Landscape ReEnvisioned Artist Gallery
Brian Taylor (b. 1954)
Map to a Miner's Cabin, 2024
Artist Statement
I adore historic sketchbooks and now make my own, continuing my interest in creating illustrated handmade books. My "sketches" spring from a desire to incorporate more of my daily experience into my art, and more art into my daily life.
These artworks depict the world in front of my camera and include hand drawings, watercolors, and collage on the print surface to conjure up images from my imagination—"scenes I wish I'd seen" (like chatting with Carlos Castaneda's coyote friends). This creation of imagined worlds is a freedom photographers can share with other artists, such as painters, poets, and writers of fiction.
I use both historic and modern processes to evoke antiquated sketchbooks—including cyanotypes, distressed silver gelatin prints, and pigment prints with mixed media on watercolor paper. Some images are presented as full-page spreads in open books, while others are loose pages "torn" from journals. I've always enjoyed revealing signs of my hand in artworks as fingerprints, brush marks, drawn lines, deckled edges, and imperfections akin to those found in distressed, historic documents.
Drawn to creative methods that allow surprises, I welcome imperfections and textures in unpredictable, temperamental, and quixotic photographic processes. In this virtual age, I savor the tactile pleasures of making art by hand; I believe that a work of art created by a human touch may contain a resonance of that touch, a lingering aura.
About the Artist
Brian Taylor is known for his innovative explorations of alternative photographic processes, including historic nineteenth-century printing techniques, mixed media, and handmade books. His work has been exhibited globally in numerous solo and group shows and is included in the permanent collections of the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House, Rochester.
Taylor served as the Executive Director of the Center for Photographic Art in Carmel, CA, for over four years, retiring in 2019 to return to his art practice in the studio. He received his BA in Visual Arts from the University of California at San Diego, MA from Stanford University, and MFA from the University of New Mexico. Taylor has served as a Professor of Photography for over 35 years and Chair of the Department of Art and Art History at San Jose State University.