Janet Taylor

On Making Art

I am obsessed with those extraordinary moments that surface within the mundane. Maybe it’s a fragment of murmured harmony as you brush through a grassy field, a blink of joining pattern in branches overhead, or just the way a ray of light dances across the lake on a gentle misty morning. However ordinary the source, the fugitive beauty of an instant catches you and seizes your soul as a perfect moment of existence. It may be a moment of calm or peace, or maybe of excitement, awe or joy—but that right there, that fleeting glimpse of the energy and connection of the macrocosm—that’s why I make art.

In my paintings and prints, I take that gifted moment, a whispered reveal of structure, or a passing glance of color and light, and give it permanent form. My work blends drawing, painted surfaces, and photography into subtle, layered textures and strong graphic shapes that express the fragile nature of revelation, and an enduring holistic design.

Bio

I earned a BFA in painting from Queen’s University, then took an absorbing detour into graphic design, typography, animation, game creation, and web design. The detour then became a pretty great career as a creative director. Yet all the while, I was filling notebooks with moments, with sketches and photos and memos, capturing those snippets of color and shape that stopped me dead in my tracks and gave me that knot in my stomach, gathering them against a day when I would transform them into fully realized art.

Then one morning, as I was walking in the woods taking yet more pictures to put in those accumulating sketchbooks, in a moment of pure lucidity it hit me. Epiphany might be a strong word, but really, it was just like that. The time had come. The pile of notebooks had become too huge and too rowdy to be ignored. They were asking “if not now, then when?” The art insisted on being created. The moments demanded to be shared. And the necessity of creating these pictures became my daily work.