Tellurider Jane Taylor opens show in Germantown, NY

Part-time Tellurider, painter Jane Taylor, and her husband, photographer Frederic Ohringer, join a group of Hudson Valley artists featured together in a group show in Germantown, New York. Ohringer curated the exhibit at the request of ArtSpace. The opening reception is January 16.

Taylor is no stranger to Telluride collectors. Her shows at the Telluride Gallery of Fine Art and at the Scott White Gallery used to sell out. Taylor's subject matter evolved over the years from abstractions suggesting worlds coming apart to the bounty of the table and garden, summarizing the arc of the artist's life. Insider poop aside, by channeling her physical experiences of the outside world, each tour de force painting became about making the commonplace look uncommonly good. Something that straddled the border between memory and metaphor, reality and illusion. Something transcendent.

Taylor's journey continues to be reflected in the new body work. Scanning the images of things others take for granted – the contents of a fridge, shoes pulled from the closet of an active person, a t-shirt, pair of shorts and a pair of socks tossed on the floor – the word "mindfulness" pops to mind. By giving every single object her full attention, Taylor does what Warhol did: elevates the mundane to the iconic. But there is a key difference between Taylor and Pop artists like Warhol: she is not remotely interested in stylistic or subjective irony or post-modern cynicism for that matter. Taylor images have a far greater rapport with 17th-century Dutch still life paintings than with modernists: they are physically convincing evocations of earthly realities, but they speak beyond the physical  – and, like the artist, the work is sensual. When Taylor opens the door of her fridge to the world, the act is akin to opening a bathrobe when naked: the intimacy of the experience is bold and striking. When Taylor details the contents of her veggie bin, she scrupulously attends to the small visual differences between one carrot and another or a carrot and a pepper, which rise from close scrutiny and are part of a magic realist's way of looking at the world.

"When I paint, I think about what it is to feel or hold the form. I push the color to create life, energy, and sometimes whimsy, but never to betray the sense of real physical presence," explained Taylor. "And recently I have become interested in eliminating solvents from my work. The medium I make is thick, viscous and sensual, adding another layer of tactile experience to the craft of making a painting."

When captured by a brush as vital, vibrant and confident as Taylor's has become, what is normally transitory – real food rots or turns rancid and socks get picked up and put in to a laundry basket – becomes frozen in time, immortalized.