DRAWING CONCLUSIONS, REVEALING SELF IN PICTURES AND WORDS: TOM TAYLOR AKA THE POET SPIEL | 8/6/22 – 11/19/22
Internationally published artist/author Tom Taylor aka The Poet SPIEL (b. 1941) savors the past, dares the future, swallows the present; steady hand, open heart, countercultural, passionate, sardonic, sometimes absurd.
As a child, the artist’s temperament was already edgy and precocious. For survival in the farm world he’d fallen heir to, making art allowed him to discover that he could freely create his personal child-view of a complicated world where everyone was bigger and smarter than he. Amidst his 8th decade on earth, coping with losses associated with predementia, art is the friend which has withstood the petty and the foolish, the graceful, the garish, and the grand of a diverse career in the arts.
As a child, Taylor discovered he could make a sunny picture, a sad picture or a pretend picture. He could define the ME of that moment—happily wishful, pissed off, and lonely, hungry for something he did not know. Making art, as work, as play, as sustenance and medication, has rescued him from drowning in the chaos of his troubled and hungry mind, destined to express the manic-depressive disorder he’d inherited from his mother’s blood. A family curse, indeed; but one with coping tools he’s acquired through introspection and decades of talk therapy so he is able to work it through by painting or writing it's discomfort to more easily recognize it, then, better cope with its horrors. It’s taken him a lifelong pursuit to become reasonably competent at understanding why he is the way he is and how to accept his Self.
Taylor considers making art to be his best medicine and his safe place.
EXHIBITION DETAILS
DATE
August 6, 2022 to November 19, 2022
COST
- Members: Free
- Adults: $10.00
- Children: $8.00
- Military & Seniors 65+: $8.00
OTHER INFO
Located on the 1st floor of the Helen Thatcher White Galleries building.