A RTS
Simple, Powerful Images Welcome Ar t Af icionados, to our second Laurel Anniversar y Cover, revisited. This month we’re traveling back to 2005, when f ine ar tist Sallie Taylor, was Highlands School ar t teacher. She’s now retired and a full time painter, but let’s peek in on where she was ar tistically nearly two decades ago.
S
chool teachers, then and now, have little time to devote to passions outside the classroom, so producing 2-3 paintings a year was Sallie’s optimum.
Unpretentious elegance? The painter’s message? What do you take away in your analytical and emotional brains?
Artists often do series paintings on a single subject. In the early two-thousands Sallie did studies of eggs. They are challenging, for replicating their perfect, physical form is a lot harder than it might seem.
As I looked at the organic shapes, I let my eyes travel to the secondary forms, those created by shadow, bounced light, and overlap. Ordinarily that’s regarded as negative space between the subjects, but, in this case, those shapes make their own positive statement.
Eggs are also richly iconic, historically-drenched in symbolism. Around the world eggs epitomize birth, spring, fertility, circle of life, Easter, good fortune, creation, wealth, and much more.
I am taken with the way light plays on the surfaces. The gradations are so subtly layered, it’s impossible to tell where one tone bonds to the next.
In this issue’s critique, take a few moments to reflect on what the egg means to you. Then immerse yourself, with both left and right brains, in Sallie’s painting. Make note of what strikes you on first scan. Crisp lines? Sterling brushwork?
These simple forms from an eye-to-shell perspective, appear mountain high and canyon deep, sturdy, powerful, yet my logical brain knows eggs are one of the most fragile objects on the planet. This anomaly is the essence of egg – life in a supremely
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