Carol Taylor-Kearney’s art is informed by life and life-affirming.  Like the artist’s ebullient personality, her work is celebratory and energetic.  With an array of recognizable objects, vivid colors, painterly surfaces, and mixed materials, she creates engaging narratives using representational images and discarded materials, enabling the ordinary to become extraordinary.

Taylor-Kearney’s art has a commanding presence that is both figurative and literal, bridging painting and sculpture.  Her assemblages have imposing scale derived from the architectural fragments that become her framework, while they possess an idiosyncratic theatricality from the numerous objects that are affixed to and hang from these surfaces.  Robert Rauschenberg stated:  “Painting relates to both art and life (I try to act in that gap between the two).” Likewise, Taylor-Kearney admits: “my artwork is accumulation. . . I gather found objects and found ideas.”  The impact of actual size, handling of space, use of materials, and brushwork must be directly experienced or much is missed.    Her intriguing paintings go beyond the boundaries of what many may consider a traditional picture.  They are not easy to classify.  

Never satisfied with the limitations of the flat picture plane, the artist moves back and forth between illusionistic (sometimes even quirky) and real space, while she assimilates a diverse range of art historical sources.  In spite of her academic art training, she deliberately opts for windows and doors rather than canvas as support material. The observer literally looks through a real frame to the distant painted background.  This certainly adds another conceptual level to the notion of the Renaissance window view of reality.   Duchamp’s “Etant Donnes” also comes immediately to mind.  Moreover, she incorporates a variety of found objects—many are whimsical items from pop culture, including a provocative dollop of kitsch.  

Taylor-Kearney’s multiple panels are actual window panes.  With her reverse painting on glass, she revives what had been a rather popular form of vernacular art from the late 19^th century.  Her images are akin to animation cells, yet they don’t appear to tell full stories.  The separate figurative scenes may be physically close but aren’t necessarily connected as a continuous narrative; they seem more like snippets from stream of consciousness, meditation or private reverie.  In addition, she has effectively and creatively used metal screening to construct images that become shadowy figures or dreamy visions.  

The artist relies on family and friends as models, making the paintings autobiographical. However, the people are not identified, so they retain protective anonymity.  Much of the work is done in her Philadelphia studio, aided by photographs for most of her figure drawing.  However, the actual landscape imagery is often painted en plein air.  This can become a rather cumbersome undertaking, since she has to transport her large windows or door panels to scenic destinations.

When Michelangelo proclaimed:  “The nearer painting approaches sculpture the better it is,” he seems to have prophetically and unwittingly praised Carol Taylor-Kearney.

Fred B. Adelson, Ph.D.

Fred B. Adelson, Ph.D. is a Professor of Art History at Rowan University.  He has written on art for many publications including the N.Y. TImes, the Grove Dictionary of Art, and the Encyclopedia of American Art.

  Cliches, Positively

     Can anything positive be said about cliches?  Carol Taylor-Kearney has found a way.  Her exhibition of paintings attempt to prove that, in her words, "cliches encompass a truth and usefulness.  From sheer repetition, cliche...bridges gaps of awkwardness, boredom, restraint, and confusion."

      It's an intriguing idea, and Taylor-Kearney expresses it primarily through a suite of 22 oil paintings hung around the gallery in a continuous band. The scenes have the casual look of family photographs or home videos.  People are either consciously posing or caught in awkward moments. 

     These snapshots from suburbia qualify as cliches only in the broadest sense of being familiar image types, such as people building a snowman and a man posed with three tots perched on a tree limb.

      Taylor-Kearney has outfitted most of her subjects with sunglasses or goofy party glasses, to encourage her audience to focus on the narrative situations rather than personalities.  This tactic works to a limited extent, but it doesn't push the viewer beyond the obvious typological cliches.

      Repetition, as the artist says, may strip an image of its original vitality.  Yet in this case it does not; as she concludes,  allow "each painting [to] find new life in its own circumstance."

Edward Sozanski.  THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER.Friday, September 9, 2005.