freshman year, leading Taylor to graduate with a degree in studio art.

While earning a living by other means, he always painted, starting out “working on ‘important things,’” Taylor says, giving those words ironic emphasis. “But it was draining to think every day about man’s inhumanity to man.” So, he switched to landscapes, “because I loved being outside, and I’ve always done a lot of drawing there.”

Last Leaf Leaving | Oil on Linen | 39 x 52 inches

Sometimes, Taylor’s oil pastels become finished artworks in themselves, such as one labeled DR 22127, indicating it was the 127th drawing he completed in 2022. The small composition glows with warmth from its tawny impressions of orange and red leaves against a granite-gray background, at once spontaneous in spirit and satisfyingly complete — a perfect example of one of the artist’s stated creative goals: “I have to make my own fun, right?”

Taylor’s work is represented by A Gallery/Allen+Alan Fine Art in Salt Lake City, Utah, and at Ann Korologos Gallery in Basalt, Colorado, where his work is part of a group show celebrating the gallery’s 32nd anniversary through October 18.

Based in Marin County, 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.