"TEXT-BASED WORD PAINTINGS: Thrift Store Paintings Given New Meaning"

Exploring the relationship between art history, language, color and humor, Taylor Smith paints and screen prints words and sentences over found artworks that she obtains in thrift stores during her travels and online auction sites. The visual impact of type is sometimes neglected, yet text is an eminently aesthetic form. How does the meaning of a painting change by adding unexpected text over visual artwork? By superimposing quotations and other deadpan sayings over vintage found artworks as diverse as kitschy landscapes or classic golden-age European paintings, Taylor Smith is elevating words and text to the status of main subject.

Word Based Text Paintings

This is a collection of my smaller more intimate works

Small Intimate Works

Taylor Smith’s Abstract Landscape series was inspired by the natural world. As if she were lying in a field of wild grass and flowers looking up upon the magnificence of the universe. Taylor uses diverse materials on her canvas. She creates a unique composite by mixing amounts of different wines into her paint. Taylor drips and throws this mixture onto her flat-lying canvas to create the flowing grass and flowers found in these paintings.

Abstract Landscapes

Figurative Abstraction

WORKS ON RECLAIMED VINTAGE SILKSCREEN FRAMES    

Taylor Smith's series of paintings featuring iconic Pop Culture imagery are created directly on the silkscreen frames that she has used to create her art for many years. Each artwork is hand painted onto an old reclaimed screen frame that has been used hundreds of times to create other artworks in the artist studio. There is a palpable sense of use and history to these pieces, which have lived many lives over the decades. Each artwork carries with it the history of previous works, which were created with these studio screens.

Industrial Silkscreen Frame Series

Confronting death, gun violence, wealth, opulence, capitalism, and historical pop art squarely in its face, I have created a loosely connected group of artworks which take as their subjects luxury designer brands, the human body, consumer products, iconic imagery, politics, classic Greek & Roman sculpture, prescription drugs and pixel-glitched computer data corruption.

Luxurious Disaster series

My molecular & chemical still life work documents my interest in science, nature, and organic chemistry. My work is intended as a calculated, modern interpretation of traditional still life, elements of graphic design and abstract expressionism.