Johnny Taylor | Artist's Statement

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. The chief ambition of art, I believe, is to change the way we look at the world around us.

Bright colored blocks compose my acrylic paintings. I enjoy the look and feel of loose, graffiti-like marks, text, and “noise” against these vividly hued planes. Usually I paint with layers, with each new layer showing a bit of the one beneath, either by transparency, an unpainted “window” area, or by a scraping away of recent layers. Often this process yields unexpected colors and forms. Similarly, I use corrugated cardboard, bubble wrap and other common items to apply paint in tightly striped registers. Played against this pictorial depth are images that are hard edged and, at times, almost aggressively flat.

Aside from an obvious pop art influence, I draw inspiration from graffiti art and improvised music, particularly jazz, dub, and hip hop. It is my aim to combine the lively playing off of what has come before (as in hip hop) with the active courting of the unplanned (as in jazz). In doing so, I am rewarded with dynamic juxtapositions, discovering associations between disparate elements.

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.

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 layers is informed by the abandoned billboard's peeling layers revealing bits of images that came before, scraps of its history visible all at once.

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