MICHAEL TAYLOR

The astonishment of standing before a storm has served as the inspiration for my work over the past year. This moment describes the place between curiosity and terror, the beautiful and the destructive. It is a place where physicality and spirituality are one. In my recent series, landscape paintings are derived from multiple sources that have both literal and metaphoric meaning. The works retain memories of a vast, unobstructed horizon, becoming a generalized mix of abstracted and softened shapes. The use of dark tones derived from foreboding views of nature heighten the sense of isolation and vulnerability that are part of the human condition. Images seem to blur the line between more abstract qualities that rely on internal experience and realistic representations of nature.

Southwestern and midwestern landscapes provide the vast horizons and unobstructed views of storms that link the spiritual and physical connection to the land. The topography of these landscapes provides little shelter from the danger of impending storms; onliterally has no choice but to face them. In this moment of awe, spectators begin to experience the "eternal now", which seems to transcend time and place. Because it is undefined, this suspension is associated with divine presence. Caught in between the beautiful and the destructive, everything mortal becomes more tentative.

In developing the series, I combine aspects of 19th Century romantic landscape painting and the innate simplicity of 20th century Abstract Expressionism. The idea of the sublime in nature becomes a state of mind rather than an actual event. I am not interested in objective representation or in working from life. I am concerned with capturing an encounter that is transcendent of a specific juncture of land and sky. This haunting moment, both inside and outside myself, collides in recent work.

Michael Taylor